Wednesday, March 09, 2005

I found The Eye of Silence

...an oil by Max Ernst as I was poking around today. Below the image is Evan M. Maurer's essay about Ernst and the painting, in which he discusses Ernst's "process of deliberate ambiguity". Deliberate ambiguity. That, like the painting, appeals to me.

However, a subsequent search reminded me of its downside. Search results pointed to various nations and their current policies of deliberate ambiguity, nuclear weapons often being mentioned on the same line.

What I find most sobering is that The Eye of Silence, a painting that came to be through a process of deliberate ambiguity, was painted in 1943-44 and, according to Maurer, it's one of the "documents of the artist's traumas during World War II".

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