Max Ernst (French, born Germany. 1891–1976) Max Ernst. Max Ernst. The Hat Makes the Man. (1920) Gallery Text: Dada June 18–September 11, 2006 Ernst's appreciation for visual and linguistic puns was likely fostered by Freud’s book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Here, Ernst cut, pasted, and stacked photographs of men’s hats clipped from a sales catalogue to make phallic towers. This visual pun relates to Freud's identification of the hat—the requisite accessory of the bourgeois man—as a common symbol representing repressed desire, adding new meaning to the cliché inscribed on the work, "C'est le chapeau qui fait l'homme" ("The hat makes the man").
Publication Excerpt: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 88 Pictures of ordinary hats cut out of a catalogue are stacked one atop the other in constructions that resemble both organic, plantlike forms and anthropomorphic phalluses. "One rainy day in 1919," Ernst wrote, "my excited gaze was provoked by the pages of a printed catalogue. Your Paintings - Max Ernst.
The Dali Museum (Salvador Dali Museum, St Petersburg, Florida USA) Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Salvador Dalí frequently described his paintings as “hand painted dream photographs.” He based this seaside landscape on the cliffs in his home region of Catalonia, Spain. The ants and melting clocks are recognizable images that Dalí placed in an unfamiliar context or rendered in an unfamiliar way. The large central creature comprised of a deformed nose and eye was drawn from Dalí’s imagination, although it has frequently been interpreted as a . Its long eyelashes seem insect-like; what may or may not be a tongue oozes from its nose like a fat snail from its shell.
Time is the theme here, from the melting watches to the decay implied by the swarming ants. Mastering what he called “the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling,” Dalí painted this work with “the most imperialist fury of precision,” but only, he said, “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” The part of the mind below the level of conscious perception. Madness to His Method? Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904–1989)
André Breton (French, 1896–1966) (b Tinchebray, 19 Feb 1896; d Paris, 28 Sept 1966). French writer. While still an adolescent he came under the influence of Paul Valéry and Gustave Moreau, who for a long period were to influence his perception of beauty. From that time on, his poetic creation interrelated with his reflections on art, which like Gide’s were conditioned by a moral code. He considered that it is not possible to write for a living, but only from interior necessity; in the same way, painting must always derive from an irrepressible need for self-expression.
Breton’s family were of modest means. By this time Breton’s interest in Surrealism had led him to investigate automatic writing and the importance accorded to the subconscious by Freud; he had already collaborated with Soupault on Les Champs magnétiques which appeared in Littérature in 1919. Henri Béhar From Grove Art Online © 2009 Oxford University Press top.