Mr H and the mighty Max
A Welsh-born “Mr H” had an interesting blog called Giornale Nuovo that he’s abandoned now, but five years’ worth of entries remain in place — so far at least. There are two great pages on Max Ernst’s 1929 collage-laden novel “The Hundred-Headless Woman”, which includes both the artwork and quotations from a monograph about the proto-surrealist that came out in 1977.
The images shown here — “Spiritual Repose” above and “The Hundred-Headless Woman Loosens Her Majestic Sleeve” on the left — are on this page, along with a visit from Ernst’s pet chicken Loplop and an amusing anecdote.
Ernst recalls being approached by a fellow artist who asked what he was up to. Ernst said he was working on collages, which in French can be understood as “gluing”, from the word colle, meaning “glue”.
“Then he whispered in my ear: ‘And what sort of glue do you use?’
“If it is the plumes that make the plumage,” Ernst explains to his reader, “it is not la colle that makes the le collage.”
Surrealist humour.
Or, if you don’t understand it at all, dadaist humour.
This all segues nicely into a biographical piece coming up in a few days based on “A Reunion of Friends”, Ernst’s group portrait of the early surrealists.
There must have been plenty of laughs (and vacant looks) at the first surrealist meetings in Paris, amid rounds of automatic writing and exquisite corpse. Ernst, disliking the aroma of his native Cologne, was persuaded to come to the big city and join the gang, which he did in 1922, promptly committing the whole group to canvas in one fell swoop.
