Max Ernst : Fiat modes pereat art = Let there be fashion, down with art Author Ernst, Max, 1891-1976 Date 1997 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/248 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art Max Ernst fiat modespereat HPS (Let there be fashion, down with art) Three from a portfolio of eight lithographs ences of Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carra, and Francis Cologne:Verlag ABK and SchlomilchVerlag, 1919-20 Picabia, artists whom Ernst had recently discovered Each 17Vs x 12" (43.7 x 31.9 cm) through reproductionsof their work in the Italian peri Printer: the artist odical Valori Plastici. Edition: Oneof only a few known sets.An edition of 60 The emergence and increasing popularity of the sets was initially announced,the majority destroyedby portfolio format in the late nineteenthand early twen the artist. tieth centuries stemmed,in part, from the flexibility it The Museumof ModernArt, New York allowed artists to expand upon a particular theme by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund meansof seriality. In Fiat Modes,made in homageto de Chirico, Ernst consciouslysubverts this customary Max Ernst's Fiat Modes,considered a masterpieceof function by continuously frustrating the viewer's printed art, introducesthe viewer to Ernst's large body inclination to understandthe series of imagesas a log of prints and illustrated books,an integral component ical narrative progression.Instead, he creates a sym of his overall work. Indeed, not only does this first bolic evocation of the collapse of instrumental reason printed project by Ernst providea summaryof the prin and of disbelief in the idea of causality,notions he for ciples of the elusive art and literary movementknown mulated in responseto his military service in World as Dada, which flourished in cities throughout Western Europeand in New York from 1915 to 1923, but it also serves as a prototype for the thematic and compositional motifs of his more well-known Surrealist paintings and col lages of the 1920s. Whereas the allusions to shop windows and fashion were possibly inspired by the works of Ernst's Rheinlandartistic col league August Macke, the imagery of mannequinsplaced within disturbing disjunctive spaceswith unexplainedshad ows also indicates the influ- Platel Plate 2 War I, having witnessed the cal logic and the systemsof mea war's destructive employment surement, Ernst places in the of technology.Ernst's unconven lower right-hand corner a com tional use of the portfolio falls pass that has drawn its own well within the Dada move shadow,and in the upperright he ment's art-making objective to addsa nonsensicalmathematical shock the viewer out of his or formula. The prints that follow her everyday mind-set and to continueto turn upsidedown the instigate a questioning of one's principles of pictorial perspec conditioned responseto reality. tive invented by Renaissance Ernst creates Fiat Modes artists and instead reveal an entirely through precise line valvTc/rMam irrational spatial environment drawing, unaccompanied by filled with dismemberedfigures, text. Its mechanisticstyle regis pulleys,gears, and other mech ters the avant-garderejection of anisms. By the final plate, the both human touch and crafts tailor/artist as well as the manship,characteristics gener puppet-like forms have disap ally understoodas prerequisites peared,replaced with whimsical of art. The first plate establishes imagery consisting of a small Plate 8 the artist as creator in the guise anthropomorphicweight at the of a tailor in the process of unraveling a spool of lower center whose attached cord leads to a circular thread (or, alternatively, drawing lines) before a scalethat measuresthe value of "1 Mark" versusDada. dummy. The inscriptions "Pereat ars fiat modes" Below are various inscriptions including "Dada NoBis (Down with art, let there be fashion) to the left of the vaLuTamTam,"aword punon the phrasefrom the Lord's tailor, and "homo elegans tissi mus" (most elegant prayer "...and give us our daily bread."Fiat Modescre man or mouse)inscribed across his legs,are written in atesa hall of mirrors,an illogical reality akin to a dream reverseto suggestthat we are standingbehind a trans sequencein which Ernst wryly commentsupon what he parent glass,possibly a shopwindow. believesto be a misguidedbelief in the infallibility of In the next print, Ernstcontinues with his visualpuns, humanprogress based upon instruments of reason. presentingus with an overlappingsequence of a head less dummy, which would become a major symbol in Robin Reisenfeld Ernst'swork, the robotic tailor, and a towering,faceless, AssociateCurator bowling-pin-shapedfigure with protruding thigh and This card is made possiblethrough the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Freidus. lower leg. In a gesturethat willfully negatesmathemati- Design© 1997The Museumof Modern Art, New York The Museum Producedin conjunctionwith the exhibition of Modern Art More Than One: Twentieth-CenturyPrint Portfolios Departmentof Prints May 16-September2,1997 and Illustrated Books.