SUPER(IM)POSITION
”All good ideas arrive by chance. ”
- Max Ernst
https://www.max-ernst.com
‘Superposition’ is a term used in quantum theory to describe how objects can simultaneously exist in multiple states that are individually indistinguishable until they are measured.
In mathematical terms, superposition can be thought of as an equation that has more than one solution. When we solve x2 = 4, x can either be 2 or –2. Both answers are correct. Superposition wave functions will be more complicated to solve, but they can be approached with the same mindset.
In art we find related definitions:
Conceptual Duality:
The concept of superposition is also used to express ideas of duality, where opposing states or concepts exist simultaneously on the canvas. Artists can achieve this by creating images in different coordinate systems that can be viewed at once.
Quantum Superposition in Art:
Inspired by quantum mechanics, where a particle exists in multiple states at once, some contemporary artists explore this idea through interactive works. These pieces might present multiple possibilities until a measurement (such as the viewer looking through a device) causes a single state to be observed. It was Ernst's memories of the war and his childhood that helps him create absurd, yet interesting scenes in his artworks. Soon, he took his passion for the arts seriously when he returned to Germany after the war. With Jean Arp, a poet and artist, Ernst formed a group for artists in Cologne. He also developed a close relationship with fellow artists in Paris who propagated Avant-Garde artworks.
Superimposition in the work of Max Ernst
In 1919, Ernst started creating some of his first collages, where he made use of various materials including illustrated catalogs and some manuals that produced a somewhat futuristic image. His unique masterpieces allowed Ernst to create his very own world of dreams and fantasy, which eventually helped heal his personal issues and trauma. In addition to painting and creating collages, Ernst also edited some journals. He also made a few sculptures that were rather queer in appearance.
From the TATE MODERN website:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/frottage
FROTTAGE
The technique was developed by Max Ernst in drawings made from 1925. Frottage is the French word for rubbing. Ernst was inspired by an ancient wooden floor where the grain of the planks had been accentuated by many years of scrubbing. The patterns of the graining suggested strange images to him. From 1925 he captured these by laying sheets of paper on the floor and then rubbing over them with a soft pencil. The results suggest mysterious forests peopled with bird-like creatures and Ernst published a collection of these drawings in 1926 titled Histoire Naturelle (natural history).
He went on to use a wide range of textured surfaces and quickly adapted the technique to oil painting, calling it grattage (scraping). In grattage the canvas is prepared with a layer or more of paint then laid over the textured object which is then scraped over. In Ernst’s Forest and Dove the trees appear to have been created by scraping over the backbone of a fish.
Superimposition in art involves layering multiple images, elements, or media to create a composite work, often resulting in complex, visually rich compositions that convey new meanings or challenge perceptions. This technique spans various art forms and movements, blending realities, concepts, or aesthetics to evoke emotion, narrative, or abstraction. Below, I explore superimposition in art, its techniques, historical context, notable artists, and contemporary applications.
From the Moderna Museet, Compiled by Barbara Berger.
https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/max-ernst/collage-frottage-grattage/
FROTTAGE
Max Ernst started using the frottage technique in his work in 1925. As some might still recall from their childhood days, this technique involves laying a piece of paper on a structured surface and making a rubbing of its texture with a pencil.
By his own admission, Max Ernst discovered this technique for himself on the rainy afternoon of August 10, 1925, when he observed a washed-out wooden floor in a hotel at Pornic on the French Atlantic coast. The floor’s structure inspired him to place a piece of paper on the floorboards and then transfer its textures to the sheet with graphite.
Aside from wood boards, he also utilized textures from leaves, bark, thread, straw, textiles, netting, and dried paint as the starting point of his frottages. He regularly shifted the paper while rubbing: “When I intensely stared at the drawing won in this manner, at the ‘dark spots, and others of a delicate, light, semi-darkness,’ I was by the sudden augmentation of my visionary facilities with contrasting and superimposed pictures.”
Inspired by the resulting structures, associations were produced that the artist reshaped into new pictorial worlds. In 1925 he put together a selection of frottages for the portfolio Histoire naturelle. The thirty-four prints in the series were reproduced here as lithographs in order to further underscore the impression of their pictorial reality compared to the original frottages.
GRATTAGE
In 1927, Max Ernst developed the grattage as an application of the frottage technique in painting. Richly textured, relief-like materials such as wood, wire mesh, pieces of broken glass, and cord were placed under a canvas primed with numerous layers of paint. The individual layers of paint were scraped from the canvas pressed onto the textured object using a palette knife or spatula.
The textures pressed themselves through the still-wet paint with the result that the characteristic features of the underlying objects were lost. Subsequent reworking with paintbrushes caused a further transformation of the structures achieved in this manner. They could become forests, water cabbages, birds, sun crosses, and petrified cities.
In his essay “What is Surrealism?” (1934), Max Ernst said of such transformations: “The joy in every successful metamorphosis conforms . . . with the intellect’s age-old energetic need to liberate itself from the deceptive and boring paradise of fixed memories and to investigate a new, incomparably expansive areas of experience, in which the boundaries between the so-called inner world and the outer world become increasingly blurred and will probably one day disappear entirely.”
Inner and outer world, the subconscious, fantasy and reality are linked together in Max Ernst’s pictorial worlds. This is a characteristic feature of his entire oeuvre.
