Category: Max Ernst

A Little Night Music

Posted on Posted in Art, Gustave Flaubert, Irving Penn, Madame Bovary, Max Ernst, Photography, R.I.P.Leave a comment
Irving Penn ~ Max Ernst + Dorothea Tanning, 1947
Dorothea Tanning ~ Emma, 1970 [The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art]
She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains.  Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary, 1856

Not apples

Posted on Posted in Max Ernst, René MagritteLeave a comment
René Magritte ~ Les Forces de l’Habitude, 1960

“Magritte,” said Daniel Filipacchi, “was both someone very serious, very bourgeois, and someone with a great sense of humor who knew how to laugh. He was rather complicated. In Max Ernst‘s dining room in Paris there was a painting by Magritte, entitled Force of Habit, in which a heraldic image of a large green apple is inscribed in English, “This is not an apple.” Max and Magritte had exchanged pictures, as artists often do. And Max, in the middle of the apple, had painted a cage with a bird inside. Below this cage, Max had written, “Ceci n’est pas un Magritte – signed Max Ernst.” It was pretty funny, at least I thought so. It transformed that painting by Magritte, which was a little boring, into something exceptional. The only problem is that when Magritte came and saw the picture, he laughed politely, but he hated it.”

➔  Carter B. Horsley – Surrealism: Two Private Eyes- The Nesuhi Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum [June 4 – September 12, 1999] From The Unconscious To The Irreverent

 René Magritte ~ This is not an apple, 1964