Dans les rues d’Athènes

Material

Bronze; height: 96.5 cm

Dating

1960

About the artwork

edition 4/5

Like many other great painters, Max Ernst was fascinated by sculpture, but he began to engage in it late. Ernst’s friendship with Hans Arp, with whom he had initiated the Dadaist movement in Cologne in 1919, was one of the main reasons for his fascination. After he had started to reflect on sculpture in 1929, he got the chance to spend time with Alberto Giacometti in Maloja in 1935, an experience which intensified and inspired Ernst’s own work in this artistic field. Together the two artists moved eroded granite blocks, which they had found in river beds, to Giacometti’s yard and Ernst used them for his first attempts at sculpture. He created flat reliefs of flowers, birds and figures, yet he would not pursue their form later on.
Ernst remained the only surrealist sculptor for a long time – Giacometti returned to the figurative representations and Arp embraced abstraction and the ideas of Brancusi regardless of his involvement in Dadaism. Ernst emigrated to the United States in 1941, after his oeuvre had been declared as ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazi and his several internments as ‘enemy alien’ during his time in Paris.
In the United States, Ernst was impressed by the masks of the Hopi Indians, a captivation which reflected itself in a formidable production of sculptures. He developed a very individual style characterised by forms which were inspired by elements of his painting. By moulding garden pottery, plates or shells and casting finds, Ernst created components, which could be integrated and combined freely. In his art work “Dans les rues d’Athène” he combined a flat basic plate, a high sized rectangular body surface, a horizontal rectangular head plate and two small figures in order to emphasize the realisation of essence and represent the transition from the planar image to the spatial sculpture.
Like many other surrealist artists, Max Ernst obtained his artistic ideas from his dreams and fantasies and from the unconscious. His art aimed at blurring the boundaries between reality and the dreamworld. Ernst created grotesque and ironic images of reality, filled with hybrid creatures that seemed to have emerged from a children fantasies. Ernst explained that “Sculpture is created in an embracement, like love. Every time I turn to sculpture I always feel like being on holiday […]. When I do sculptural work I relax. It gives me the same sense of pleasure like when I was a child and built castles in the sand. In case I reach an impasse in painting, which happens time and again, sculpture offers an exit, because sculpture is much more playful than painting”. This mirrors Dadaism’s credo, which Ernst was a follower of in his early and then later career – to turn to the childlike, original and to the beginnings of culture. Dadaism’s aim had been to establish the playful and farcical, the random and arbitrary in art.

About the artist

The French painter, graphic designer and sculptor of German origin was one of the most prominent representatives of the Cologne Dadaism and belonged to the initiators and most versatile members of the Surrealist movement. His paintings and collages show an extraordinary and creative use of image techniques. Beyond Surrealism, Max Ernst has influenced many future art movements since. The all-over-structures used in action painting, for example by Jackson Pollock, would be barely imaginable without his contribution.
Max Ernst studied philosophy, psychology and art history at the University of Bonn. The study of psychology introduced him to Sigmund Freud’s work and awakened his interest in the art of psychiatric patients. Eventually in 1912 and encouraged by his friend August Macke, the German Expressionist, he decided to become a self-educated painter. The lack of an artistic education helped him to revolutionise the pictorial language of the 20th century. He turned against established conventions and followed an artistic path, which focused on the subconscious and its representation.