Max Ernst

So first of all, the physical book.

The first edition of J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World has a Max Ernst painting, The Eye of Silence, wrapping around the whole cover.

Now I've got the paperback edition and the illustration on the spine sets it apart from its contemporaries and it must have looked breathtaking as the dust jacket for the hardback.

The painting is this sort of calcified jeweled ruin in a greenish tone and it's worth noting that by this point that painting had already been used in a Penguin edition of James Blish's A Case of Conscience and it also inspired the novel that came after The Crystal World which is Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition.

They actually had universal joints on the end of them so viewers could move paintings 360 degrees and tilt them backwards and forwards.

And the works in this space are by some of the most influential European surrealists, from Max Ernst, Max Ernst there, most of those Max Ernst along the wall, to Yves Tanguy on the far left, and to Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Giorgio de Chirico, and in the middle, or you can see the standing woman and on the plinth there, Giacometti.

And so even the plinths doubled as seats or rocking chairs.

And in the surrealist gallery intermittently, there would be the sound of a rushing train that would punctuate the air and then flashing red lights every 10 minutes.

But lots of really interesting people go to this property.

Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Dora Carrington, Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar.

Lee Miller's there for a month or so.

They then go to the south of France to a place called Mougins.

On the computer, the painter can scan, crop, morph, colorize, distort, flip, blur images, dot, dot, dot, but now at great speed.

The invisible scissors of Max Ernst and the melting of solid forms in Salvador Dali are now available to anyone as generic effects of the stroke of a wand And she goes on to say some more nuanced stuff, but I was just like, God, that's such a radical misunderstanding of digital image processing.

And it's exactly the sort of reductive straw man kind of position that she's been railing against in regards to painting.

And it's so funny that you can be so like as soon as you work with any materials, whether it's like I've been working with them.

Carrington's Journey to Mexico reads like an adventure novel.

In the 1930s, she turned her back on the aristocratic comfort of a conservative Catholic upbringing in Lancashire to study art in Florence and live as a bohemian in Paris, where she became romantically involved with Max Ernst, the German-born pioneer of Dadaism and Surrealism.

she narrowly escaped the nazi invasion in nineteen forty fleeing to spain where she strategically married a mexican diplomat then traveled underground to portugal and new york eventually finding refuge in mexico city in in nineteen forty eight carrington moved into a house in the roma neighborhood with her husband a hungarian-born photographer and she remained there for twenty years before moving to the united states in her last decades she returned to the mexico city house to live and work Today, the district is filled with CDMX's trendiest cafes, bars, and restaurants, but a sense of its quiet charm a few decades ago can be gained from Alfonso Cuaron's Oscar-winning 2018 film Roma.

Once obscure, Carrington's artistic reputation has soared since her death in 2011 at age 94.