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Lot Essay
Loplop présente (Loplop presents) is one of an important series of collages made by Max Ernst in the early 1930s invoking the mysterious shamanic figure of 'Loplop'. Loplop was a bird-headed figure that had emerged unconsciously in Ernst's art in the late 1920s and which came to 'visit' him through his work almost constantly during the early 1930s at a time when, in the aftermath of creating his extensive collage novel La femme 100 têtes, he was in the process of defining his artistic position with relation to Surrealism.
A kind of shamanic alter-ego of the artist himself, Loplop was a mysterious guide to the underworld of Ernst's unconscious and the realm from where his ever-fertile creativity derived. Part reincarnation of the vulture in Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks which had so fascinated Sigmund Freud, and by extension André Breton, part mask and part avian incarnation of Ernst himself, Loplop was a totemic vehicle existing on the borderlines between Ernst art and imagination.
Emerging from paintings such as Le toréador of 1930 as a constructed totem, Loplop soon evolved in Ernst's work into a bird-headed canvas often displaying within his own body, the artist's newest pictures. By 1932, Ernst had defined this type of work with the title Loplop présente. This work, a mixture of both collage and frottage, is one of a number of major collages bearing this title and seeming to showcase Ernst's contemporary 'work in miniature'.
Comprising a frottage of a figure set against a gradated rectangle, resting on a linear horizon which has been affixed to a larger paper ground, the figure of Loplop in this work has been reduced to only a vertical and horizontal line and a monochrome disk, also stuck onto this ground. Recalling the image of one of Ernst's forest paintings from which the bird-figure of Loplop first emerged, it is in this way that the reality and definition of both image, medium and figure in this work become intentionally blurred. At the same time the pervasive feeling of the whole play between these elements is one of a secret language of profound poetic mystery being unveiled.
A kind of shamanic alter-ego of the artist himself, Loplop was a mysterious guide to the underworld of Ernst's unconscious and the realm from where his ever-fertile creativity derived. Part reincarnation of the vulture in Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks which had so fascinated Sigmund Freud, and by extension André Breton, part mask and part avian incarnation of Ernst himself, Loplop was a totemic vehicle existing on the borderlines between Ernst art and imagination.
Emerging from paintings such as Le toréador of 1930 as a constructed totem, Loplop soon evolved in Ernst's work into a bird-headed canvas often displaying within his own body, the artist's newest pictures. By 1932, Ernst had defined this type of work with the title Loplop présente. This work, a mixture of both collage and frottage, is one of a number of major collages bearing this title and seeming to showcase Ernst's contemporary 'work in miniature'.
Comprising a frottage of a figure set against a gradated rectangle, resting on a linear horizon which has been affixed to a larger paper ground, the figure of Loplop in this work has been reduced to only a vertical and horizontal line and a monochrome disk, also stuck onto this ground. Recalling the image of one of Ernst's forest paintings from which the bird-figure of Loplop first emerged, it is in this way that the reality and definition of both image, medium and figure in this work become intentionally blurred. At the same time the pervasive feeling of the whole play between these elements is one of a secret language of profound poetic mystery being unveiled.