A weekly Guide column in which we dissect the influences and interpretations of a work of art
Go your own way …
Max Ernst was surrealism’s true great, a restless inventor pushing both medium (from collage to frottage, drip-painting to carved stone) and ideas. His work was driven by the concerns of the time, the trauma of war, fascism’s rise or sexual repression, and personal obsessions.
Into the woods …
This included the woods near his childhood home in Cologne: a focus for darker boyhood musings and a staple within 19th-century German Romanticism, where forests became a stand-in for wild imagination. He made numerous tense, dense forest paintings in the 1920s and 30s, as the fallout from the first world war was felt and Hitler was gaining ground.
Welcome to the jungle …
The Joy of Life hails from a series of “jungle paintings” made later in this era, and it takes a different approach to the subject. At first it looks like an entirely fantastical landscape. Camouflaged among the swollen green fronds are alien beasts with pointed teeth, bug eyes and insectoid bodies. In the upper-right corner a wolf with the smooth skin of a man crouches at a naked woman’s feet. Even the snaking plant stems look like a sticky carnivorous trap.
A bug’s life …
Yet this barbarous jungle’s origins are no more exotic than what you find in your back garden: a patch of ordinary undergrowth put under the microscope of Ernst’s imagination. Its horror is rooted in everyday life. He once described the creepy-crawly monsters as female dragonflies devouring their lovers. Needless to say, the title is a scorching irony.
In Beyond Realism: Dada and Surrealism, Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh
