Max Ernst A Retrospective Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications By: Werner Spies Sabine Rewald ISBN: 0300107188 See detail of this book on Amazon.com Book served by AMAZON NOIR (www.amazon-noir.com) project by: PAOLO CIRIO paolocirio.net UBERMORGEN.COM ubermorgen.com ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO neural.it Page 1 Retrospective 0Retrospective 0Retrospective 0 Page 2 Page 3 Nightmare and Deliverance OVERVIEW Werner Spies This retrospective exhibition of Max Ernst's work, the first held in the United States in thirty years, provides a glimpse of the artist's tremendous productivity. In it we sec pictures that represent what historical painting of the twentieth century, filled with signs of terror and destruction, has to offer. Pictures Ernst produced shortly after Hitler's seizure of power, reminiscent of Goya's Capriehos and Desastres de /a guerra, are clear references to that event. But mixed in with them again and again we find more harmonious, lighter works in which melancholy and horror give way to an almost cosmic serenity. The two moods are intimately related in this pictorial world, so inti- mately in fact that at any moment night can turn to day, paralysis to exhilaration: Ernst gives us both nightmare and deliverance. Encountering Max Ernst's work, we soon realize that it is impossible to catego- rize his extremely diverse oeuvre in terms of style. Yet we find in everything he did a single overriding artistic concept: that of the collage. Ernst took inspiration from the bewildering glut of available images in reproduction. Illustrations of objects and processes that he discovered in publications from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided material he could recycle in the form of collages. He began experi- menting in this direction early on. Starting in 1919 he gradually felt his way into a realm he characterized as "au-delà de la peinture," or "beyond painting."' Among these efforts created immediately after his return from service in World War I are mono- types, photomontages, paintings that combine Cubist and you will have to walk alone.."2 It would be difficult to think of another pictorial world that so clearly parallels the world of Franz Katka. Here, as there, we enter a terrain filled with what Freud called "manifest dream content." Indeed, the obsessions and compulsions Kafka and Max Max Ernst, The Painter's I)auth/ers, 1940 Ernst explored arc comparable to the material that concerned Freud in his interpretation Oil on canvas Private nvas i~>n coll of dreams. Yet unlike Freud, the two artists were not interested in explaining the incom- sM 2359 prehensible. Rather, they were intent on describing a strangeness beyond comprehension. Page 4 Fig. 1 Max Ernst, Making Li ne/rom Borres, 1921 Collage Private collection SM 435 u Z In pictures such as Oedipus Rex (cat. no. 36) and Making Lime front Bones (fig. 1), we search in vain for some key that might help to explain them. And in so doing we get no closer to their meaning than the bearer of Kafka's "imperial message" to its in- tended reader.3 It is important to recognize that even precise knowledge of the sources Ernst made use of for his collages and paintings does not help us understand them, for he cut away and obscured the meaning of the original image in the course of mak- ing his own work. In fact, knowledge of his sources only blinds us to the poetry of the final image. Ernst liked to refer to a passage in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen that argues against the destruction of dream content: "But, dear father, why are you so op- posed to dreams... ? To me the dream is a defense against the routine and ordinari- ness of life, a chance for the imagination to break free of restrictions, to tumble together all of life's images in childlike play as an escape from the wearying earnestness of adult- hood"' On principle Ernst favored the mystery of the dream over analysis. And, so it is untenable to equate his collage work with Freud's dreamwork. Ernst employed his knowledge of Freud with irony. It is telling that he failed to include the inventor of psychoanalysis in his group portrait of major cultural figures Rendezvous of Friends (fig. 2), though he did find room for Dostoyevsky, another explorer of the soul. Here it should be noted that already, in his Dada years in Cologne, Ernst was making paintings, drawings, and collages that foretold Surrealist concerns in their de- piction of the world of the subconscious. The shocking quality of the images from these early years also offered a premonition of Surrealist content. For example, Oedipus Rex, whose jarring image alludes to Nietzsche's nutcracker of the soul, prefigures Sur- realism's objets desagréables such as Giacornetti's Endangered Hand, 1932 (Kunsthaus Z(irich, Alberto Giacometti Stiftung) and Meret Oppcnheim's fur-lined teacup Object, 1936 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Products of the cult of objects pursued by the Surrealists in the 1930s, works of this kind gain historical resonance when they arc considered in the context of Ernst's early experiments. Page 5 Fig. 2 1N1ax I',rnst, Rendezvous o_/ Fri,°,ut,, 1922 Oil on canvas Museum Ludwig, Cologne stir 50S From the second half of the 1920s, following upon such shocking pictures as Celebes (cat. no. 33), Oedipus Rex, Castor and Pollution (cat. no. 44), Saint Cecilia (cat. no. 45), The Wavering Il/oman (cat. no. 46), and Ubrr Imperator (cat. no. 47), came works that rely on semiautomatic techniques for their effect. Frottage, or rubbing, and its offshoot grattage, which covers the picture surface with relieflike pigment, led to the development of new subject matter. Portrayals of Birds, Wind Brides, Forests, and Shell Flowers are filled with fanciful images and are highly varied in color and composition. They are ecstatic in feeling, and it is this mood that dominates what William Rubin has called "the heroic epoch of Surrealist painting."' Repeatedly in this period, Ernst interrupted his painting to produce collage novels. La /e-ntnre 100 totes (cat. no. 167), Rcwe dune petite, fine qui voulut entrer au Carmel (cat. no. 169), Une semaine de bontcé (cat. no. 172), and other examples of the form present narrative cycles that provided Surrealism, no less than did Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris and André Breton's Nadia, with a visual subconscious. The romantic fantasies and apocalyptic visions of Ernst's paintings and collage novels culminated a few years later in jungle pictures filled with imagery of prehistoric fauna that introduced the theme of a world in decay: his llgonument to the Birds (sec cat. nos. 70, 72) and Garden Aeroplane Trap (see cat. nos. 110-113) series, and the most extreme embodiment of the subject, the Entire City paintings (see cat. no. 115), all of which echo with recollections of a trip Ernst took to Singapore, Indochina, Angkor Wat, and the jungles of Southeast Asia in 1924. Increasingly in this period he relied on a highly detailed, veristic style, and in his pictures of decaying jungles on the use of grattage. In the later 1930s Ernst began to employ decalcomania, a refinement of the monotype process. Justinus Kerner, George Sand, and Victor I logo had used the f Z Page 6 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Max Ernst, Chemical Nuptuati, 1948 Mi.ix Ernst, An Anxious Friend, 1944 Oil on canvas Plaster Private collection Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusscldort s~o 2594 V Z > 0 technique in the nineteenth century, associating the resulting images with pictures produced by the unconscious. In the 1920s the Surrealists adopted decalcomania along with automatic writing, recording dreams, and playing cadavre exquis, activities that allowed the expression of the unconscious and helped to bond the writers and painters of the group together. Ernst developed what had served dilettantes as an amusing ex- periment and perfected it for use in his art, turning the procedure into a comprehensive system he could strictly control. Transferring decalcomania to large-scale canvases such as Totem and Taboo (cat. no. 133) and wielding his brush to elaborate the forms that resulted from the process, Ernst made the technique uniquely his own. During the years he spent in the United States after World War II, in paintings such as Chemical Nuptuals (fig. 3), Dream and Revolution (cat. no. 149), and Design in Nature (cat. no. 150), Ernst gradually returned to the use of precise outlines. These crisp outlines unmistakably parallel the clean contours and stercometric shapes of sculpture he was producing at the same time, for example King Playing with. The Queen (cat. no. 145) and An Anxious Friend (fig. 4). VERSATILITY Even in this brief glance at the evolution of Ernst's work, which can easily be traced in this exhibition, we are confronted with an astonishing variety of techniques and subject matter. Ernst repeatedly defended his quest for innovation and refused to codify a style, maintaining, for example: "A painter may know what he doesn't want But woe be to hill] if he desires to know what he wants. A painter is lost if he finds himself. Max Ernst considers his sole virtue to be that he has managed not to find himself"' What mat- tered was participating in a critical, creative process, not achieving a recognizable style. For this same reason we find no signs of an attempt on the part of any of the Surrealists to achieve a common style. All the Surrealists were bent on putting their origins and tastes, their own pasts, behind them. All concentrated on inspiration, the initial leap, and all thrived on dealing with inexplicable strangeness, with imaginative excess, on the juxtaposing of disparate elements.