Modern Artists on Art

Second Enlarged Edition

Robert L. Herbert

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486146003
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This rich, readable anthology contains 17 unabridged essays by some of the 20th century's leading artistic innovators. Chosen for their intrinsic quality and documentary value by editor Robert L. Herbert — Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Mount Holyoke College — the essays are presented in their entirety to allow the fullest possible expression of their authors' ideas.
Ranging in tone from questing to contentious, the pieces encompass a broad spectrum of forceful artistic opinion and theory — from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger's 1912 presentation of Cubist theory to Henry Moore's three brief essays, three decades later, on sculpture and primitive art. Among other contributions are the reminiscences of Kandinsky; Le Corbusier and Ozenfant on Purism; Klee on modern art; Mondrian on plastic art; and Beckmann describing his painting. Essays by Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, El Lissitzky, and Fernand Léger, added to this second edition, have expanded the anthology considerably and extended its range to include Dada, Surrealism, and the `machine esthetic.`
Described by the Canadian Forum as `an excellent collection of carefully selected essays by some of the most significant spokesmen among Modern artists,` these challenging essays not only will provide much food for thought for art historians and theorists but also will be a smorgasbord of continuing inspiration for all artists and art students — whether or not they are devotees of `modern` art.

Ernst

Beyond Painting

“Beyond Painting,” published in 1937 at the height of Surrealism, is a quixotic and thoroughly Surrealist piece of autobiography in which Max Ernst inter-leafs many dozens of titles of his works as elements of his prose, thereby obscuring the boundaries between life and art. In the guise of startling dream images he outlines his career, concentrating upon his unique creations, including his Dada collages of borrowed and transformed images that indeed foretold later Surrealist painting, and his frottages, his rubbings of diverse textures that in 1925 launched a rich mixture of techniques in drawings, prints, and paintings. In the process he refers warmly to most of his fellow Surrealists, and quotes liberally in praise of himself from the movement’s founder, André Breton, and from Aragon. References to Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, Rimbaud, Picasso, and others establish his ancestry and that of the movement as a whole.

Ernst (1891–1976) was a self-taught artist on the fringes of the German vanguard by 1912. After service in World War I, he joined Johannes Baargeld and Hans Arp in 1919 to form the short-lived Cologne branch of the explosive Dada movement. With Paul Eluard’s help he emigrated in 1922 to Paris, where his collages, prints, and paintings introduced a new kind of fantastic reality that owed a debt to Giorgio De Chirico but was informed by his own serious study of psychology and philosophy. Although he eventually broke with Breton in 1938, Ernst was a central figure in Paris-based Surrealism. His work appeared in books by Eluard (Répétitions, 1922), Tristan Tzara, René Crevel, Kafka, and many others. Equally influential were his own frottage and collage collections, Histoire naturelle (1926), La Femme 100 Têtes (1929), and Une Semaine de bonté (1934). Ernst’s liaisons with notable women contributed to his notoriety: Leonora Carrington, Peggy Guggenheim, and Dorothea Tanning, whom he married in 1946. He had moved to the United States in 1941 and settled with Tanning in Sedona, Arizona, in 1946. He returned to France in 1953 and until his death actively continued working in painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, film making, book illustration, and writing.

“Beyond Painting,” which Ernst signed “Paris, October 1936,” was first published as “Au-delà de la peinture” in volume 11 of Cahiers d’art, 1936, pp. 149–82. Its first integral translation into English was made by Dorothea Tanning in a collection of Ernst’s writings, Beyond Painting, one of the series “Documents of Modern Art” edited by Robert Motherwell for Wittenborn, Schultz (New York, 1948), pp. 3–19. I am thankful to Wittenborn Art Books for permission to publish it here. Another translation was made by Lucy R. Lippard for her Surrealists on Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970).

Beyond Painting

I. History of a Natural History

“. . . it is like the tinkling of the bell, which makes one hear that which one imagines.”

—Leonardo da Vinci (Treatise on Painting)

From 5 to 7 years

I see before me a panel, very rudely painted with wide black lines on a red ground, representing false mahogany and calling forth associations of organic forms (menacing eye, long nose, great head of a bird with thick black hair, etc.).

In front of the panel, a glossy black man is making gestures, slow, comical and, according to my memories of a very obscure epoch, joyously obscene. This rogue of a fellow wears the turned-up moustaches of my father.

After having executed some leaps in slow motion, legs spread, knees drawn up, torso bent forward, he smiles and draws from the pocket of his trousers a fat crayon in a soft material which I find I cannot describe more precisely. He sets to work: panting violently he hurriedly traces the black lines on the panel of false mahogany. He quickly imparts to it new forms, forms which are at once surprising and abject. He accentuates the resemblance to ferocious or viscous animals to such a point that he extracts from it living creatures that fill me with horror and anguish. Content with his art, the fellow tosses his creations in the air, then gathers them in a kind of vase which he paints, intentionally, on the inside. He whirls the contents of the vase by stirring it, faster and faster, with his fat crayon. The vase itself, in whirling, becomes a top. The crayon becomes a whip. Now I realize that this strange painter is my father. He wields the whip with all his force and accompanies his movements with terrible gasps of breath, comparable to the snorts of an enormous and enraged steam-engine. With fiendish passion he causes the top to whirl and leap around my bed, that abominable top which contains all the horrors that my father is capable of evoking in an amiable panel of false mahogany by means of his frightful soft crayon.

One day, at the age of puberty, in examining the question of how my father had conducted himself in the night of my conception, there rose in me, as if in response to this question of filial respect, precise and irrefutable, the memory of that vision of half sleep that I had forgotten. For a long time afterward I was unable to disengage myself from a quite unfavorable impression of my father’s conduct on the occasion of my conception, an impression perhaps unreasonable and unjust, but carefully thought over....

At the age of puberty

The well-known game of purely optical representations which obsesses us in half-sleep quickly becomes a procession of normally clad men and women which departs from a distant horizon toward my bed. Before arriving, the participants separate: the women pass to the right, the men to the left. Curious, I lean toward the right so that not one face shall escape me. Moreover, I am struck by the extreme youth of all these women; and later by the fact that the persons in question are always the same, only the head changing a little, the identity never. In scrutinizing them carefully, face by face, I realize my error: among these women many are of a “certain age,” some really old and only two or three very young, perhaps 18 years of age, the age expedient to my puberty.

I am too occupied by the women to give any attention to those passing on the men’s side. But I know without seeing that I shall now commit the contrary error: All these gentlemen begin by frightening me with their precocious senility and their remarkable ugliness, but upon close examination only my father, among all these, bears the traits of an old man.

January 1925

I see myself lying in my bed and, standing at my feet, a tall slender woman dressed in a very red gown. The gown is transparent, the woman also. I am ravished by the surprising elegance of her bone structure. I am tempted to pay her a compliment.

The 10th of August, 1925

Botticelli did not like landscape painting. He felt that it was “a kind of short and mediocre investigation.” He says with contempt that “by throwing a sponge soaked with different colors against a wall one makes a spot in which may be seen a beautiful landscape.” That statement brought him a severe admonition from his colleague, Leonardo da Vinci:

He [Botticelli] is right; in such a daub one may certainly find bizarre inventions. I mean to say that he who is disposed to gaze attentively at this spot may discern therein some human heads, various animals, a battle, some rocks, the sea, clouds, groves, and a thousand other things—it is like the tinkling of the bell which makes one hear what one imagines. But though this stain serves to suggest some ideas it does not teach one how to finish any part of the painting. And the above-mentioned painter makes very bad landscapes. To be universal and to please varying tastes it is necessary that in the same composition may be found some very dark passages and others of a gently lighted penumbra. It is not to be despised, in my opinion, if, after gazing fixedly at the spot on the wall, the coals in the grate, the clouds, the flowing stream, if one remembers some of their aspects; and if you look at them carefully you will discover some quite admirable inventions. Of these the genius of the painter may take full advantage, to compose battles of animals and of men, of landscapes or monsters, of devils and other fantastic things which bring you honor. In these confused things genius becomes aware of new inventions, but it is necessary to know well (how to draw) all the parts that one ignores, such as the parts of animals and the aspects of landscape, rocks and vegetation.

(from Treatise on Painting)

On the tenth of August, 1925, an insupportable visual obsession caused me to discover the technical means which have brought a clear realization of this lesson of Leonardo. Beginning with a memory of childhood (related above) in the course of which a panel of false mahogany, situated in front of my bed, had played the role of optical provocateur of a vision of half-sleep, and finding myself one rainy evening in a seaside inn, I was struck by the obsession that showed to my excited gaze the floor-boards upon which a thousand scrubbings had deepened the grooves. I decided then to investigate the symbolism of this obsession and, in order to aid my meditative and hallucinatory faculties, I made from the boards a series of drawings by placing on them, at random, sheets of paper which I undertook to rub with black lead. In gazing attentively at the drawings thus obtained, “the dark passages and those of a gently lighted penumbra,” I was surprised by the sudden intensification of my visionary capacities and by the hallucinatory succession of contradictory images superimposed, one upon the other, with the persistence and rapidity characteristic of amorous memories.

My curiosity awakened and astonished, I began to experiment indifferently and to question, utilizing the same means, all sorts of materials to be found in my visual field: leaves and their veins, the ragged edges of a bit of linen, the brushstrokes of a “modern” painting, the unwound thread from a spool, etc. There my eyes discovered human heads, animals, a battle that ended with a kiss (the bride of the wind), rocks, the sea and the rain, earthquakes, the sphinx in her stable, the little tables around the earth, the palette of Caesar, false positions, a shawl of frost flowers, the pampas.

Blows of whips and threads of lava, fields of honor, inundations and seismic plants, fans, the plunge of the chestnut tree.

The lightning flashes under fourteen years of age, the vaccinated bread, the conjugal diamonds, the cuckoo, origin of the pendulum, the feast of death, the wheel of light.

A system of solar money.

The habits of leaves, the fascinating cypress.

Eve, the only one who remains to us.

Under the title Natural History I have brought together the first results obtained by the procedure of frottage (rubbing), from The Sea and the Rain to Eve, the Only One Who Remains to Us. (Published in 1926, under the direction of Jeanne Bucher.)

I insist on the fact that the drawings thus obtained lost more and more, through a series of suggestions and transmutations that offered themselves spontaneously—in the manner of that which passes for hypnagogic visions—the character of the material interrogated (the wood, for example) and took on the aspect of images of an unhoped-for precision, probably of a sort which revealed the first cause of the obsession, or produced a simulacrum of that cause.

From 1925 to the present

The procedure of frottage, resting thus upon nothing more than the intensification of the irritability of the mind’s faculties by appropriate technical means, excluding all conscious mental guidance (of reason, taste, morals), reducing to the extreme the active part of that one whom we have called, up to now, the “author” of the work, this procedure is revealed by the following to be the real equivalent of that which is already known by the term automatic writing. It is as a spectator that the author assists, indifferent or passionate, at the birth of his work and watches the phases of its development. Even as the role of the poet, since the celebrated lettre de voyant of Rimbaud, consists in writing according to the dictates of that which articulates itself in him, so the role of the painter is to pick out and project that which sees itself in him.¹⁷ In finding myself more and more engrossed in this activity (passivity) which later came to be called “critical paranoia,”¹⁸ and in adapting to the technical means of painting (for example: the scraping of pigments upon a ground prepared in colors and placed on an uneven surface) the procedure of frottage which seemed applicable at first only to drawing, and in striving more and more to restrain my own active participation in the unfolding of the picture and, finally, by widening in this way the active part of the mind’s hallucinatory faculties I came to assist as spectator at the birth of all my works, from the tenth of August, 1925,^1...