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拍品專文
Filled with a vivid sense of texture and form, Sans titre (L’oiseau qui s’assoit et ne chante pas) dates from an important period of experimentation and adventure in Max Ernst’s artistic career, as he boldly pushed the envelope in his compositions and explored new pathways towards spontaneous, unconscious painterly effects. In early 1925, Ernst had achieved a new level of financial stability, and for the first time in his life he was able to devote himself to his art full-time. Almost immediately, he reached a radical breakthrough in his practice, developing the semi-automatic technique of frottage while on holiday in the seaside town of Pornic, on the Atlantic coast of France.
Stuck in his hotel room one rainy afternoon that August, the artist became captivated by the rich and varied textures of the grooves in the wooden floorboards, their unique patterns of ripples and whorls evoking childhood memories of a wooden headboard that had suggested dreamlike images to his young mind as he drifted off to sleep. Laying sheets of paper at random across the floor, Ernst took pencil tracings of the wooden boards in his room, and in so doing created a series of unplanned images that fed his artistic imagination, their spontaneously generated marks becoming the foundation of his subsequent drawings. As he explained: “My curiosity awakened and astonished, I began to experiment indifferently and to question, utilizing the same means, all sorts of materials to be found in my visual field; leaves and their veins, the ragged edges of a bit of linen, the brushstrokes of a modern painting, the unwound thread of a spool, etc.” (“On Frottage,” 1936; quoted in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Berkeley and London, 1968, p. 429).
Soon after, he found a way to adapt the frottage process to oil painting. Filling his canvases with thin, overlapping layers of pigment, he would then lay the picture over a textured surface and scrape or scratch the paint away to reveal rich, multi-colored patterns which both echo the material used in their creation and suggest entirely new forms. Referring to this unique approach as grattage (scraping in French), this technique would remain an integral aspect of Ernst’s creative process for decades, serving as the creative catalyst which allowed him to push past the fear he claimed to feel before the empty, blank surface of a page or canvas. Responding to the unexpected marks and shapes that emerged from the textured scrapings, Ernst worked back into the painting, creating fantastical forms and mysterious, otherworldly landscapes from the ethereal textures and patterns that emerged. As he later explained, these patterns offered endless stimulation: “There my eyes discovered human heads, animals, a battle that ended with a kiss (the bride of the wind), rocks, the sea and the rain, earthquakes, the sphinx in her stable, the little tables around the earth, the palette of Caesar, false positions, a shawl of frost flowers, the pampas…” (quoted in Max Ernst: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975, p. 38).
In Sans titre (L’oiseau qui s’assoit et ne chante pas), Ernst uses these spontaneous patterns to conjure a pair of birds—one pale white, the other vibrant green—who appear to huddle together on the ground of this mysterious, alien landscape, while a strange solar disc hovers in the sky above. Birds had long exerted an important influence on Ernst’s imagination. Since childhood he had made an unconscious connection in his mind between these avian creatures and people, and would later develop a mysterious alter ego in his paintings, a hybrid being that was half bird, half man, which he called “Loplop.” While many of Ernst’s depictions of birds through the mid-1920s focused on a pair of songbirds trapped together in a cage, here the two appear free within the landscape, the wings of the white bird slowly stretching outwards from its body, unconfined by the surrounding space. However, rather than appearing in mid-flight, they remain unexpectedly tied to the earth, their bodies firmly rooted to the ground which stretches upwards towards the distant horizon line, filling almost the entire canvas with its ethereal patterns. As a result, there is a certain sense of melancholy to the scene, enhanced by the poetic subtitle the artist has added to the canvas—the birds do not revel in their boundless freedom, but remain locked together, silently watching and waiting for some unknown event to occur.
Stuck in his hotel room one rainy afternoon that August, the artist became captivated by the rich and varied textures of the grooves in the wooden floorboards, their unique patterns of ripples and whorls evoking childhood memories of a wooden headboard that had suggested dreamlike images to his young mind as he drifted off to sleep. Laying sheets of paper at random across the floor, Ernst took pencil tracings of the wooden boards in his room, and in so doing created a series of unplanned images that fed his artistic imagination, their spontaneously generated marks becoming the foundation of his subsequent drawings. As he explained: “My curiosity awakened and astonished, I began to experiment indifferently and to question, utilizing the same means, all sorts of materials to be found in my visual field; leaves and their veins, the ragged edges of a bit of linen, the brushstrokes of a modern painting, the unwound thread of a spool, etc.” (“On Frottage,” 1936; quoted in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Berkeley and London, 1968, p. 429).
Soon after, he found a way to adapt the frottage process to oil painting. Filling his canvases with thin, overlapping layers of pigment, he would then lay the picture over a textured surface and scrape or scratch the paint away to reveal rich, multi-colored patterns which both echo the material used in their creation and suggest entirely new forms. Referring to this unique approach as grattage (scraping in French), this technique would remain an integral aspect of Ernst’s creative process for decades, serving as the creative catalyst which allowed him to push past the fear he claimed to feel before the empty, blank surface of a page or canvas. Responding to the unexpected marks and shapes that emerged from the textured scrapings, Ernst worked back into the painting, creating fantastical forms and mysterious, otherworldly landscapes from the ethereal textures and patterns that emerged. As he later explained, these patterns offered endless stimulation: “There my eyes discovered human heads, animals, a battle that ended with a kiss (the bride of the wind), rocks, the sea and the rain, earthquakes, the sphinx in her stable, the little tables around the earth, the palette of Caesar, false positions, a shawl of frost flowers, the pampas…” (quoted in Max Ernst: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1975, p. 38).
In Sans titre (L’oiseau qui s’assoit et ne chante pas), Ernst uses these spontaneous patterns to conjure a pair of birds—one pale white, the other vibrant green—who appear to huddle together on the ground of this mysterious, alien landscape, while a strange solar disc hovers in the sky above. Birds had long exerted an important influence on Ernst’s imagination. Since childhood he had made an unconscious connection in his mind between these avian creatures and people, and would later develop a mysterious alter ego in his paintings, a hybrid being that was half bird, half man, which he called “Loplop.” While many of Ernst’s depictions of birds through the mid-1920s focused on a pair of songbirds trapped together in a cage, here the two appear free within the landscape, the wings of the white bird slowly stretching outwards from its body, unconfined by the surrounding space. However, rather than appearing in mid-flight, they remain unexpectedly tied to the earth, their bodies firmly rooted to the ground which stretches upwards towards the distant horizon line, filling almost the entire canvas with its ethereal patterns. As a result, there is a certain sense of melancholy to the scene, enhanced by the poetic subtitle the artist has added to the canvas—the birds do not revel in their boundless freedom, but remain locked together, silently watching and waiting for some unknown event to occur.