LONDON (GUARDIAN) - Surrealist painter Max Ernst’s
Pietà or Revolution by Night, in Tate Modern, is a gateway to the psychological power of one of the great themes of European religious art. Ernst’s painting depicts a man – the artist himself – supported in the arms of a kneeling bowler-hatted figure. Neither the supported nor the supporting figure seems fully alive: the grey flesh of the one held up is reminiscent of stone or a ghost, and the bowler-hatted helper is brown, like a figure of clay or wood. The painting is taken from the traditional scene of Mary clasping the body of her son Jesus with an image of the artist himself, held by his father, a Roman Catholic.
According to historians at Tate Modern, Ernst's father "denounced his son's work, and the painting is often seen as rising out of their troubled relationship, although - like dreams - it resists precise analysis." Reproductions of Michelangelo's
Pietà are currently on view in the US in Texas at the Museum of Biblical Art (See "Calendar") and Minnesota's
St. Paul Cathedral.
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