Taking a break from drawing textures objects (peanuts! – I tried peanuts, this is difficult!), I did some research on Max Ernst. The Wikipedia page gives a nice overview, as expected. Max Ernst (1891-1976) was born in Germany, but later lived in the United States and France. He was married several times.
A Google image search on his name shows very surrealistic paintings which remind me of René Magritte. I must admit that I’m not a friend of surrealism. I continued the image search with “Max Ernst frottage” as key words, and I liked the images which came up better than the surrealist paintings.
The Tate Gallery Glossary Page on frottage shows two works illustrating grattage (scraping), the other technique invented by Max Ernst: ‘Forest and Dove’ (1927) and ‘The entire City’ (1934). I find these two very subtle and interesting in their use of colour and structures. According to the Glossary, Ernst and others using these techniques appreciated the element of chance which frottage and grattage introduced to their work.
The glossary mentions a collection of frottage drawings by Max Ernst published 1926 under the title ‘Histoire Naturelle’ (natural history). This is a collection of thirty-four works. Many of these can be seen on the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMa) website. I’ve selected two which I found nice. But overall, while I like the techniques of frottage and grattage, I’m not really into surrealism and am not overly fond of the way Max Ernst used frottage.
I’m nevertheless surprised that frottage counts as a surrealist drawing technique. I think this would be a too narrow perception of the possibilities of this technique. Frottage has not been invented out of nowhere, as points out the website ‘Morning Earth’, but is based on the well known practice of ‘rubbing’, which has been used for centuries. For example, the base technique is used in traditional Chinese stone rubbings, also called ‘ink-squeezes’. The website also present a nice and very effective example of a rubbing with a grass twig.
The Morning Earth authors see the difference between rubbing and frottage mainly in its aims: While the aim of rubbing is taking of an accurate image in the sense of a deliberate reproduction, frottage aims to explore and extend the possibilities of the original texture.
References
Tate Gallery Glossary: Frottage
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=113
MoMa Website search for ‘Histoire Naturelle’ by Max Ernst
http://www.moma.org/search/collection?&page=1&query=max+ernst+histoire+naturelle
Morning Earth: Rubbing and Frottage
http://www.morning-earth.org/ce6109/earthjournal/rubbing/Rubbing.html