Concept Art, Decalcomania

Max Ernst

Decalcomania

German-born Max Ersnt was an innovative artist who mined his unconcious for dreamlike imagery through a range of techniques. He was a solider in World War  l and it emerged he was deeply traumatised and critical of western culture. This all fed directly into his artwork. Ernst artistic vision, along with humour, he acme a pioneer of both the Dada and Surrealist movement. A man of his time, Ernst understood the urgency in making sense of the modern world, not through old strategies of truth-seeking, but through an embrace of the irrational, chaotic, unknowable, and otherworldly—he was particularly drawn to the alternative reality offered by dreams. 

The Dada movement, the Cologne chapter of which Ernst had founded, explored performance, poetry, innovative exhibition design, and collage as a way to catalyze collision and reconfigure the world as it stood.

His most fascinating canvases were produced in the late 1930s to the early 1940s using his technique decalcomania. 

Figure 1 - Epiphany, Max Ernst 1940l

Ernst’s best-known work to employ this technique is Europe after the Rain (1940-42), an eerie reflection on World War II as the Nazis ravaged the continent. Ernst was personally swept up in the terror; his work had been condemned by the Nazis as degenerate, and he was interned in a prison camp.

Figure 2 - Europe after the Rain, 1940-42

'Just like collage and frottage, it (decalcomania) was simply a perfected form of a well-known children’s game, the ‘blotting’ game. Here the method was to pour diluted black gouache on to a sheet of white paper of a certain texture, covering this with another sheet and then execising uneven pressure with the hands, in order to spread the gouache. The result, always unpredictable, is a highly contrasted composition in black, grey and white, in which one can discover landscapes, profiles or heads, composite animals, (or) unknown plant life. […]Max Ernst conceived the idea of trying the experiment directly on a canvas, with oil paint reduced to a suitably fluid state. What began as a mere game suddenly seemed to him to offer rich possibilities…' - Patrick Waldberg.

Using this technique I took a piece of book covering film as it was a shiny surface and would not absorb the paint. From here I then laid down three colours of paint and on top laid another sheet on book covering film and pressed the paint so that it would move across the paper. Here are the various results that I produced.

Figure 3 - Decalcomania

Figure 4 - Decalcomania

Figure 5 - Decalcomania

I took figure 4 as my idea and drew over it. I felt it gave me a lot to work with. While didn't recreate a scene with the, the usual tones and textures gave a new depth to creating something like a character. I enjoyed the technique process and will always enjoy a hand made feel to art work. By working black pen over the top of the image meant the textures and compositional factors weren't lost and the image overall works well.

Image refernce

- Figure 1 - Giornale Nuovo: Decalcomania (2004)

- Figure 2 - Backus, J. (2014) Beyond painting: The experimental techniques of Max Ernst.

Bibliography

- Backus, J. (2014) Beyond painting: The experimental techniques of Max Ernst. Available at: https://www.artsy.net/article/jessica-beyond-painting-the-experimental-techniques-of-max (Accessed: 8 December 2016).

- Ernst, M. (2016) Max Ernst biography, art, and analysis of works. Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-ernst-max.htm (Accessed: 8 December 2016).

- Giornale Nuovo: Decalcomania (2004) Available at: http://www.spamula.net/blog/2004/02/decalcomania.html (Accessed: 8 December 2016).