The proper title is The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter, painted by Max Ernst in 1926. According to a Time magazine story in 1976 -
His father was a fiercely authoritarian Roman Catholic, an amateur painter who taught in a school for deaf-mutes in the Rhineland town of Brühl. Little Max briefly persuaded this eccentric sire that he was the child Jesus. Memories of this sort underlie Ernst's most notorious thrust of anticlerical wit, a spanking Madonna...The painting is (not surprisingly) said to have been controversial at the time. Now it hangs in the
Jesus was a Perfect Child, there's no reason to hit him ....
ReplyDeleteNote the halo has fallen off in the painting...
DeleteShe didn't hit him. She spanked him, and he was the perfect child because she loved him enough to do it.
ReplyDeleteIts hangs not in the metropolitain museum of art but in the Luwig museum in Cologne.
ReplyDeleteThe MMA link is now a 404, so I'll take your word for it on the new location. Post amended; thanks.
DeleteIt's a delightful painting, audacious and a great rebuttal to rampant piety. It also seems to justify my Christian friends philosphy that spanking is beneficial for children, 'just like their parents did to them.' We surmise that this make them the perfect adults they are today, and grants them the right to dicipline thier children in such a manner.
ReplyDelete