Exploring Surrealism: Max Ernst and Sandy Calder in Amboise
Surrealist exhibition 2017 Tate Modern London.
If you can’t get to the Surrealism Centenary Exhibition in Paris,* fret not, you can see Surrealism in action in Amboise town centre which has the Max Ernst Fountain and a Sandy Calder Stabile (from stable as opposed to mobile).
Those labels were coined for Sandy by his friend, arch Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, who became famous for submitting a gent’s urinal to an art gallery. Sandy invented the mobile. Marcel invented the name.
You can visit the house where Max Ernst lived in Huismes and Sandy Calder’s Studio in Saché. Both villages about an hour’s drive from Amboise.
A hundred years on, Surrealism has never been hotter. When Tate Modern London held an exhibition of Surrealist art it drew over 170,000 visitors.
Christie’s holds an Art of the Surreal Sale every year. Works are smashing records.
A decalcomania** by Ernst set a $24 million auction record.
Man Ray’s Le Violin d’ Ingres sold for $12.4 million, the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.
In 1985 The Tate bought a de Chirico for £1 million. Christies sold a de Chirico for £11 million.
André Breton is credited for the art movement but not the moniker. In 1916, the poet Apollinaire said the choreography for the Ballets Russes in Parade was surreal.
In his Manifesto of Surrealism Breton advocated a new kind of art inspired by the subconscious. All well and good but was Sigmund Freud credited? Until Freud, neither Breton or anyone else knew we had a subconscious mind.
Max Ernst Fountain, Amboise.
Max Ernst, trying to explain Surrealism to his young son, told him that he and his fellow Surrealists were sailing on a ship to an unknown destination. If that was the case, Sigmund Freud was the captain.
Breton, a qualified doctor, who worked in a neurological ward of a large hospital was fascinated by the way the minds of mentally distressed patients work. He wondered at their imagination which made no sense ergo he urged his artist friends to produce art from the imagination.
Breton and his cronies worshipped Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland but long before the Reverend Dodson, Hieronymous Bosch was producing fantastic inexplicable paintings. We would now say they were surreal.
Surrealism did not, as Breton hoped, change the world but it did shape American art.
Lobster Telephone, Salvador Dalí.
In 1941, he went to New York where Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Dali were living. Peggy Guggenheim, who was married to Ernst, used her fortune to promote the Surrealists. She bank-rolled Exhibitions of their works in her Art of This Century Gallery in Manhattan which became a meeting point for Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, Sandy Calder et al.
Because of Peggy, Max, Marcel, Sandy and fellow Surrealists, New York took over from Paris as the international art capital.
Today, the whole world is Surreal. Before long, AI will dominate the art world, we will all be gender neutral and morphing into cyborgs. The Surrealists would be delighted. Beyond even their vivid imaginations.
* from 4 September 2024 to 13 January Pompidou Centre, Paris.
** Technique used by Ernst. A piece of paper or glass is laid over a painted surface. When removed suction pulls the paint to form surprising, unimagined results.
Read about Max Ernst life and The Amboise Fountain in Max Ernst: and The Genie of Amboise by Pamela Shields.
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art), Artwork and Photography by Mark.
Max Ernst: and The Genie of Amboise
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