The Metaphorical Mechanism Of Maxernst's Surreal Images

Surrealism,as one of the movements of the western modernist art,has influenced almost all of the artistic fields,including literature,play,music,movie and fine arts.Initiated at the end of the World War I and reached its peak in the period between the two world wars,the history of Surrealism almost completely covered the five decades from the 1920 s through 70 s.Moreover,Its influence is still broad and significant in the today's artistic practices.Some of the artists of this trend tended to use realistic rhetoric approaches in their artistic crafts,while the others prefer using purely abstract imageries.Therefore,there is no coherent and standardized linguistic structure in the artistic expression of Surrealist painting,nonetheless,the inherent goals of their artistic pursuits are consistent,all of which point the surfacing of “Surrealism”.This paper focuses on Max Ernst,one of the most representative artists of Surrealism.This paper is based on the theory of metaphor,from which one could see the roles played by Breton and Aragorn in investigating the function of metaphor in Surrealism,which is primarily from the perspective of epistemology,namely how could metaphor be used to investigate the expression and structure of the ideology of Surrealism.As one could notice,the previous investigation of metaphor theory has been concentrated on its linguistic aspect,in this paper,however,the focus is on its significance in imagery epistemology,hence when exploring the epistemological significance of metaphor,I would like to incorporate a good number of visual analyses of Ernst's works into discussion.The analyses will start from the rhetoric structure of Ernst's works,the selected works are realistic or semiotic,through visual analysis I intend to reveal the ways in which he transmitted his abnormal expressions.This paper discusses the structural aspect of Ernst's paintings,namely how he established the imagery metaphor through pictorial construction,since in his works,the connections between multiple objects have been reshaped,so that the original logical relations could be replaced by the new ones that could help realize the definitive structure of so called“authenticity”.Hence,Ernst is always reorganizing the original empirical system to assist our cognition of the real world,the form of cognition and the form of rhetoric expression in his paintings are consistent with the structure of metaphor.After the discussion of the formal level of Ernst's imagery,this paper will turn to his surrealist expression and cognition through metaphor,and investigate the meaning of the metaphors embodied in his paintings by incorporating his biography intoconsideration.By examining the two levels just mentioned,one linguistic,another semiotic,this paper discusses the metaphorical mechanism of Max Ernst's surrealist paintings.