Our Editor Views Many Of Max Ernst Masterpieces at The Max Ernst Museum Brühl, Germany

Written by Dorian Cardinale Thursday, 03 May 2012 23:12

The Max Ernst Museum Brühl of LVR is the world's first and only museum that is the work of this seminal artist and world citizen Max Ernst (1891-1976) dedicated. It shows an overview of the extensive work of the Dadaists and Surrealists, whose imagery - as with almost any other artist of the 20th Century - are distinguished by astonishing creativity and inspiring genius. Max Ernst not only created a large number of paintings, collages, graphics, sculptures and assemblages, and his boundless creativity was reflected in numerous books, artist portfolios and poems. In his world of images we encounter poetic landscapes, fantastic compositions and bizarre creatures whose powers of invention and clever wit and fascinating at the same time and cause confusion in the viewer inexorably lead an effeminate wake of the suggestion. The painter, sculptor, graphic artist and poet Max Ernst is one of the most important representatives of the Dadaism and Surrealism. Early in his life he breaks with conventional painting and turns towards the use of indirect techniques such as over-paintings, collage, frottage (rubbing technique), grattage (scrapping technique) and decalcomania (tracing technique with oil colours). These techniques serve the systematic survey of the realms „Beyond Painting" (Max Ernst). By exploiting his hallucinatory capabilities Max Ernst reinterprets objects and structures of his environment to then fix his visionary perception of the world. The alienation of the ordinary as well as the irritating orchestration of the inexplicable and the dreamlike are consistently broken up by irony and humor in his many works of art. During the summer of 1934, German-born artist Max Ernst executed a mural for the Dancing Mascotte, the bar at Zürich’s Corso Theatre. One of the largest painted works of the artist’s seven-decade career, Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie (Petals and Garden of Nymph Ancolie) adorned a wall of the popular nightspot in Zurich. Based on an illustration found in a Victorian-era botanical encyclopedia, the surrealist imagery features a dancing bird-like figure emerging from a lush backdrop of red and gold flower petals. This amazing huge nightclub mural has been full restored and on display until March, 2011. The Max Ernst Museum Brühl of LVR also presents five major works by Max Ernst from the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, makes for a whole year under the "collection on display in the change." The Menil Collection is one of the world's largest private art collections. Given the Menil’s preeminent Ernst holdings – the result of a lifelong friendship between the artist and John and Dominque de Menil – the Houston museum was the ideal venue for the debut of the fully restored Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie. The de Menils met the artist for the first time, in Paris, in 1934 – the year Ernst completed the Zürich mural.

The building complex is a combination of old and new: far from the palace of Augustus, with its castle park stands the classical three wings of the 19th Century, which was extended by a centrally inserted glass pavilion and a "floating" entrance plateau and supplemented in the basement with additional exhibition and meeting rooms.For four years, the conversion work continued by the Cologne architect Thomas van den Valentyn and Seyed Mohammad Oreyzi. The restoration of the heritage-listed building was there a main idea, visited but also the young Max Ernst that "Brühler pavilion, a picnic area, in 1844, so at the same time, the construction of the railway line between Cologne and Bonn, as a further attraction of the recreation area Brühl built. For the realization of the project, the existing building with the requirements of a museum and the aesthetic standards of contemporary architecture to agree harmoniously, received the Max Ernst Museum awarded "exemplary building in North Rhine-Westphalia". Since 1 July 2007 is the Max Ernst Museum to the Museum Association of the Rhineland Regional Council. Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism. He was born in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family. His father Philipp Ernst was a teacher of the deaf and dumb and an amateur painter. Ernst visited asylums and became fascinated with the art of the mentally ill patients; he also started painting this year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle and portraits of his sister and himself. In 1911 Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist. In 1912 he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-Impressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influenced his approach to art. His own work is exhibited the same year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, and then in several group exhibitions in 1913. In 1914 Ernst met Hans Arp in Cologne. The two soon became friends and their relationship lasted for fifty years. Next year Ernst visited Paul Klee in Munich and studied paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, which left a deep impression on him. The same year, inspired partly by de Chirico and partly by studying mail-order catalogues, teaching-aide manuals, and similar sources, he produced his first collages (notably a portfolio of lithographs), a technique which will come to dominate his artistic pursuits in the years to come.Constantly experimenting, in 1925 he invented a graphic art technique called frottage which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images. He also created another technique called 'grattage' in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He uses this technique in his famous painting 'Forest and Dove' (as shown at the Tate Modern). Along with other artists and friends (Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall) who had fled from the war and lived in New York City, Ernst helped inspire the development of abstract expressionism. Ernst died on 1 April 1976, 1 day before his birthday, in Paris.