Distinguishing features: There's an unsettling splendour to this painting. In Beyond Painting, Ernst mocks abstract art. The opulent figurative excess of this vision could scarcely be further from the purity advocated by modernists from Le Corbusier to Judd. It's a troubling, glorious thing, this picture. Seeing it in a gallery is like encountering a screaming exotic bird in a cathedral.
It is both beautiful and horrible. The mantle, with its crushed velvet feathery texture, pours off the canvas. The body arcing forward with her long leg walking, small breasts, prominent belly, appears to have a monster's face. Of the bride's real face all we see is an eye peering out of a hole. Above this, staring straight at us, are the eyes of an owl, impenetrable, knowing.
The green demonic bird-man serving his new bird-queen holds a broken spear. Her sexual majesty daunts him, as it defeats the gross four-breasted creature weeping on the right. The bride is attended by an enraptured nude whose headdress is a burst of decalcomania, the technique invented by the surrealist Oscar Dominguez that spreads paint in a dappled organic way. Also decalcomanic is the painting of the same subject that hangs on the wall.
As well as an erotic fantasy, this is a meditation on creativity. The painting within the painting is a clue. Ernst opened himself to images, he claimed, just as Leonardo da Vinci advised artists to do, by staring at a stain. You will see in the stain, said Leonardo as quoted by Ernst, "human heads, various animals, a battle... "
In the arbitrary red form that emerged in his small decalcomanic image, Ernst saw the bride being robed; in the completed, large painting this is fleshed out as a complex history. It is Leonardo's method exactly."
Jonathan Jones
The Guardian, Saturday 6 December 2003
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