The virgin chastises the baby Jesus in front of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard and the painter

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The virgin chastises the baby Jesus in front of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard and the painter
Max Ernst , 1926
Oil on canvas
196 x 130 cm
Museum Ludwig , Cologne

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

The virgin chastises the baby Jesus in front of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard and the painter (French: La vierge corrigeant l'enfant Jésus devant trois témoins: André Breton, Paul Éluard et le peintre ) is a by Max Ernst in 1926 in Paris completed painting of surrealism , first shown at the Paris Salon des Indépendants , where it caused a scandal.

description

In a room open to the top, a young woman with a halo, dressed in an ankle-length, wide blue skirt and a tight-fitting, decollete red top, sits on a kind of pedestal. With her right arm she stretches out wide to hit a blond, curly haired child lying in her lap on the already reddened bare rear. In the picture on the left, three people are looking at the scene from outside through a small window in the wall.

The virgin's arm, raised to strike, is bent so sharply at the elbow that the palm of the hand is directed upwards. The space of the scenery appears just as arbitrary: the walls seem to be at acute angles to each other and show an irrational perspective. The floor and the pedestal on which the virgin sits tilt towards the viewer, while the figures are only seen from a slight perspective. The narrow delimitation of the room opens up in the background and up into a blue, empty sky. The light falling without a recognizable source leaves the young woman's face in shadow. The three people peering through the window, whose location remains uncertain, are portraits of André Breton , Paul Éluard and the painter himself. The painter has placed his signature on the child's halo, which has fallen to the right.

The color of the picture is based on the basic colors blue, red and yellow as well as an earth tone in the base, hair and skin and white. The virgin's clothes are in the pure colors of red and blue, the colors of the walls are red and green, broken with white, mixed with yellow and blue. The floor shows a colored gray from the mixture of blue and an orange from red and yellow.

iconography

Raffael 030.jpg Agostino Carracci - Vênus punindo Eros.JPG

Madonna and Venus
Left: Raffael : Madonna in the Green , painting 1506
Right: Agostino Carracci : Venus chastises Cupid , copper engraving, around 1590–1595

The halo of mother and child and the colors of the clothes in red and blue are borrowed from the Italian depictions of the Madonna of the Renaissance and Mannerism and leave no doubt as to the relationship between the profane motif of chastisement and the sacred context of the “Mother of God”. With regard to the extremely elongated limbs, the painter orients himself to mannerist artists such as Parmigianino , especially his painting Madonna with the Long Neck .

The three wise men from the Orient are another traditional motif that the artist takes up. But instead of the Magi , which the baby Jesus offer their homage to appear three living intellectuals as "witnesses" in the image, so an interpretation in their distances shown occurrence a modern religion critical awareness to represent.

Is cited as the classic subject of "Amor poenitus" of of Venus chastened Amorknaben , a popular in the Baroque and Rococo Theme: Venus punishing her Cupid if he do too much mischief and, for example - so the mythology - in Endymion fell Goddess Luna was so beaten up with his arrows that she complained about him to Venus.

shape

The figuration of the Virgin Mary, with its arrangement in the form of a triangle, references "the classic composition scheme of images of the Virgin since the Renaissance". The “backdrops” that determine the space appear to be “crooked and inconsistent”, recognizable for example by the diagonal in the right corner of the picture, which underlines the signature, but spatially leads “nowhere”. The architecture, which is open at the top, with the tapering walls, is more reminiscent of the constructions of the expressionist stage. The irrational, inconsistent perspective and the interlacing of the backdrop as well as the strong oversight point to the Pittura metafisica of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico and to the methods of Cubism .

classification

Philipp Ernst: Max Ernst as Child Jesus , around 1896

The painting is classified as a bridge between the early Dadaist depictions of Max Ernst and his later abstract-surreal compositions. It combines the profane and the sacred in a surrealist manner, thus referring to a central procedure of later surrealism, combinatorics, a procedure for alienating the real. The provocative depiction is said to have been inspired by André Breton, the "Pope" of the Surrealists.

As early as 1936, 10 years after its creation, the French magazine Cahiers d'Art made a special issue of Max Ernst's Catholic upbringing. Max Ernst grew up in a Catholic family of teachers. Ernst's father was a deaf-mute teacher and, as a lay painter, had portrayed friends and family members. In the year 1896 the little, blue-eyed, blond boy, dressed in a red “punjel” (night dress), with a whip in his hand, slipped out of his parents' house unseen in the afternoon. Kevelaer pilgrims had seen him and reverently referred to him as “Et Kriskink!”. Philipp Ernst then painted his son Max as a little Jesus boy with a cross in his hand instead of a whip. Max Ernst himself attached importance to the statement that there was nothing mysterious about the picture, because he was often portrayed as a Christ Child and an angel, which nevertheless did not protect him from occasional punishment by his mother: “Although I was the Jesus child, I am was spanked by my mother, who made the model for the Madonna. "

The humanist Joachim Kahl interprets the picture of the Madonna beyond the autobiographical background as a detachment of the artist from the parental home and its denominational character.

reception

criticism

The picture attracted public attention when it was first presented in 1926. According to Max Ernst, the reason for the rejection by clerical circles in Paris should not have been that the baby Jesus was beaten, but that his halo was rolled down. The picture was to be shown in the same year in an exhibition of the “Cologne Secession” at the Cologne Art Association . The Archbishop then asked for it to be removed from the exhibition. According to a mirror interview with Max Ernst, a representative of Archbishop Karl Joseph Schulte is said to have closed the Catholic assembly in Gürzenich with the words: “The painter Max Ernst is excluded from the church, and I call the assembly to a three-time 'ugh'.” Ernst saved According to their own information, this means that the church tax is reduced . The political scientist Klaus von Beyme sees the scandal that has often been claimed about the first exhibition of the picture in Cologne as exaggerated: “The claim that sometimes appears in the literature that the Archbishop of Cologne reprimanded the picture by Max Ernst [...] does not seem to be correct. In any case, there was nothing justifiable ”. The Ludwig Museum expresses itself in its audio file for viewers of the painting as follows: “The picture caused a sensation at exhibitions. In 1926 Catholic artists demonstrated in Paris, and in Cologne the archbishop had the painting removed ”.

Michelangelo, ignudo 17.jpg Jacopo Tintoretto 003.jpg

Assumed originals
Left: Michelangelo: Ignudo , 1511
Right: Tintoretto: Ariadne, Venus and Bacchus , 1578

science

The art historian Roland Krischel made references to Michelangelo's ceiling fresco on Genesis in the Sistine Chapel , on which one of the nude frame figures for Genesis 1, 3–5 resembles the beating Maria in their posture, and to a painting by Jacopo Tintoretto from the Doge's Palace in Venice, in which the figure of Venus resembles the boy Jesus - albeit mirrored. On the basis of computer tests, Krischel suspects that Max Ernst assembled his painting with the help of traced images of the Italian paintings. The collage , the combining of prints or photographs to create new works with one's own statement, can often be found in the works of Max Ernst.

cabaret

In a satirical discourse, the cabaret artist Jürgen Becker and the storyteller Martin Stankowski sketched the plea for the reintroduction of corporal punishment during their cabaret play , performed in July 2010 at the Museum Ludwig , based on the image of the possibilities of art, the perception of the scandals of sexual abuse and physical abuse Expand violence within the Catholic Church. In a socially critical way, this is linked to the question of why children are being beaten in the present. With a similar aim, Becker showed in his program The artist is present (2011-2016) a large-format copy of the picture on stage as an introduction to his “art history”, with around 120 works by well-known artists serving as illustrative material. In November 2012 the program was shown in the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl.

Provenance

The painting came to the Ludwig Collection in 1984 . The previous owners were three private collectors from Brussels and Ernst Beyeler's gallery in Basel.

literature

  • Roland Krischel: Seriously classic. About some of the role models for Max Ernst's La Vierge corrigeant l'Enfant-Jésus… , in: Kölner Museums-Bulletin, issue 1/1998, pp. 4–18.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Günter Rombold : Pictures. Language of religion . Series: Aesthetics. Theology. Liturgik, Vol. 38, LIT, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7923-2 , p. 92
  2. ↑ a b c Quoted from the web link Joachim Kahl
  3. ↑ Lukian, Gods Conversations 19 ( translation by Christoph Martin Wieland )
  4. ↑ a b c Quoted from the web link of Museum Ludwig: Description of the picture
  5. ↑ Uwe M. Schneede : The art of surrealism: poetry, painting, sculpture, photography, film . CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-54683-9 . P. 36
  6. ↑ Fig. Of the Jesusknaben by Philipp Ernst , jimmyernst.net, accessed on May 21, 2012
  7. ^ Lothar Fischer: Max Ernst , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1969, p. 9 f.
  8. ↑ Klaus von Beyme: The age of the avant-garde. Art and Society 1905–1955 . CH Beck, 2005, p. 275
  9. ↑ Kölnischer Kunstverein , koelnischerkunstverein.net., Accessed on July 27, 2012
  10. ↑ Philipp Wittmann: Between Blasphemy and Truth ( Memento of February 23, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.3 MB) in: Katholisch in Brühl , Archdiocese of Cologne, No. 3, 2010, p. 18, accessed on 13 June 2012
  11. ↑ The pious shouted Pfui three times : Interview with Max Ernst in Spiegel , 9/1970, accessed on May 23, 2012
  12. ↑ Klaus von Beyme: The age of the avant-garde. Art and Society 1905–1955. CH Beck, 2005, p. 345
  13. ↑ Quoted from the Ludwig Museum's web link: available there as audio file no. 45
  14. ↑ Quoted from the web link Roland Krischel
  15. ↑ See köln.de June 1, 2010 [1] (accessed April 6, 2018)
  16. ↑ Jürgen Becker inspires 600 visitors in the town hall , come-on.de, accessed on June 4, 2012
  17. ↑ Sebastian Berndt: Jürgen Becker inspires cabaret fans, wa.de, March 16, 2012, accessed on June 4, 2012
  18. ↑ Jürgen Becker: The artist is present (accessed April 6, 2016)
  19. ↑ Quoted from Weblink Image Index of Art and Architecture