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Review of "Max Ernst: A Retrospective" “Max Ernst: A Retrospective” Max Ernst was perpetually seeking escape — from countries ravaged by two world wars, from marriages he left behind as he moved West (from Germany to France, from New York to Arizona), from the artistic identity he had forged as a leader of the Dada-turned-Surrealist movement in France, from creative techniques, and from the conscious mind itself. The Ernst retrospective featured at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 10, 2005, captures this perpetual flux as it traces Ernst’s work across time, place, style and medium. Ernst has been dubbed a “proto-Surrealist” because of the way his principally Dadaist works anticipated the attempts of artists like René Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Yves Tanguy who, decades later, tried to capture the content of the unconscious mind on canvas. In 1922’s “Oedipus Rex,” Ernst combined the image of fingers holding a walnut with the image of a tool used to poke holes in webbed feet of chickens to track their ages. The sharp metal rod impales the fingers in Ernst’s attempt to represent in a random assemblage of objects the danger of grasping for knowledge (depicted by the walnut). The piece is a clear forerunner of Ernst’s surrealist progeny — one of the many that made him an attractive addition to the burgeoning French movement. Ernst left Germany on a false passport in 1922, pursuing escape from the country of his birth, in whose army just a few years earlier he witnessed the atrocities of war that deeply influenced his art. He left behind his first wife and their child, displaying his first rejection of relationships in favor of the exploration of new avenues for his creation. He evolved beyond Dada and joined the Surrealist movement of poets André Breton and Paul Éluard — not to mention Éluard’s marriage: in France, Ernst began a ménage à trois with the poet and his wife, Gala (who later married Dali). The feeling of existential entrapment that drove Ernst to France comes across clearly in the works he produced once there. In “Saint Cecilia,” a collage painting produced in 1923, the titular patron saint of music is shown sitting in profile, her entire body — save her hands — encased in a shell that constricts her movement. While her body sits trapped, her hands play on an invisible harpsichord before her. While the allegory of artistic creation taking place in spite of intellectual confinement is simple, the angst Ernst had been experiencing in war-ravaged Germany after World War I comes across forcefully. Ernst began experimenting with new techniques 1925. Departing from the collage paintings that had characterized his early work — in which he had clipped images from magazines and journals, combined them in unexpected ways, and painted over them — he experimented with frottage, in which rubbings were made on paper from uneven surfaces. Later, Ernst took this technique to a new level, inventing grattage, in which he scraped away paint applied to canvases on more textured surfaces to reveal “unconscious” imagery. But as the retrospective makes clear, not all of Ernst’s pieces were endeavors into artistic frontiers. In “The Blessed Virgin Chastises The Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses” (1926), Ernst tilled familiar soil, offending the Catholic Church by depicting a muscular Virgin striking a child-sized Jesus, whose halo has fallen to the ground. Three spectators look on through a window, as voyeurs looking on at an illicit sexual act. The show in which the painting was displayed was quickly shut down — Ernst’s reputation, though, was on the rise. After establishing a successful artistic enterprise in France, Ernst again felt confined by the world he had built up around him. This time, he invented an alter-ego: Loplop the Bird Superior. Loplop, a manifestation of the recurring bird imagery in Ernst’s art, made his debut in Ernst’s collage novels, books of small collages that traced an essential narrative. In the collage novel “La Femme 100 Têtes” (1929), Loplop presented “The Woman with 100 Heads” — which, in a clever play-on-words that highlights Ernst’s preoccupation with the titles of his works, sounds like “The Headless Woman” due to the similarity of the French words “cent” and “sans.” Ernst’s works took on a darker tone as he saw the signs of approaching world war. Forest imagery became more prominent in his work — forests, in Ernst’s words, “take over the sun.” Fascism was a plague spreading through Europe, and Ernst chanelled his fear of this specter into 1937’s “Fireside Angel,” which depicts a raging, violent monster destructively plodding across an abstracted landscape. Ironically naming this frightening beast an “angel,” Ernst evokes the danger of the seemingly innocuous, referencing the surface appeal of fascism but underscoring the evil he perceived in its proliferation. Ernst’s art was prescient. In 1941, he escaped again — this time, though, his exodus was not for the sake of artistic evolution, but to save his own life. With the aid of heiress Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married in 1942, Ernst secured passage to the United States. He completed a painting that he had begun in 1940 when his fate was unclear. He had mailed the unfinished canvas to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he settled once in the U.S. “Europe After the Rain” features Ernst’s newest technique, decalcomania, in which painted canvas is pressed against a surface to create unexpected patterns. The painting, on whose patterns Ernst elaborated, shows a decrepit, corrosive landscape predictive of post-World War II destruction. In New York, Ernst moved away from political imagery — and from other ties to his past. He broke with the strict tenets of Breton’s Surrealism, capturing this schism in “Surrealism and Painting” (1942), in which an abstracted figure with a brush in the hand of its one distinguishable limb paints on a canvas. The title is a play on Breton’s avant-garde 1928 manifesto of the same name. Hanging in the same gallery as “Surrealism and Painting” is 1940’s “The Robing of the Bride” in which a nude woman is engulfed in a heavy hood and cloak of striking saffron feathers while Loplop stands guard with pointed spear. Her head is masked while her breasts and lower-body stand exposed, following the familiar theme of metaphysical imprisonment. In 1946, Ernst moved West yet again, settling with his final wife Dorothea Tanning in Arizona for seven years before relocating back to France until his death in 1976. The final gallery of the exhibition houses the work of the final thirty years of Ernst’s life — no two paintings look alike, though Ernst continued to re-experiment and re-explore themes and techniques that had appeared in his work since the beginning of the century. Before going to Arizona, Ernst looked back on the work he had done thus far, painting “Vox Angelica” in 1944. It is a stylistic autobiography, in which small compartments on the canvas contain small images representing all of the painting styles he had used over the fifty-two years of his life. There are only fifty-one compartments, though — it is thought that Ernst always remembered a séance he had attended in Paris in 1922, in which he was told that he would die at the age of fifty-one. But Ernst died at the age of eighty-five, leaving behind a body of work whose only constant trend — as the retrospective makes unmistakable — is its propensity for perpetual change. Although it is at times cluttered and at times overly self-indulgent, the retrospective presents a powerful image of Ernst. In him we see a man who never became complacent, never resting for too long with one idea or technique. Though as a result his contribution to twentieth century artistic development is immeasurable, there is no painting that is distinctly Ernst — no men in bowler hats, no melting clocks, no painting that can be picked out and said to exemplify his work. “Max Ernst: A Retrospective” curators Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald have presented the image of an artist who deeply influenced all who followed him, but who himself was a sort of primogenitor. The placard beside “Surrealism and Painting” boasts that the drip painting technique that Ernst used to create the design on the canvas in the painting may have inspired Jackson Pollock upon his viewing of the piece. Though the audio guide that accompanies the exhibit confirms that this legend is apocryphal, this sort of vainglory distastefully permeates the retrospective. Everyone and everything before Ernst is neglected in spite of the unmistakable presence of Henri Rousseau in Ernst’s forests and a clear awareness of, if not dialogue with, artists like Marc Chagall. Aside from the exhibition’s frequently pompous tone, its only observable flaw is an overwhelming breadth. Spies and Rewald have chosen to display almost two hundred of Ernst’s works, much to the detriment of the pieces that are clumped together in obscure corners of the galleries. For instance, 1934’s moving “Blind Swimmer: The Effect of Touch” is unceremoniously hung behind a selection of Ernst’s small sculptures on pedestals, works that seem to have been thrown into the exhibit for good measure. Though some galleries feel like desultory mélanges of pieces, the overall retrospective is a breathtaking testament to Ernst’s genius. The works trace an implicit through-line beyond Ernst’s restless evolution, as he strives to capture the obscure and challenges his viewers to see what is just below the surface. The exhibition’s apotheosis of Ernst is thus a marked success, with its straightforward presentation of Ernst’s prodigious oeuvre allowing his art to speak for itself.
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