Object Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Ernst, Max |
Title |
Untitled |
Date |
1970 |
Medium |
lithograph |
Culture |
German |
School |
Dada |
Object ID |
1987.8.2 |
Collection |
Modern Art (1900-1970) |
Object Name |
|
Credit line |
Gift of Robert and Frances Moore |
Didactic Information |
Surrealist artist Max Ernst is known for his explorations of the unconscious and the irrational, often combining personal mythology and Freudian metaphor into his fantastical works. An accomplished painter and sculptor, Ernst was also a printmaker. In Untitled, 1970, he explores a kind of childlike vitality in depicting a series of totemic figures reminiscent of the petroglyphs that he might have found at his home in Sedona, Arizona. Ernst is also well-known for painting swamp-like landscapes filled with mythological creatures that stem from the nature mysticism practiced among the German romantics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ernst's early interest in philosophy and psychology, as well as the art of the mentally ill, brought him to devote his life to art. In 1962, his work was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London, and in 1975, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as the Grand Palais in Paris. |