Happy Birthday, Max Ernst!

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891 in Brühl, Germany. After serving in the German army during WWI, he became an artist in the Dada movement and was notorious for his art events (one staged in a public rest room) and his dreamlike collage work. In 1922 Ernst moved to Paris and helped found Surrealism. He was married to Peggy Guggenheim, and Dorothea Tanning. Ernst died in 1976.


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Vocabulary: 

• Autonomism - refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement.

•  Dada Movement - or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.^[1] The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule the meaninglessness of the modern world as its participants saw it. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchistic in nature.

• Decalocomania - from the French décalcomanie, is a decorative technique by which engravings and prints may be transferred to pottery or other materials. It was invented in England about 1750 and imported into the United States at least as early as 1865. Its invention has been attributed to Simon François Ravenet, an engraver from France who later moved to England and perfected the process he called "decalquer" (which means to copy by tracing). The first known use of the French term décalcomanie, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Eleanor's Victory (1863), was soon followed by the English decalcomania in an 1865 trade show catalog (The Tenth Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association); it was popularized during the ceramic transfer craze of the mid-1870s. Today the shortened version is "Decal". The surrealist Oscar Domínguez (referring to his work as "decalcomania with no preconceived object") took up the technique in 1936, using gouache spread thinly on a sheet of paper or other surface (glass has been used), which is then pressed onto another surface such as a canvas. Black gouache was originally used in Dominguez's practice, though colours later made their appearance.
  

•  Surrealism - is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers^[who?] regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.