Max Ernst’s Gala Eluard: Oil on canvas (1924)
Max Ernst was an artist born in Bruhl, Germany in 1891 to a strict Catholic family. He was introduced to painting at an early age by his deaf father, who was a teacher and a disciplinarian, training Max and his siblings to be God-fearing children alongside his stern wife. Ernst would attend University of Bonn to study philosophy and later drop out to pursue a career in the arts, driven by his interest in the craft of painting. Early on in his career, he was forced to join the German army in the artillery division during World War I. Here he was exposed to traumatic events that would cause his highly critical view of western culture, which would be the root in his vision of the modern world as irrational.
This work is painted by Max Ernst based on a photograph of the eyes of a lady named Gala Eluard, who was lover to three members of the Surrealist movement, her two husbands Paul Eluard and Salvador Dali and Ernst. The painting shows what is inside the head of Gala Eluard, the mysterious and unknown makings of the unconscious mind.
What first drew me to this painting were the three circle-shaped figures that supposedly depict the workings of Eluard’s thoughts. To me, it looked like it could be those strange specks floating about in your field of vision called floaters. As I thought more about it, it seemed like he painted those bizarre figures to represent random thoughts floating away in what seems to be infinite space. If you look at the design of the circles, they are all different from each other. I believe Ernst wanted the focus of the painting not to be on the eyes of Eluard, but the unfurling of her head, the revelation of all the irrational thoughts that filled her subconscious mind.
During the modernism movement, after the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), artists began to explore dreams and the subconscious mind. Ernst shows the influence of this movement on his work here, painting abstract, weird figures to bring attention to Eluard’s mind. It doesn’t seem to resonate with any certain emotion, and Ernst does not apply any constancy to it. Eluard also does not seem to emit any emotion in her eyes, or facial expressions that we can see. Her eyes look blank and ordinary, which makes me wonder, why use Eluard as the subject of this painting? Is it because she had taken upon three lovers, which Ernst would have thought would add depth and complexity? When they say she was lover to those three men, were they all at the same time, or at different times?
-Amr
Amr,
I don’t know the details of Eluard’s romantic entanglements, but I agree that this is an intriguing work. I’m glad that you connected it to Freud; clearly the painting is exploring the question of just what lies under the surface in the subject’s subconscious or unconscious mind. As you’ve indicated, Ernst is a Surrealist, as we see in this work’s treatment of a dreamlike scene that clearly emerges from the imagination of the artist. Surrealism is, of course, a sub-category of Modernism. Like most Modernist works, this one resists easy understanding.
JS