ENIGMATIC PAUL AND GALA ELUARD

 This is our last Masterclass of Surreal Artists, and our last person to learn about is...

Paul Eluard and his wife, Gala. 

 I have to tell you that when I started this two months ago, I had no idea any of these artists were so strongly connected to one another. When I started writing the post about Max Ernst and found out about his relationship with Paul Eluard, I had a "AH Ha" moment...I realized that all their life stories had come around full circle...back to the the first post I wrote when I started this months ago. Picasso began the circle until it ended with Eluard. Their lives, their art, their loves...everything about them was connected! Surrealist Artists, all of them living, working, and creating art, finding one another and establishing this elite group of Surrealist Masters!! Picasso, Dali, Kahlo, Diego, Tanning, Magritte, Eluard. They reminded me of a group of artists...just as the Impressionists had done a hundred years before. It was time for a change. When society and culture begin to change, artist's reflect that change in their work no matte how controversial it seems.

 Who was Paul Eluard?

 Eluard is known as one of the founders of the Surrealist Movement. He did not paint but he was a famous poet. Being a member of Dada, he was a pillar of Surrealism by opening the way to politically express opinions through artistic action. He was also a member of the Communist Party. (As we will remember, so was Magritte Ernst, and Picasso). 

He was known worldwide as the "Poet of Freedom" because he used his poetry to speak out against war and political injustice. 

At the age of 16, he contracted tuberculosis and went to Clavadel Sanitorium near Davos. There he met a Russian girl by the name of Helena, Diakonova, who he nicknamed Gala. (Gala, as you will remember, was married to Salvador Dali.) 

Paul told her of his dream of becoming a poet, of his admiration for "poets dead of hunger, sizzling dreams".  They became inseparable. She believed in him and gave him the confidence and encouragement he needed to write. She became his muse and listened to his verses, often being completely honest with him and telling him which verses worked and which needed to be changed. She told him, "You will become a great poet!" Paul's parents were against the romance between Paul and Gala and forbid them to be together because they did not want Paul to pursue a career in writing poetry.

Gala

In 1914, Paul and Gala were declared well and heathy and they were immediately separated from each other.  Paul was sent back to Paris and Gala sent back to Moscow. Soon Europe was on the brink of WWI and so Paul was called for duty. In spite of his past health problems, he passed his health exam and was sent to the Auxiliary services. He began to suffer from migraines, bronchitis, cerebral anemia, and acute appendicitis and spent most of 1915 under treatment in a military hospital not far from home. His mother came often to visit him. He slowly began to try and change his mother's mind about Gala. He talked about Gala for hours trying to persuade his mother to drop her hostile feelings towards her by describing to his mother about Gala's faithfulness and love for him. His mother's hardened views slowly began to vanish, and she started playfully calling Gala the "Little Russian". Paul's father did not relent, and he refused to allow them to see one another. He forbid her to come to Paris.  

Gala refused to listen to anyone who told her to stay away from Paul and was convinced that her love for him gave her an unshakable faith that they would be reunited again someday. She wrote to Paul's mother to ask if she would aide her in trying to convince Paul's father to allow them to be together so she could come to Paris. She begged her stepfather to pay for her to go to school in Paris and so he finally relented and sent her to the Sorbonne to study.

Paul and Gala

In 1916, Paul was sent to one of the military hospitals where he would write at least 150 letters a day to families to tell them of the loss of their sons to the war. At night he dug the graves to bury them. Shaken by the war, he began to write poetry again and sent them to Gala for approval upon which she promptly send him a letter back encouraging him to continue in his endeavors to write and reminded him that a bright future waited for them after the war. 

 

In 1916, he married Gala in spite of his father's disapproval.  He announced to his family and his new wife, two days after the wedding, that he would be returning back to the war and on to the Front Line, in the trenches with the "real soldiers". Gala protested and threatened to go back to Moscow to become a nurse and station herself on the Russian front line. Paul for once resisted her and said, "Let me live a tougher life. One of less like a servant, less like a domestic." The conditions on the front line were horrible. They went for days without water or bread. No shelter. Daily exposure to the weather and the raw elements took its toll on his health. He became very ill and was taken to military hospital and treated for pleurisy. While Paul was convalescing at the hospital, Gala gave birth to a baby girl and named her Cecile. She did not want children and had no motherly instincts. She was known to have never paid Cecile much attention throughout her life.

In 1919, Paul wrote Gala, " The war is now coming to an end. We will now fight for happiness after having fought for life." He sent his poems he had been writing to various personalities of the literary world that took a stand against the war. He was referred to three young writers who had started a new journal called, "Literature". One of the young writer's name was Anton Breton, (the same Anton that became one of Frida Kalo's best friends and organized her famous art exhibition in Paris).

The young writers like what they read and quickly published two of his poems.  Wounded and scarred from the war, he joined up with these three poets and found solace in their friendship. They talked about living a life of bohemia after the war. They refused the bourgeoises middle class aspirations of money and comfort and rejected its moral codes. They hated politicians and the military or anyone with ambitions of power. They only wanted freedom and felt that they had already paid the price for it. Revolted and passionate, they were looking for a new idea, something very far detached from the current political programs.

When the war was finally over, Paul and Gala moved just outside of Paris and found the much-needed solace Paul yearned for in Dadaism. They had already met Max Ernst and Paul felt a kinship with him that he had never felt before with any of his other artist friends. He insisted that Max leave Cologne and come to live with them in Paris. Max used Paul's passport and fake identity papers and successfully crossed the border into Paris. Gala possessed a very strong sexual libido and soon after Max moved in with them, they entered into a ménage a trois relationship that eventually caused Paul much distress and anxiety.  He refused to challenge Max because of the respect he had for their close friendship, so he spent many nights trying to drink away the jealousy and heartache he felt toward Gala. Her well-being still mattered to him above all else, so he spent his nights in clubs drinking his anxiety away. He finally decided to leave Paris and went without telling anyone where he was going, not even Gala knew where he was. Then four months later, he wrote to her explaining why he left and that their threesome tortured him so much that he could not endure it anymore and had to leave. She bought a ticket and left Paris searching for him until he was found in Saigon. He agreed to come back home with her to Paris. 

One of Paul's books of poetry, called Repetitions. Max Ernst drew the illustration on the front of the book. 

Paul met Pablo Picasso during the time he was supporting the Moroccan Revolution and was inspired to publish more poetry as anti-war propaganda. He encouraged Picasso to join the French communist Party. They began a friendship that would last throughout the rest of their lives. They collaborated their work through many exhibitions, combining poetry and art together. Paul once said that "with Picasso the walls come down". 

Paul told Picasso, "You hold the flame between your fingers and paint like fire."

Picasso's painting of Eluard

Picasso said of Eluard that he was the only poet in the world that he could converse with an and exchange ideas with.

 In 1928, Paul had to put his political activism aside to deal with another bout of Tuberculosis. He returned to the Clavadel Sanatorium with Gala. It would be their last winter together. 

Dali and Gala

Gala met Salvador Dali and began an affair with him. She left Paul and married Dali. Dali said of Gala, "It is mostly with your blood that I paint my pictures." She remained with Dali the rest of her life. Dali's high sexual libido was equal to that of Gala's and they both had a series of affairs with other people throughout their entire married life. At that time, Gala was known to still have relations with Paul. 

Dali's painting of Gala

 Here is one of Eluard's poems that he wrote during his stay in Mexico during a new peace conference he attended.

The Phoenix

I am the last on your path

The last spring, the last snow

The last battle not to die

And here we are, low and higher,

than ever.

There is a bit of everything in our pyre

Pine cones, vine shoots, 

But also flowers stronger than water

mud and dew,

The Flame is beneath our feet,

 the flame crowns us

At our feet, insects, birds, men

Will fly away

Those who will fly land.

The sky is bright, the earth is dark

But the flame goes to the sky 

The sky has lost all its fires,

The flame remained on the earth

The flame is the cloud of the heart

And all of the branches of blood

It sings our tune

It dissipates the fog of our winter. Sorrow blazed in horror and nocturnal. 

The ashes bloomed in joy and beauty,

We always turn our backs to the sunset.

Everything has the color of dawn.

 I asked myself, after learning about all of these famous artists and their extraordinary lives...now...what should I do with what I have learned? How do I apply this to my life? How can this experience make me a better artist...a braver, more courageous artist...can I take risks they took and not concern myself with what others think of my artwork? Can I reform my ideas of creativity and art like the artists I have learned about? 

The answer was simple...yes!

This is what I know...each of these fine artists were completely human, flawed, some beyond redemption, most of them marked by great tragedy, great scandal, mental illness, a multitude of health problems, and yet....with all the problems they faced throughout their lives, they had a choice to make... a choice to give into their fate or to do nothing...a choice to give up as most people do in bad situations and settle for half a life or push beyond the peril and blindly allow their ambition and talent to guide them through the darkness and into the light of personal success and freedom! 

They had a choice! They could have wallowed in self-pity, become a burden to all that knew them, or make the decision to rise above the calamity and live their lives in another world of their own making.  A world of their own choice. They understood that through hard work, determination, and great imagination, they would have to believe enough in themselves and their talent to become what they knew they should be. In doing so, they became much more than most humans can imagine in one lifetime! They used their talent and their imagination to take them to places that did not exist before but certainly do now! Those odd, new worlds they created hang like majestic kings in every art museum on the planet. Every painting a testimony to what the sheer will of human spirit combined with the magic of imagination can accomplish!!! To combine hope and blind ambition with the obsession to never give up, even when situations occurred where it seemed they would never become the well-recognized artists that they are today,  They kept on dreaming and painting and dreaming some more until they became what we all know in our culture today as the Great Masters of Art...every one of them a Genius of their own making!!

Art has that way of becoming an obsession, a crutch, a soothing balm, a healing medicine, an addiction! No one said it better than Diego Riveria when Frida asked him if she had any talent, he replied, "You will paint because you have to. You will not want to do anything else." He also said, "I do not believe in God, but I believe in Picasso." 

We create because we have to...we have no choice! Those of us lucky enough to take advantage of the mystical powers of the Arts can find and create our own little world, just for ourselves, every day!  It is a world I am privileged to be a part of because I know so many wonderful artists who create for the same reasons I do and they never cease to amaze me and truly inspire me!  I have known for years that I cannot exist one day without creating something ...anything...everything!!!! 

But the real question here is this...are we utilizing the modern tools of today's technology to surpass the Masters of yesterday?  I wonder what Picasso, Dali, Pollack, Ernst, Tanning, Kahlo, would create if they had the modern technology of Photoshop? We have the ability right at our fingertips to create anything...there is no limit to what we can do through Photoshop and the AI Technology of today.  The question is... what would the artists of yesterday create with the same technology? We will never know but maybe that task has been left up to us to fulfill! All it takes is some imagination and the perseverance to make it happen! So, with what we have learned and what we have available to create art with, then we must incorporate the same philosophy of the Great Masters and combine that with our own personal style to create our own fabulous masterworks! 

Now is the time... we begin and dream and work and dream some more and what we create will tell the rest of the story!!! 

Your challenge this week is to interpret Paul Eluard's poem, "The Phoenix" in the Surrealist Style to use as a anti-war propaganda art piece. Use as many descriptive images as you can to bring his words to life that suggests political revolt to the horrors of war.

Here are my Phoenix Creations!

Digital art created from Pixabay, Wikipedia Photography of the Holocaust, and Miriam's Digital Kit Scraps

EVOLUTIONARY MAX ERNST

 A Study in the Life and Art of Max Ernst

Max Ernst was born April 2, 1891, in Bruhn, south of Cologne. His father, an amateur painter, inspired in him a penchant for defying authority. 

He was a self-taught artist, having studied at the University of Bonn.  He visited asylums regularly as he was fascinated by the artwork of mental patients. He was often found sketching the gardens at the Bruhl Castle or at home drawing his little sister. Coincidently, he was greatly influenced by the works of Picasso.  All of these first impressions of art contributed to his unique style of painting. It has been said that his style contained many juxtaposed grotesque elements alongside Cubism and Expressionist motifs. 

World War l interrupted his artistic endeavors as he was drafted and served on both Western and Eastern Fronts. The effect of the war on Ernst was devastating. He wrote in his Autobiography this..."On the first of August, 1914, Max Ernst died. He was resurrected on the 11th of November, 1918."

In 1918, he was demobilized and returned to Cologne, where he married Luise Straus and began a serious attempt to paint. He and several colleagues founded the Cologne Dada Group and organized the Dada Exhibitions. 

Now you are asking as you are reading...what does Dada mean? Dada was created by an elite group of artists who mainly painted in Surreal Form and is how Surrealism got its birth. They also created works of collage, photomontage and mixed media assemblage which during that time, this style of art was not considered to be "true art".  At the turn of the century, society had begun a change and had also thrust itself into a World War, leaving many people worried and fearful of the future. These Dada Groups sprang up in almost every country of the world, all united in being able to represent their opinions about this great change of their world in their artwork. Many Artists used their art as a protest against war, nationalism, and cultural conformity.  They adopted strategies of nonsense, chance and ridiculed "normal" aesthetic values.

Max met the poet, Paul Eluard, and his life took a radical turn. In 1922, he wanted to leave Cologne and move to Paris where he thought he could have a better chance of exhibiting his work and being recognized as a professional artist. He could not secure the necessary papers to leave Cologne, so he divorced his wife, Luise, and entered France illegally. he found his friend, Eluard and was immediately taken in and began living with them. Then the evitable happened, Ernst began a "menage a trois" with Eluard and his wife, Gala. Eluard knew people and became instrumental was instrumental in helping Ernst get his artwork noticed and his paintings began to sell. His career as a professional artist began to bloom and grow, however, his private life was not so successful as the tryst between the three of them did not last very long. Eluard began to resist the notion of his wife having intimate relations with his best friend. The affair ended and Eluard would remain friends with Ernst for the rest of his life. 

In1926, Ernst invented two Graphic art techniques, one is called Fottage, which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images and the other one is called, Grottage, which is scraped paint across a canvas to reveal the placed objects beneath it.  His paintings, Forest and Dove and Black Forest are examples of these techniques.

He developed a fascination with birds which he suggested was an earlier extension of himself and the confusion of birds and humans. When he was very young, he woke up one night and found that his pet bird had died only to be told by his father, minutes later, that his sister was born.

He published a collage novel, an artist's book entitled, Une Semaine De Bonte, A Week of Kindness. He created 182 collage illustration pages using cut up illustrations and images from Victorian Magazines, Encyclopedias and Novels. The 7-volume book was created in three short weeks. He arranged the images to present a dark, surreal world. He constructed his characters with heads of animals connected to human bodies. The book was received well, widely read, and known for its strange, graphic images and subject manner.

When WWII broke out, Ernst being of German descent, was considered in Paris to be a "undesirable foreigner". He was arrested and sent to jail. Thanks to his friend, Eluard and other artists, he was released and stayed in Paris until the city was occupied by the Nazi's and then he was arrested again by the Gestapo. He managed to escape to América with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. She met Ernst in Paris and had his works exhibited in the Guggenheim Art Museum in London so she was more than willing to help him! Peggy's motives, sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes not as her actions were nothing but ulterior motives when it came to men who were also famous artists! She was very rich, lived off of her trust fund, and owned two art museums that needed to be filled with the master works of the new Surreal artists! After Max came to America, he and Peggy were married, and coincidently, she began exhibiting his artwork in her New York Art Museum as well. 

His marriage with Peggy did not last, as we all well know, when on that fateful day when Dorothea Tanning stopped by his studio and they played a game of friendly chess and fell in-love. He divorced Peggy and married Dorothea, happy with his artist wife. They moved to a remote part of Sedona, Arizona, where he built a small cottage for them to live and paint together. Even though Sedona was populated by immigrants and farmers, their popularity grew and their influence and artwork inspired many people. They started an American Colony of artists and intellectuals and shared their ideas and techniques with anyone interested in becoming an artist or a writer. They happily resided there for 7 years until France began to call out to them to return. They moved back to Paris and continued to paint and exhibit their work. In 1954, Ernst was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting, in Venice, Biennale. 

The Elephant

Max Ernst died 1972 and is buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Here is my Ernst Creations:

Digital art created from Pixabay, Itkupilli's Digital Kit Abandoned Buildings, Friday Designs Digital Kit Old Vintage Portraits, Miriam's Scraps Digital Kit, and DreamFusionPrint Digital Kit DayDream Escapes

DARING DOROTHEA TANNING

Exploring the Art of Dorothea Tanning

 "Am I a surrealist? Must we artists bow our heads and accept a label without which we do not exist? The ideas of surrealism are still very much with me. But I have no label except artist."

Dorothea was born in 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois. She was a self-taught artist and only briefly studied painting in Chicago while haunting the Art Institute where she learned what painting was.  She moved to New York City in 1941 and met the most important influence in her life, the artist and painter Max Ernst. He came to visit her studio to look at one of her paintings but stayed to play a game of chess. They had 34 happy years together. Early in their relationship they decide to move out of the United States and lived in France, where she continued to paint her enigmatic versions of life: on the inside looking out. 

 Dorothea found herself facing a solitary future when Max died on April 1, 1976. 

She was quoted as having said after Max's death, " I was a loner, am a loner, good Lord, it is the only way I can imagine working. When I hooked up with Max, he was clearly the only person I needed, and I can assure you, we never, never talked about art. Never."

 Soon her paint tubes, brushes, and canvases began calling out to her, telling her to go back home to the United States where she remained for the rest of her life.

Dorothea's early paintings were precisely figurative renderings of dream-like situations. In her youth, Dorothea read many gothic, romantic novels in her hometown of Galesburg. These fantastical stories filled with imagery of the imaginary, heavily influenced her style and subject matter for years to come.  Like most Surrealist painters, she was meticulous in her attention to details, building layers of paint with carefully muted brushstrokes.  She painted depictions of unreal scenes, some of which combined erotic subjects with enigmatic symbols and desolate space. While in France, her work radically changed as her paintings took on a less erotic approach and her images became increasingly fragmented and pragmatic.

She explains her work with this quote, " Around 1955, my canvases literally splintered...I broke the mirror, you might say."

Her artwork has been exhibited in numerous one-person shows in France, Sweden, and London as well as the United States. In 1992,  The New York Library had a showing of her prints and in 2000, The Philadelphia Art Museum held an exhibition of her work. 

  After returning to the United States, Dorothea found her voice and began writing poetry and short stories, which were widely published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review.

In an interview for Salon.com and asked, "So what have you tried to communicate as an artist?

She replied, "I'd be satisfied in suggesting that there is more than meets the eye."

In 1997, The Dorothea Tanning Foundation was established with the purpose of preserving the artist's legacy while fostering a broader, public understanding of the artist's art, writing, and poetry. They manage and distribute the art and asset of Dorothea for philanthropic purposes.

"The diversity pf experience and attitude on the part of women artists active in Surrealism has proved both an obstacle and a challenge. In the end, I came to view such diversity as a tribute to these women, an attribution to their strength and a mark of their commitment to a form of creative expression in which personal reality dominates".

 Dorethea died in her home in New York City on January 31, 2012. She was 101 years old. She had just published her second collection of poems called, "Coming To That".

ALL HALLOWS EVE

by Dorothe Tanning

Be perfect, make it otherwise. 

Yesterday is torn in shreds.

Lightnings thousand sulfur eyes

Rip apart the breathing beds.

Her bones crack and pulverize.

Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Countless overwrought housewives,

Minds unraveling like threads,

Try lipstick shades to tranquilize

Fears of age and general dreads.

Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,

Don't take faucets for fountainheads.

Drink tasty antidotes.  Otherwise

You and the werewolf: Newlyweds.

Now it is your turn to immerse yourself in the style of Dorothea Tanning and create your own Surrealist art piece! This is the first artist I have showcased that did not have a tragic life circumstance that influenced her artistic style!! Her life is as described as..."She breathed words as well as air and looked at her paintings in amazement"!

Here is my Dorothea Tanning Creations:

Digital art created from Gecko Galz Free Images and DreamPrint Fusion Digital Kit Daydream Escapes