Constitutional conventions

David Hopkins analyses a fascinating network of shared themes and images in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, two of the central names of modern art. Covering a period of time from 1912 to the mid-1940s, the author shows how their preoccupations intersected with those of Dada and Surrealism, the movements to which they were linked.

In a multi-layered argument, rich in original discoveries and insights, the author shows how the artists subverted Catholic doctrine using powerfully bizarre and disturbing visual imagery appropriated from areas as diverse as Symbolist painting and Freudian psychoanalysis. He charts new territory by showing that their parodic flirtation with the imagery of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry amounted to what he calls a 'poetics of separatist male identity' which ironically reinforced dominant modes of male avant garde organization.