I found this only today: the metropolitan museum of art’s max ernst retrospective which began in April and ends July 10, this sunday. Ah well, perhaps some reader of this in New York City will have nothing else to do tomorrow. I myself was in town when the show started, but was overscheduled and then some.
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In any case, ernst is one of my favorite artists; he brings a certain specificity to his hallucinations, and they are always intensely beautiful as well as menacing. there’s the sex-boiling-over of the robing of the bride, the carnival sideshow of celebes, the soap-opera voyeurism of the blessed virgin chastises the infant jesus before three witnesses: a.b., p.e. and the artist, the shamanic, demonic, alien rage of the fireside angel, the many-worlds vision of vox angelica. Ernst always seemed to say something witty with his brush, as in the “i’m much weirder than anything i paint” implication of surrealism and painting. the best reason to make it to the shows (regardless of who the artist is?) with the exception of those artists who only left a tiny number of works, most shows have worthwhile works that never made it into the books you’ve read. of those on the images page, there are at least three paintings i never saw before, and i like them just as much as the famous ones.