The Mathematics of Max Ernst

Posted: December 27, 2010 | Author: Theodor Pavlopoulos | Filed under: Visual Arts | Tags: Complex
numbers,Geometry, Mathematics, Surrealism, Visual Arts |1 Comment

https://pavlopoulos.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/the-mathematics-of-max-ernst/
Art that has nothing to do with Art

When the German artist Max Ernst (1891 1976) displayed some of his
work at a Dusseldorf art exhibition, the daily press commented that not
even the best disposed of visitors knows what to make of these objects and
that Ernst had regressed to a state of childhood to such an extent that he is
now, in all seriousness, sticking old reels, cotton wool remains and wire
together into knotted sculptures along with dolls arms and legs, cogs and
wheels from watches and whatever else is to be found in the junk room. In
another occasion Ernst was even summoned at the headquarters of Cologne
police where, together with the artist and poet Johannes Theodor Baargeld
(1892 1927), he was accused as a fraud and scoundrel for having
demanded admission for something that was announced to the public as
being an art exhibition, but which in reality has nothing to do with art.
Later, during the Nazi regime, works by Max Ernst were included in the
1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) mockery exhibition, as examples
of degradation in art.

Max Ernst's surrealist portrait of Euclid (1945)

In fact it was Ernsts own decision and intention to move along the margin
of conventional art: as a co-founder of the Cologne Dada group, together
with Baargeld and Jean (Hans) Arp (1886 1966), he found himself for
several years on the avant-garde of an anti-art movement that even flirted
with nihilism. Though often hard to penetrate and certainly susceptible to
many interpretations, Max Ernsts work was both unconventional and
ingenious. Much of it cannot even be described as painting or sculpture by a
strict sense. He experimented with assemblages of unrelated objects and
with collages comprised by printed material taken from book illustrations,
advertisements and even various kinds of scientific textbooks. Ernst
developed and extensively applied techniques of creating spontaneous
images, compatible to surrealism, such as frottage (the creation of an
image by rubbing a pencil on a paper stretched over a variety of materials).
With decalcomania he applied color on the canvas using flat surfaces,
such as glass, instead of brushes, achieving an unusual appearance of the
finished surface, often disturbing, incompatible to the generally accepted
notion of beauty, and sometimes likened to fractal structures. Against any
conventional conception of art and against what is taught in art schools,
Ernst often made use of a ruler and dividers to construct lines and forms in a
geometrical like manner.
The mathematical inspiration
Max Ernst displayed interest in Science and Mathematics that is certainly
traceable in his artistic yield, both on the level of technique and on that of
content. It is reported that, after a visit at the Henri Poincare Institute in
Paris, he pointed out to Christian Zervos (1889 1970) , a Greek art critic
and publisher of the Parisian Cahiers d Art magazine, a series of models
on display, representing mathematical surfaces, that struck his imagination.
This encounter brought these surfaces into the artistic surrealist foreground
of the time and the American artist Man Ray (1890 1976), after a
suggestion of Zervos, produced a series of photographs of these exhibits,
under the title Mathematical Objects. Man Ray later described these
surfaces as so unusual, as revolutionary as anything that is being done
today in painting or in sculpture, though he admitted that he understood
nothing of their mathematical nature. As curious objects, reminiscent of
algebraic surfaces, appear in several of Ernsts paintings, it is quite possible
that he himself made attempts to incorporate them in his works. In Design
in Nature (1947), a painting heavily influenced by Geometry and carried
out using geometric technique, Ernst provides an allusion on the
mathematical nature of the worlds design. In the background, a variety of

shapes and curves give birth to living forms among alternating areas of light
and dark. A mathematical solid, drenched in light, dominates the foreground
topped by two horn like structures, bringing to mind the horn or Dupin
cyclides, two types of mathematical surfaces , forming thus an abstract ibex
head. In the colorful Feast of the Gods (1948), a collection of surfaces and
solids emerge amongst intense color rays of light, supposedly forming the
monumental figures of the gods. Objects that could be thought of as their
heads are again surfaces reminiscent of mathematical surfaces in Siamese
like complexes.

Left: "Design in Nature" (1947). Right: "Feast of the Gods" (1948)

Pendulum instead of a brush
In several other works of Max Ernst, other mathematical curves appear that
could be connected, rather unexpectedly, to the motion of a pendulum. The
artist himself described his idea as follows:
Tie an empty can to a piece of string one or two yards long and drill a
small hole in its bottom. Now fill the can with paint and allow it to swing
backwards and forwards over a flat canvas. Guide the can by movements of
the hands, the arms, the shoulders and the whole body. In this way, amazing
lines will trickle onto the canvas.
Such lines are not very different than the rhodonea curves traced on the
ground by a Foucault pendulum bob as seen directly from above. These
curves are expressed in polar form by the equation r=cosk, where the
integer parameter k fixes the number of petals of the rhodonea and is a
variable ranging from 0 to 2.

"Surrealism and Painting" (detail, 1942)

In Surrealism and Painting (1942), the bird like creature Loplop, Max
Ernsts alter ego that appears in several of his paintings, stretches an arm to
the far right in order to draw lines bearing obvious resemblance to parts of a
rhodonea curve. In Euclid (1945) a surrealist portrait of the ancient
Geometer is presented in abstract form, the figures head rendered as a
geometric solid, resembling a pyramid. The wise man is clad in noble, velvet
clothes, rendered using the decalcomania technique, and adorned with two
white roses. He is surrounded by a geometric background of overlapping
planes, intersecting straight lines and rhodonea like curves, some of which
extend over its face, contributing to the formation of its features. His owl
like eyes, formed on an inverted antefix with the design of the ancient Greek
anthemion ornament, glow bright yellow betraying intense intellectual
activity. And then, in the obviously mathematical inspired Young Man
Intrigued by the Flight of a Non Euclidean Fly (a picture executed in
1942 and colored in 1947), Max Ernst combined his Dupin cyclide surfaces
and his exquisite, elegant pendulum curves to create a puzzling image of a
creature resembling a bird (Loplop?) surrounded by the rhodonean
trajectories of the non Euclidean fly.

"Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non - Euclidean Fly" (1942 1947). Above right: the horn, a parametric surface. Lower right: the
rhodonea r=cos3
The imaginary unit of a revolutionary Art
In all the above instances Ernst alludes to Mathematics either by his
experimental dripping paint technique or by the artistically unusual and
revolutionary algebraic surfaces. Yet in the large painting The Phases of the
Night (1946), a rare instance of explicit presence of mathematical symbols
in a work of art is encountered. Over a night landscape of decalcomania, a
bright moon appears in a form suggesting the phases of the moon from
different points of view: an unusually oriented crescent supports what could
be interpreted as a schematic representation of the lunar motion around the
earth. A strange shape, formed by sinusoidal curves, casts its shadow over
the moon. And similar sinusoidal curves, intimately related to circular and
elliptic motion (and therefore inevitably connected to the motion of the
moon), appear in various parts of the picture. The mountain range in the
horizon and the strange dotted line unwinding from a circle in the
foreground both display the same trigonometric function pattern. The most
surprising feature of the painting is however the emergence of explicit
mathematical symbols next to an owl resembling creature with a glowing
pair of eyes strongly reminiscent of the anthemion eyes of Euclid. A
symbolic equation appears, involving a childishly painted heart and the
imaginary unit i, or square root of -1, a peculiar number that came to
Mathematics as a necessity during the 16th century, following the attempts to
express the solutions of cubic and quartic polynomials in closed formulae. A
deep and unexpected connection of the numbers containing this i, called

complex numbers, to the exponential and trigonometric functions was first

established by the great Leonhard Euler (1707 1783). This connection
inevitably leads to what may be considered as the most remarkable equation
of Mathematics and which appears in The Phases of the Night as the
power i^i of complex analysis.

The Phases of the Night (1946)

An allusion to Eulers identity
Taylor series are representations of functions as infinite sums involving their
derivatives calculated at a specific point and they are quite useful for
approximating the values of a specific function by calculating the sum of a
few initial terms. It is not difficult to construct such Taylor series for
elementary functions such as the sine, the cosine and the exponential
function.

Taylor series expansions for the exponential, the cosine and the sine
functions
In complex analysis these series may be extended to include imaginary
powers, involving the imaginary unit i mentioned above. Using the
imaginary power ix in the series of the exponential function, and the easily
calculated powers of the imaginary unit, (i^0=1, i^1=i, i^2=-1, i^3=-i and so
forth) the corresponding Taylor series is broken up in two parts, one formed
by the terms of the sine series and one formed by the terms of the cosine
series. This observation yields quite surprisingly, a relation between the

exponential function and the trigonometric functions of sine and cosine, the
notorious Euler formula e^(ix)=cosx+isinx.
A special case of this formula is derived for x= producing thus an amazing
result, the so called Eulers identity: e^(i)+1=0. This relation connects
some of the most fundamental mathematical constants (1, e, and i) and has
by many been described as a convincing yet unfathomable to its full
meaning result. Richard Feynman described Eulers identity as a jewel and
one of the most remarkable, almost astounding, formulas in all of
Mathematics.It is not hard to identify the relation between Max Ernsts
power i^i in the Phases of the Night and the Eulers identity. As a matter
of fact, it is a standard exercise in complex analysis and it takes only a little
manipulation to see that for x=-/2 Eulers formula yields e^(i/2)=i. By
raising both sides to the power i we arrive at the quite remarkable result
i^i=e^(-/2)=0,20788.
Though it is hard to see what to make of this (mathematical) object in
The Phases of the Night, it is equally hard not to notice the repeated
sinusoidal curves appearing in the painting and their connection to the
Eulers identity and inevitably their connection to the i^i complex power.
Moreover, the very title chosen by the artist, whose ordinary practice was to
use the titles of his works as hints to the interpretation of his works, suggests
a periodic alternation of cosmic proportions, governed by mathematical
laws. It may not be coincidental that the specimens of mathematical jargon
appear next to the aptly chosen, nocturnal owl, an ancient Greek symbol of
wisdom. Its glowing eyes bring to mind the explicitly Mathematics related
painting of the Greek Geometer Euclid, painted only a year before. The
mathematical nature of The Phases of the Night is further underlined by
the dashed curve in the foreground, bringing to mind mathematical
textbooks, by the square root symbol within the unwinding circular disk on
the far left of the picture and by the vinculum inside the blue block on the far
right.
It is quite uncertain whether Ernst was aware of the mathematical details
accompanying his fragments of mathematical jargon in The Phases of the
Night. It may be that he merely used mathematical cipher simply on a
symbolic level in order to create an impression of mystery and few
accessible mathematical symbols could be considered as mysterious as the
square root of -1. However, Mathematics is not simply a circumstantial
occurrence in a few of his paintings but rather a lifelong influence and a
structural element permeating his work as a whole. And having included
mathematical symbols in a nocturnal, almost mystical landscape that, as

explicitly confessed by its title, it is supposed to convey the idea of the

cosmic design, is by itself an act of recognition of the admirable,
metaphysical nature of the laws of the worlds design, reflected upon
Mathematics.