Ernst – A Week of Kindness
Introduction
In 1918 a Belgian, Frans
Masereel, created a wordless novel in woodcuts, often translated to ‘A
Passionate Journey’. American Lynd Ward created a similar woodcut novel, ‘God’s
Man’ in 1929. German Otto Nuckel followed suit publishing ‘Destiny’ in 1930.
So, by these accounts, Ernst’s 1934 contribution to graphic novels, ‘A Week of
Kindness’, is a latecomer. But unlike the three pioneers before him, who all
worked in woodcuts, Ernst did something new, namely creating his novel from
collage. Collage, now the standby of the kindergarten art-class, was a new
artistic concept in the early 20th century. The cubists, led by
Braque and Picasso, were the first to experiment with the technique, but in a
seemingly limited way. Cutting up and rearranging existing works instead came
to the forefront of those two sometimes overlapping modern artists, the
surrealists (who used the technique to make statements through juxtapositions)
and dada (anti-art art).
Max
Ernst (1891 – 1976) was involved with dada and surrealism both. Modern art can
be traced back to the 1800s, and Picasso’s 1907 unveiling of ‘Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon’, the first work of cubism, definitely raised eyebrows. Beginning
with modernism, art confronted the viewer. Art was now, by design, trying to
provoke a reaction. Compare this against Munch’s famous 1893 painting ‘The
Scream’. ‘The Scream’ strikes us, viscerally, and we react. But the painting
was not intended as such, instead attempting to convey the painter’s own
feelings of existential horror at perceiving a red sky. With the instillation
by Marcel Duchamp of ‘Fountain’, an upside-down urinal, signed ‘R. Mutt, 1917’
modern art really began. ‘Fountain’ got people asking a question that
previously hadn’t been asked, not whether or not a piece was good or bad
art, but whether it was art at all. From here it was a short step to
asking ‘what is art?’ The provocation would continue into the abstract,
separating those who understand this as the purpose of modern art from those
who want art to ‘represent something’.
Ernst was German,
and spent time, like most twentieth century western artists, in France. From there
he moved to America, with Peggy Guggenheim. Guggenheim continued to collect
art, including Ernst’s, as her father had done, eventually opening the second
of the four Guggenheim modern art collections, in Venice. He was joined by other artists
fleeing the war, Duchamp amongst them. Ernst, meanwhile, remarried and
eventually moved back to France after the War.
The
surrealistic landscapes he created are second only to Dali. By 1921 he was
incorporating collage elements successfully into his surrealist works. Twenty
years later his landscapes became unquestionable unique masterpieces, for
example ‘Napoleon in the Wilderness’ from 1941, or ‘The Eye of Silence’ from
1944. Interesting, surely, to the art historian, but why is Ernst in this
collection?
With
‘A Week of Kindness’ two milestones are met. First, it represents the graphic
novel and graphic story-telling generally. The 20th century has seen
an explosion of this sort of narrative – truly a unique development in
literature, spanning from the Superman and Batman comics that millions read, to
the revered indie art of Kim Dietch and Chester Brown, to the middle ground of
Alan Moore, Will Eisner, and Neil Gaiman. Graphic storytelling now accounts for
a huge share of the global reading population, from Tintin to manga. Ernst’s
work is made more interesting as the narrative is a surrealist one.
Second,
the importance of collage makes Ernst’s work critical. We live in a collage
age. Our movies lift characters and dialogue, overtly as tributes or subtlety
as ‘nods’, from the works that came before, as well as rotoscoping and using
existing footage as templates, all examples of Hollywood interested in
presenting the old as new. No one can listen to hip-hop, or pop, without
getting a sense that these works are just collage. In literature William
Burroughs would take Ernst’s graphic collage storytelling and revitalize it by
cutting and pasting existing text to create his 1961 novel ‘The Soft Machine’.
In visual art the ‘pop’ movement began with collage in 1956. New international
agreements and legislation has branded much of this collage-style art illegal.
‘Sampling’ in music has now left the world of creativity and entered the realm
of lawsuits for infringement on ‘intellectual property’, a once-brilliant notion
now distorted far beyond original intent. Works such as ‘A Week of Kindness,’
if created today to be sold in bookstores would now be illegal. This
disconcerting trend should give us pause as we move forward into the 21st
century.
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