{"id":5182,"date":"2009-05-17T02:24:17","date_gmt":"2009-05-17T01:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=5182"},"modified":"2020-01-10T00:34:25","modified_gmt":"2020-01-10T00:34:25","slug":"max-the-birdman-ernst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2009\/05\/17\/max-the-birdman-ernst\/","title":{"rendered":"Max (The Birdman) Ernst"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"birdman.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Max (The Birdman) Ernst (1967).<\/em><\/p>\n

Psychedelia is never far away here at { feuilleton }. Yesterday’s film poster reminded me of this work from the psychedelic era by Martin Sharp, an Australian artist who moved to London and became closely-associated with Oz<\/em> magazine and London’s other leading psych poster designers, Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, aka Hapshash & the Coloured Coat<\/a>. Sharp’s homage to the great Max was one of a number of his designs produced on metallic foil sheets, the reflective nature of which often presents difficulties for reproduction in other media.<\/p>\n

\"performance.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Performance (1970).<\/em><\/p>\n

I wonder how many people who admired Sharp’s poster puzzled over the meaning of the image, one of twenty-eight similar collages from the fourth chapter of Ernst’s 1934 “collage novel” Une Semaine de Bont\u00e9<\/em><\/a>. Chapter four\u2014Wednesday; Blood\u2014concerns the criminal travails of a series of bird-headed individuals (or possibly the same individual in different guises) which end in abduction, possible rape\/murder, and suicide. This picture of Ernst’s has always struck me as a very obvious rape metaphor with the woman stretched over the birdman’s lap and the knife piercing her foot. Ernst’s dark imagination\u2014informed by Freudian concerns, as were most of his fellow Surrealists\u2014separates the picture from the more lightweight Art Nouveau\/Beardsleyesque stylings of the other London artists. Martin Sharp was producing collages of his own during this period so it’s easy to see why he was attracted to Ernst. And the popularity of his poster may explain why the birdman turns up in a painted version in Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance<\/em><\/a>, seen when Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) goes to pick mushrooms in the greenhouse. Ernst’s sinister birdman suits Performance<\/em> very well, a token of the film’s atmosphere of weirdness and violence. (“A heavy evil film, don’t see it on acid” warned underground newspaper International Times<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

\"sharp_dylan.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Bob Dylan: Blowing in the Mind (1967).<\/em><\/p>\n

And to compound the connections a little more, Sharp’s famous Bob Dylan collage portrait (another foil sheet production) also turns up in Performance<\/em> as part of the collage-covered screen in one of Turner’s rooms. Unlike his fellow Hapshash artists, Sharp’s work is under-documented on the web beyond pages such as this one<\/a>. The same goes for Ernst’s collage novel but then the best way to experience that is to buy the Dover book edition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The Robing of The Birds<\/a>
\n\u2022 Gandharva by Beaver & Krause<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Look presents Nigel Waymouth<\/a>
\n\u2022 The New Love Poetry<\/a>
\n\u2022 Judex, from Feuillade to Franju<\/a>
\n\u2022 Further back and faster<\/a>
\n\u2022 Quite a performance<\/a>
\n\u2022 Borges in Performance<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Max (The Birdman) Ernst (1967). Psychedelia is never far away here at { feuilleton }. Yesterday’s film poster reminded me of this work from the psychedelic era by Martin Sharp, an Australian artist who moved to London and became closely-associated with Oz magazine and London’s other leading psych poster designers, Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, … Continue reading “Max (The Birdman) Ernst”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,1029,4,7,3,17,18],"tags":[419,370,418,371,128,417,112,421,306,420],"class_list":["post-5182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-collage","category-design","category-film","category-music","category-psychedelia","category-surrealism","tag-anita-pallenberg","tag-beaver-krause","tag-bob-dylan","tag-donald-cammell","tag-judex","tag-martin-sharp","tag-max-ernst","tag-michael-english","tag-nicolas-roeg","tag-nigel-waymouth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-1lA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}