Hi everyone,
As I visited the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice last week, I got inspired by a couple of paintings I saw in the collection. The Guggenheim museum is a collection of modern art which was acquired mostly between 1938 and 1946. Peggy Guggenheim discovered the talent of many great artists, including for example Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro and Wassily Kandinsky. In this blogpost I'll try to dive a bit deeper into a selection of paintings that caught my eye. Today we'll be taking a deeper look into a painting of German surrealist and Peggy's later husband, Max Ernst.
| Artist | Max Ernst |
|---|---|
| Title | Zoomorphic Couple |
| Artwork type | Painting |
| Year | 1933 |
| Movement | Surrealism / Dadaïsm |
First of all I want to clarify that I am by no means a professional art-critic of some sorts. I purely enjoy art because of the emotional value. I love it when something catches my eye and lets me think about the deeper reasoning behind the artwork. I love it when I get fascinated by something I don't seem to understand or that I can't analyse. "Zoomorphic Couple" is a painting that checks these boxes for me. It's a dark, desolate, gray picture that I immediately linked to feelings of fear and despair. Out of the darkness two figures are formed. On the left you can recognize a person-like figure who's caressing a bird. The painting, to me, resembles a nightmare. Dark and incomprehensible.
On the official site of the Guggenheim museum, we find following explanation:
The image of the bird, which recurs frequently in Ernst’s work from 1925, had become an almost obsessive preoccupation by 1930. In the present painting one can discern a vaguely birdlike form and a caressing humanoid arising from the primordial material that gives them their substance. It has been suggested that the atavistic imagery in Ernst’s work of this period alludes to the failure of European civilization in the face of the rising National Socialist threat in Germany.¹
So through this dark, scary painting Max Ernst seemingly wanted to voice his fear and resistance against the upcoming Nationalistic parties in his country. When the Nazi's took control over Germany, Ernst had to flee out of the country and moved to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. There he helped the development of abstract expressionism in America with other artists - like Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall - who also fled from the war. Ernst would stay in America until his death at the age of 85.
I hope you liked this article.
Thanks for reading.
