Traces from the Past: Surrealism
I began painting at eighteen, and the Surrealists were the trigger. First came the literature of the circle around André Breton and Paul Éluard. Jean Cocteau and André Masson also opened a new world for me. With painters such as Max Ernst, that discovery became a way into painting itself.
Ernst’s The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism) dates from 1937.[1] A brightly coloured creature seems to leap across the picture, its limbs pulling in different directions. Its body is difficult to settle into a single reading: animal, fabric and gesture seem to run into one another.
A Homage, Almost Fifty Years Later
By the time of this fifth post in my March 2021 series, almost fifty years had passed since I began painting. I had made a homage to Ernst, and The Triumph of Surrealism was probably its source of inspiration. I say “probably” because an image remembered for so long does not always return as a conscious reference.
The colour and space are quite different here. Dark brush forms cut across a grey-violet ground, with pale green passages opening within them. Their ragged edges suggest movement, but no creature is fully described. Where Ernst gives the strange body a clear silhouette against the sky, the forms in my work emerge only partly from their surroundings.
This belongs to a series of homages to artists I have learned from or who have inspired me. Looking at the two works together, I can follow a connection without tracing every shape back to its source. Something of that early encounter remains, even when the image has become quite different.
Footnotes
[1] Fondation Beyeler: Max Ernst retrospective — catalogue entry for L’ange du foyer (Le triomphe du surréalisme), 1937. ↩
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