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拍品專文
Created in 1920 at the height of Max Ernst’s involvement with the Dada movement in Cologne, sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler (l’énigme de l’Europe Centrale or always the best man wins) is one of the finest and best-known of the artist’s celebrated early ‘overpaintings.’ These were collage-type works in which, by painting over printed illustrations taken from the strictly logical, rational world of scientific periodicals and lexica, Ernst was able to give pictorial form to his disquieting visions, creating startling images of bizarre, new worlds filled with unsettling hybrids in the form of animated apparatus, mechanized plants and anthropomorphized machines.
With its long, complex and seemingly nonsensical, multi-lingual title, sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler was one of a select number of these pioneering early works made in preparation for Ernst’s first, landmark solo show held in Paris at the Galerie Au Sans Pareil under the title ‘Exposition Dada: Max Ernst,’ between 3 May and 3 June 1921. This now famous exhibition featured what William Rubin would later describe as ‘proto-Surrealist’ pictures and effectively announced Ernst to the Parisian avant-garde. André Breton, in particular, was so enthralled with this show that he wrote immediately to André Derain saying he now considered Max Ernst to be ‘one of the most remarkable minds of the age. He’s the one, you know, who paints on photographs, which themselves are the result of a combination of existing printed material, such as illustrated advertisements, botanical plates, sports pictures, instructions for women’s handicrafts, etc. He made Picabia nearly die of chagrin. I sometimes maintain that we owe a brand of art to him that corresponds to the new conception of things advanced by Einstein’ (Letter to André Derain, 3 October 1921; quoted in W. Spies, Max Ernst, Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, London, 1991, p. 67).
Breton’s statement that pictures such as sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler had vexed Francis Picabia is understandable, given Ernst had drawn upon Picabia’s earlier ‘mechanomorphic’ pictures of sexualized machines, and taken them to a completely new level in these works. But it was not only the strange, erotic nature of Picabia’s machine pictures that overpaintings like this one—with its imagery of a planted garden, mountains and a celestial constellation—had transformed into landscapes of imaginative mystery. Ernst was also influenced by the cosmic visions of Paul Klee in these images, as well as the metaphysical poetics of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, whose pictures he had also recently encountered for the first time in an edition of the magazine Valori Plastici.
The strange meta-mechanical poetics evoked by the Italian artists’ mannequins, sharp geometries and frequent use of high perspective lines immediately prompted at first imitation from Ernst and soon afterwards an exploration of their new metaphysical world through the medium of collage. In collage, and then likewise in the overpainting technique employed in sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler, Ernst declared that he had found a way ‘to create an electric or erotic tension between… elements that we have become accustomed to think of as mutually alien and unrelated’ (quoted in W. Spies, Max Ernst: Collages, London, 1988, p. 228). It was, Ernst said, ‘the systematic exploitation of the fortuitous or engineered encounter of two or more intrinsically incompatible realities on a surface... manifestly inappropriate for the purpose,’ that generated a ‘spark of poetry’ (quoted in U.M. Schneede, The Essential Max Ernst, London, 1972, p. 29).
In overpaintings like sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler Ernst threw this poetic conjoining of two incompatible realities into direct contrast with one another by translating and transforming a botanical illustration from the 1914 publication Bibliotheca Paedagogica. Displaying various flowering male and female plants known as ‘Anglospermae,’ characterised by their having seeds enclosed in an ovary, this illustration is transformed by Ernst’s interventions into an entire landscape, populated by a sequence of partly mechanized, partly organic, anthropomorphic and androgynous forms, blooming together in a planted garden. Collectively, the strange alchemy of this diagram-like group of mecano-botantical figures is ultimately a humorous take on ideas of fertility and the mechanics of sexual reproduction. It is also a work deliberately intended to mimic, undermine and ridicule the inherent seriousness, order, logic and rationalization of the thinking that lay behind the original scientific illustration of these natural forms.
Writing about the overpaintings, Ernst has explained: ‘We young people came back from the war dazed and our disgust simply had to find an outlet. This quite naturally took the form of attacks on the foundations of the civilization that had brought this war about – attacks on language, syntax, logic, literature, painting and so forth’ (quoted in Max Ernst, exh. cat., Tate, London, 1991, p. 82). In particular, he would later recall, ‘I was struck by the obsession which the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for the anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic and paleontologic demonstration exercised on my irritated mind. There I found, brought together, elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep… It was enough at that time to embellish these catalogue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me, a colour, a pencil mark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon… thus I obtained a faithful fixed image of my hallucination and transformed it into dramas revealing my most secret desires’ (‘What is the mechanism of collage?’ 1936; in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 427).
Like Ernst’s assault on the empirical logic of the original source material, the long, complex, multilingual and largely uninterpretable title of this work appears to be the product of some form of collaged attack. Sometimes also known under the shorter titles of always the best man wins… or l’énigme de l’Europe Centrale, its full extended title reads: ‘always the best man wins/sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler rosinen und mandeln schlagen die eingeborenen mitteleuropas/zu meerschaum und eilen nach stattgehabter denudation erignissen in bester absicht voraus.’ ‘Schneeberger’ and ‘drückethäler’ are, as William Camfield has noted, ‘senseless invented words which suggest some puzzling reference to snow mountain or snow saver and to squeeze or press valley. But… by switching the endings (and dropping the “h” in drückethäler) two real words appear: “schneetäler” (snow valley) and “Drückeberger”(slacker). Still other word plays are possible. The remainder of the extended title may be translated roughly as “raisins and almonds beat the natives of central Europe into meerschaum and, after denudation having happened hurry ahead of events with best intentions”’ (Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 340, n. 85).
With its long, complex and seemingly nonsensical, multi-lingual title, sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler was one of a select number of these pioneering early works made in preparation for Ernst’s first, landmark solo show held in Paris at the Galerie Au Sans Pareil under the title ‘Exposition Dada: Max Ernst,’ between 3 May and 3 June 1921. This now famous exhibition featured what William Rubin would later describe as ‘proto-Surrealist’ pictures and effectively announced Ernst to the Parisian avant-garde. André Breton, in particular, was so enthralled with this show that he wrote immediately to André Derain saying he now considered Max Ernst to be ‘one of the most remarkable minds of the age. He’s the one, you know, who paints on photographs, which themselves are the result of a combination of existing printed material, such as illustrated advertisements, botanical plates, sports pictures, instructions for women’s handicrafts, etc. He made Picabia nearly die of chagrin. I sometimes maintain that we owe a brand of art to him that corresponds to the new conception of things advanced by Einstein’ (Letter to André Derain, 3 October 1921; quoted in W. Spies, Max Ernst, Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, London, 1991, p. 67).
Breton’s statement that pictures such as sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler had vexed Francis Picabia is understandable, given Ernst had drawn upon Picabia’s earlier ‘mechanomorphic’ pictures of sexualized machines, and taken them to a completely new level in these works. But it was not only the strange, erotic nature of Picabia’s machine pictures that overpaintings like this one—with its imagery of a planted garden, mountains and a celestial constellation—had transformed into landscapes of imaginative mystery. Ernst was also influenced by the cosmic visions of Paul Klee in these images, as well as the metaphysical poetics of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, whose pictures he had also recently encountered for the first time in an edition of the magazine Valori Plastici.
The strange meta-mechanical poetics evoked by the Italian artists’ mannequins, sharp geometries and frequent use of high perspective lines immediately prompted at first imitation from Ernst and soon afterwards an exploration of their new metaphysical world through the medium of collage. In collage, and then likewise in the overpainting technique employed in sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler, Ernst declared that he had found a way ‘to create an electric or erotic tension between… elements that we have become accustomed to think of as mutually alien and unrelated’ (quoted in W. Spies, Max Ernst: Collages, London, 1988, p. 228). It was, Ernst said, ‘the systematic exploitation of the fortuitous or engineered encounter of two or more intrinsically incompatible realities on a surface... manifestly inappropriate for the purpose,’ that generated a ‘spark of poetry’ (quoted in U.M. Schneede, The Essential Max Ernst, London, 1972, p. 29).
In overpaintings like sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler Ernst threw this poetic conjoining of two incompatible realities into direct contrast with one another by translating and transforming a botanical illustration from the 1914 publication Bibliotheca Paedagogica. Displaying various flowering male and female plants known as ‘Anglospermae,’ characterised by their having seeds enclosed in an ovary, this illustration is transformed by Ernst’s interventions into an entire landscape, populated by a sequence of partly mechanized, partly organic, anthropomorphic and androgynous forms, blooming together in a planted garden. Collectively, the strange alchemy of this diagram-like group of mecano-botantical figures is ultimately a humorous take on ideas of fertility and the mechanics of sexual reproduction. It is also a work deliberately intended to mimic, undermine and ridicule the inherent seriousness, order, logic and rationalization of the thinking that lay behind the original scientific illustration of these natural forms.
Writing about the overpaintings, Ernst has explained: ‘We young people came back from the war dazed and our disgust simply had to find an outlet. This quite naturally took the form of attacks on the foundations of the civilization that had brought this war about – attacks on language, syntax, logic, literature, painting and so forth’ (quoted in Max Ernst, exh. cat., Tate, London, 1991, p. 82). In particular, he would later recall, ‘I was struck by the obsession which the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for the anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic and paleontologic demonstration exercised on my irritated mind. There I found, brought together, elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep… It was enough at that time to embellish these catalogue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me, a colour, a pencil mark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon… thus I obtained a faithful fixed image of my hallucination and transformed it into dramas revealing my most secret desires’ (‘What is the mechanism of collage?’ 1936; in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 427).
Like Ernst’s assault on the empirical logic of the original source material, the long, complex, multilingual and largely uninterpretable title of this work appears to be the product of some form of collaged attack. Sometimes also known under the shorter titles of always the best man wins… or l’énigme de l’Europe Centrale, its full extended title reads: ‘always the best man wins/sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler rosinen und mandeln schlagen die eingeborenen mitteleuropas/zu meerschaum und eilen nach stattgehabter denudation erignissen in bester absicht voraus.’ ‘Schneeberger’ and ‘drückethäler’ are, as William Camfield has noted, ‘senseless invented words which suggest some puzzling reference to snow mountain or snow saver and to squeeze or press valley. But… by switching the endings (and dropping the “h” in drückethäler) two real words appear: “schneetäler” (snow valley) and “Drückeberger”(slacker). Still other word plays are possible. The remainder of the extended title may be translated roughly as “raisins and almonds beat the natives of central Europe into meerschaum and, after denudation having happened hurry ahead of events with best intentions”’ (Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 340, n. 85).