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拍品專文
La Mer belongs to a series of seascapes painted by Ernst in the mid 1920s as he stayed in the town of Pornic on the Atlantic coast of France. When, on the 10th of August 1925, Ernst made his revelatory discovery of frottage—the accidental technique of taking rubbings from natural forms as a way of prompting his unconscious mind into what he described as creative "voyages of discovery"—it is no surprise to find that among the first images to emerge from these new works were haunting and mysterious seascapes. After discovering frottage, Ernst continued to explore and evolve the technique, adapting it into grattage—the scrubbing and scraping of paint over a canvas.
Frottage was for Ernst a catalyst that prompted him to paint directly from his unconscious. It was, he once explained, "the technical means of augmenting the hallucinatory capacity of the mind so that visions could occur automatically, a means of doffing one's blindness." Following the paths that frottage established, Ernst began to deliberately encourage his art to reveal the complexes that had haunted his imagination. Moreover, from the beginning of 1925, Ernst was able to concentrate solely on his art for the first time and, almost immediately, a series of recognizable creatures and themes, often strongly autobiographical, begins to repeatedly manifest itself in his art. Vogelhochzeit (Bird Marriage), 1925, one of Ernst's first explorations of grattage, employs the imagery of the bird, which "evolved into the artist's personal symbol. Ernst's friends often remarked upon his resemblance to a bird, characterized by his sharp piercing eyes and extended nose" (M.E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth, Austin, 2001, p. 89). The present work also depicts the outline of a bird, created through the artist's incisions in the surface of the blue paint of the sea, likely a premonition of the artist’s creation Loplop.
Loplop made his first appearances in Ernst's work in his collages of the late 1920s, and was soon recognized by the artist as a kind of alter-ego or mystic guide to the netherworld of his unconscious imagination. Birds had always played a profound part in Ernst's imagination. Throughout his life, he grew increasingly to look like one, and as a child, the bizarre death of his pet parrot at precisely the same moment his sister was born had a profound and long-lasting impact on him. As he recalled in his autobiographical notes of this strange event:
"A friend by the name of Horneborn, an intelligent piebald, faithful bird dies during the night; the same night a baby, number six, enters life. Confusion in the brain of this otherwise quite healthy boy (the young Ernst)—a kind of interpretation mania, as if the newborn innocent, sister Loni, had in her lust for life, taken possession of the vital fluids of his favourite bird. The crisis is soon overcome. Yet in the boy's mind there remains a voluntary if irrational confounding of the images of human beings with birds and other creatures, and this is reflected in the emblems of his art" (M. Ernst, "Biographische Notizen," Max Ernst, exh. cat., Kunsthaus Zürich, 1962, p. 23).
Frottage was for Ernst a catalyst that prompted him to paint directly from his unconscious. It was, he once explained, "the technical means of augmenting the hallucinatory capacity of the mind so that visions could occur automatically, a means of doffing one's blindness." Following the paths that frottage established, Ernst began to deliberately encourage his art to reveal the complexes that had haunted his imagination. Moreover, from the beginning of 1925, Ernst was able to concentrate solely on his art for the first time and, almost immediately, a series of recognizable creatures and themes, often strongly autobiographical, begins to repeatedly manifest itself in his art. Vogelhochzeit (Bird Marriage), 1925, one of Ernst's first explorations of grattage, employs the imagery of the bird, which "evolved into the artist's personal symbol. Ernst's friends often remarked upon his resemblance to a bird, characterized by his sharp piercing eyes and extended nose" (M.E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth, Austin, 2001, p. 89). The present work also depicts the outline of a bird, created through the artist's incisions in the surface of the blue paint of the sea, likely a premonition of the artist’s creation Loplop.
Loplop made his first appearances in Ernst's work in his collages of the late 1920s, and was soon recognized by the artist as a kind of alter-ego or mystic guide to the netherworld of his unconscious imagination. Birds had always played a profound part in Ernst's imagination. Throughout his life, he grew increasingly to look like one, and as a child, the bizarre death of his pet parrot at precisely the same moment his sister was born had a profound and long-lasting impact on him. As he recalled in his autobiographical notes of this strange event:
"A friend by the name of Horneborn, an intelligent piebald, faithful bird dies during the night; the same night a baby, number six, enters life. Confusion in the brain of this otherwise quite healthy boy (the young Ernst)—a kind of interpretation mania, as if the newborn innocent, sister Loni, had in her lust for life, taken possession of the vital fluids of his favourite bird. The crisis is soon overcome. Yet in the boy's mind there remains a voluntary if irrational confounding of the images of human beings with birds and other creatures, and this is reflected in the emblems of his art" (M. Ernst, "Biographische Notizen," Max Ernst, exh. cat., Kunsthaus Zürich, 1962, p. 23).