TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042291/0422400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.0 KB | 147 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 87

The Rebel Dreams of Oedipus Max


Like a conspiratorial uncle, the Surrealist speaks anew to the
subversiveness of youth

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Every artist needs some source of inspiration. Max Ernst,
the lyric German subversive who was born 100 years ago, had one
that carried him through most of his life. He hated his father, a
pious Catholic art teacher who worked in a school for deaf and
mute children in a small forest town south of Cologne. Indeed,
Ernst wanted to kill Papa and what he thought he represented:
the authority of age, religion, the state and the image.

    At six, little Oedipus Max, the future Dadaist, had a
dream, an obsessive vision: "I see in front of me a panel
crudely painted with large black strokes on a red ground,
imitating the grain of mahogany . . . In front of this panel a
black and shiny man is making slow, comic and joyously obscene
gestures. This strange fellow has the mustache of my father .
. . He smiles and takes out of the pocket of his trousers a
large pencil made of some soft material . . . breathing loudly,
he hastily traces some black lines on the panel of false
mahogany. He quickly gives it new, surprising and despicable
forms."

    New, surprising, despicable -- not a bad thumbnail note
for Ernst's own art, especially as seen by others. We have
reason to thank the large soft pencil of the man with the
mustache. Ernst was not a great formal artist, not by a very
long chalk. But in the 1920s and '30s especially, he was a
brilliant maker of images. Their strength and edginess radiate
like new in the centenary Ernst exhibit, organized by art
historian Werner Spies, which is at London's Tate Gallery this
month and moves in mid-May to Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie. Long
after the art movements to which Ernst contributed have passed
into history, his images continue to detonate in the mind like
unexploded land mines left on the old battlefield of modernism.
If the young love Dada and Surrealism, and early Ernst in
particular, it is because of his healthy desire to murder Papa's
culture.

    His means for doing so was collage, which means simply
"gluing." Ernst cut photos and engravings from magazines,
catalogs, albums, marrying things that didn't belong together.
Collage was a static relative of film cutting, then in its
infancy. Seventy years later, America sees in collage because
it grew up spinning the TV dial. No such fragmentation of images
was built into the culture of France or Germany in the 1920s.
The relations between image and thing seemed solid. Here was
something to overturn, and collage was the lever. Ernst fell on
the common vein of reproductory images like a miner discovering
a virgin reef.

    Essentially untrained as a painter, he fell in with the
German Expressionists in 1910-12 by sheer brightness of
character. He knew August Macke, whose ideas about pantheistic
nature were to reverberate in Ernst's work right up to its end.
Macke was killed in the trenches. Ernst survived the war and
emerged from its troglodytic lunacy with a deep hatred of Kaiser
and country.

    His first collage painting, Celebes, 1921, is one of his
funniest. It started life as an anthropological photo of an
African corn bin. This reminded Ernst of an elephant. Then he
saw a swollen human figure in it -- a failed behemoth, which he
associated with the absurd and nasty king of Alfred Jarry's
proto-Surrealist comedy, Ubu Roi. Add to that a dirty children's
rhyme he remembered from his school days, which in English would
have been a limerick; it concerned an elephant in Sumatra that
tried to, well, connect with its grandmother. The naked woman
in the foreground foreshadows the title of Ernst's great
collage-narrative of 1929, La Femme 100 Tetes, or The
Hundred-Headless Woman. She languidly beckons the dumb pachyderm
to further erotic fiascoes.

    The technical question of who "invented" collage fades to
unimportance when you look at what Ernst did with it. Some
Surrealist collages look as dated as Victorian screens, but his
tiny, rigorous visions never do. By making realities collide,
he slips you into a parallel world whose features are both
precise and ineffably odd, where things are not what they seem.
Ernst loved images that enumerated things: mechanical and
scientific drawing, illustrations from 1900 boulevardier
magazines, old catalogs. Their factual neutrality made their
paradoxes weirder. Sometimes this serves mainly lyrical ends,
as in the Klee-like plant-personages that rear up on the tiny
horizon of Always the Best Man Wins, 1920. And sometimes it
discloses an erotic fury, a Dionysiac madness bursting the
collar studs and corsets of life, as in the collage-narrative
The Dream of a Little Girl Who Wanted to Become a Nun, 1929-30.
In a secular age with its "therapeutic" religions, we find it
hard to imagine the power of blasphemy to the Surrealists. All
the same, Ernst came up with the funniest antireligious joke in
modern art -- the famous (and, alas, rarely seen) parody of a
Renaissance Madonna, in which Mary is whaling Jesus on his bare
bottom before a trio of witnesses, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and
Ernst himself.

    Ernst's work was continuously open to chance. The
arresting drawings of his 1925 Natural History were made by
laying sheets of paper on the wooden floor of his hotel room in
a French seaside town and going over them with the (paternal?)
soft pencil; the resulting images, altered and edited, received
the name frottages, or rubbings. The name of the town, by an
exquisite coincidence, was Pornic.

    His desire to freeze accident remained with Ernst until
the end of his life. After he escaped from Europe to America in
1941 -- his ticket was paid by Peggy Guggenheim, who was
sexually obsessed by Ernst -- he lived for some years in
Arizona, whose vast skies and mesas repeated the visions
inscribed in certain Ernsts of the '30s like The Petrified City.
There he made paintings by swinging a can with a hole in it over
a canvas; these rhythmical dribbles were seen by Jackson
Pollock.

    You cannot make as strong a case for the late as for the
early Ernst. Some of the sculpture of his post-1939 years was
remarkable -- especially the big totemic Capricorn, 1948 -- but
his apocalyptic paintings, like the vision of creepy, fungal
disaster recorded in Europe After the Rain, 1940-42, look like
sci-fi cliche. By the '50s he was thinking illustratively rather
than pictorially. To some extent he always had, but now the
visions were more diffuse, and the paintings of his last decade
(he died in 1976) are feebly hermetic. No matter. He was always
a painter for the young; his own youth speaks to that of others.
Each generation discovers him for itself, finding its instincts
of rebellion confirmed by him, as by a deliciously
conspiratorial uncle. The last Ernst retrospective was in 1979.
There ought to be one every 15 years or so, as a public service,
like vaccination.