GERMAN

Ernst, Max
born: 1891 Brühl, near Cologne, Germany
died: 1976 Paris

While a student of philosophy, psychology, and art history at Bonn University (1909-1912), Max Ernst came in contact through his friend August Macke with the Rhenish Expressionists in 1910. As an artist Ernst was self taught, but he had close ties with many key representatives of the avant-garde, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay (whom he met in 1913), and Hans Arp (1914). An example of Ernst's expressionist early phase is Crucifixion of 1913. Critics ofthe period found iconographical affinities with Matthia Grünewald in this painting. "The center of the medium-format picture is empty", wrote O. Metzger. "The central axis is intersected by the ; forked cross on which the dead Christ hangs with widely outstretched arms. The fingers of the right hand are spread in agony. One is put in mind of the nail-pierced, cramped hands in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and of artists' discovery of Grünewald prior to the First World War." A much more plausible iconographical comparison, however, would be with EL Greco`s John the Baptist. Ernst had seen this painting in the Blauer Reiter Almanach, published on the occasion of the group`s first exhibition in 1912, in Munich. The composition of the background and the figure drawing in Crucifixion are strikingly similar to EI Grecos depiction. A further parallel is seen in the treatment of the heavenly signs. Ernst's expressionist view of Laon was done in 1916, when he was stationed as a war artist near the French city. The composition may well have been inspired by one of Delaunay's Laon paintings of 1912, which Ernst possibly saw at a Delaunay show in Cologne in 1913. After returning to Cologne, Ernst joined forces in 1919 with Hans Arp and Johannes Baargeld to found the Dada group Zentrale W/3 and launched into numerous Dada activities. In August 1922, Ernst moved to Paris, where he found a new circle of like-minded artists and intellectuals in the Paris Dadaists. His friends Paul and Gala Eluard invited him to share their apartment, where artists and writers regularly gathered to air their ideas and read poetry, organize congresses and exhibitions - and pave the way for one of the most significant streams in twentieth-century art: Surrealism. This was the period when Ernst began one ofthe key programmatic paintings of that movement, Au rendez-vous des amis. It was no coincidence that his first large-scale canvas (13o x 195 cmJ was a group portrait that recurred to a form of depiction known since the Renaissance, the friendship painting. Ernst depicted his friends gathered on a rocky peak in the midst of snow-covered mountains, during an eclipse of the sun. As in the stiffly ceremonious portrait photographs of the day, each person is given a number which refers to his or her name. Several compositional elements have apparently been borrowed from Raphael's famous La Disputa, in the Vatican. Others recall features of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, in whose art and writings Ernst had immersed himself. Such covert references to great art of the past were intended to emphasize the significance of the depiction. But its most striking feature is the strange gesticulations indulged in by the figures. The Surrealists, Ernst seems to be saying, have their own rules and secret language. Much speculation has been devoted to ferreting out the secret code used here - is it that of freemasonry, cabbalism, or spiritism? Actually it reflects experiences of the artist's boyhood in Brühl, where his father was an instructor at a home for the deaf and dumb. Everyone there was fluent in sign language and the manual alphabet. It was a matter of course for Ernst to link the idea of an arcane sign language with an early, formative experience. The picture's message may be enciphered, but it is clear nonetheless: The elect have gathered on the highest peak, during a solar eclipse (which from time immemorial has been a symbol of epochal change and historical watersheds). Masters of an arcane language, they are on familiar terms with past greats, and lead the way for those to come - the endless column of as yet anonymous followers extending to the horizon behind them. In 1925, during a stay in Brittany, Ernst discovered the technique of frottage. An early example is The Leaf, a preliminary design for Histoire naturelle, a portfolio of 34 frottage-drawings published in 1926. The leaves represented are neither naturalistically imitated nor shown in the context of their natural environment. The character of their surroundings, and their physical inter- relationship in space, remain indefinite, an additional provocation to the viewer's habitual perception. To produce just such visual provocation was in fact a prime aim of Surrealism. The year 1926 also saw the emergence of The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter. Here the realms of the sacred and profane literally and resoundingly clash. The motif itself can be traced back to the iconographical theme of "Venus Chastizing Cupid". Ernst's anticlerical attitude is clearly reflected in the painting, with which he settled his accounts with his strict Catholic upbringing. Shell-Flowers, a canvas of 1929 evocative of biological and geological phenomena, gives Surrealistic associations free rein. After the war, Ernst's style grew increasingly geometrical in character. This is seen in The Birth of Comedy (1947), whose title recalls Friedrich Nietzsche's essay Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music), and whose forms were in part suggested by the masks in ethnographic collections. During this period, which Ernst spent in Sedona, Arizona (1946-195o), he became intensively involved in non-European, primitive cultures. Already interested in ethnography during his university days, he now began collecting wooden sculptures from Papua-New Guinea, objects from the Easter Islands, and North American Indian art. The angular facial features in the Cologne painting recall the giant heads of the Easter Islands. Spring in Paris was done in 195o, after Ernst's return to Europe. "We seem to be confronted with a figurine", wrote H. Keller, "whose shape is intermediate between a water-worn stone and a thick-stemmed aquatic plant, with exaggerated constrictions and projections. It stands before a window-like aperture, and on its head, resembling a huge leaf, the expres- sion of a sleeping face is just detectable". Song of the Cicadas to the Moon dates from 1953. According to W. Krüger, it represents a vision of a landscape devastated by an atomic explosion, and repopulated by insects. The 1961 bronze sculpture Appeasement, a dual-figure piece built up of disk shapes, reflects Ernst's increasing employment of geometric forms, yet it also still echoes the Surrealist device of em- ploying existing objects, or objets trouves

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