TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT0861> <title> Apr. 22, 1991: The Rebel Dreams Of Oedipus Max </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Apr. 22, 1991 Nancy Reagan:Is She THAT Bad? </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ART, Page 87 The Rebel Dreams of Oedipus Max </hdr><body> 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. </body></article> </text>