Dali House

“The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child”,
Max Ernst, 1926.

I was in the mood for some Titian the other day and ended up looking at a website that celebrates spanking. This sort of thing happens all the time on the Internet (so I’m told). I was completely innocent. That’s just where my dual inquiry into Titian and Max Ernst took me.
I wanted to find out what the big deal was about Ernst’s “The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child”. The gist if the “scandal” was no surprise at all: “People” in 1926 simply freaked out at the idea of Mother Mary having to give Baby Jesus a smack. “People” still get postal about things like that today – you just don’t mess with the Holy Family.
Anyway, the salacious website I came across (not the spankers, another inane one specialising in art “controversies”) quoted a sane source, our frequent appraiser Nicolas Pioch, whose WebMuseum is obviously where I should have gone in the first place.
The actual title is “The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and the Painter”. Ernst, Breton and Eluard were, of course, all charter members of the French surrealist geekdom.
Pioch explains that Ernst’s oil painting is based on the classical motif of Venus punishing Amor, aka Cupid, a scene depicted dozens of times in olden times (see below), and often with allusions to sexual pleasure. The fact that Ernst renamed the usual subjects – as the famous mum and tot of Christianity – “tell us that this scene is a requital with the severe and orthodox Catholic education in his childhood”. I’m really not sure what that means, but Pioch explains no further. He calls the picture “disrespectful and somewhat blasphemous”, but that’s “quite typical for the dadaist movement”.

Max Ernst (1891-1976) was the German applecart-upsetter who invented several new art techniques to overcome his lack of formal training. One was frottage, which was basically a graphite rubbing of some gnarly surface that provided the imaginative spark for a new creation. He founded the Cologne chapter of the Dada Lonely Hearts Club Band, or something like that, in 1919, and when that movement ran out of things to ridicule three years later helped launch surrealism.
Dada, Pioch says, repeating the tired old blarney, was a coalition “of young artists who were appalled and disillusioned by the atrocities of World War I” and expressed their outrage by hanging urinals in galleries and pissing all over everything else. Nonsense was the preferred medium in a world gone trench-crazy.
Ernst, Pioch comments, is an uneven artist but his best works have a personal sense of mythology to them”.
Below, for “comparison” purposes, Venus gets set to give Cupid a whoopin’ in front of an eyewitness in “Venus, Amor and Satyr”, from the Renaissance school of Carracci.