MAX ERNST: DADA AND THE DAWN OF SURREALISM
Along with about 180 other works in various media from the first decade of Ernst’s maturity, roughly 1916-1927, this picture can be seen in a superbly installed and sharply focused show at the Art Institute. An intelligent alternative to the all-over-the-map museum blockbuster, this exhibit gives an in-depth view of the period in which Ernst developed many of the artistic modes he used throughout his career, offering a fine introduction to both his work and 20th-century art.
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Like other modernists, Ernst worked in many styles early in his career. Expressionism–in which artists deliberately abandoned earlier naturalistic traditions, using color and space instead to represent subjective responses to their subject matter–informs Flowers and Fish (1916), a brightly colored melange, almost a grid, of fragments of both. But despite the contrasts in colors and shapes, the work is extraordinarily unified, perhaps because colors and shapes are repeated: it’s almost as if the flowers become fish which become solid colors which become flowers again. One of Ernst’s first sympathetic critics saw him “clearly aiming at a symbolic representation of the human aspect of animals and the animal nature of man, or perhaps the vegetative commonality of all living creatures, including plants.”
Ernst described his discovery of the teaching-aids catalog thus: “The absurdity of the collection confused the eye and mind, producing hallucinations and lending the objects depicted new and rapidly changing meanings. I suddenly felt my “visionary faculties’ so intensified that I began seeing the newly emerged objects against a new background.” Apparently Ernst suddenly saw each page of the catalog not as a collection of unrelated objects but as if it were a single unified image–a real visionary leap.
In his excellent introductory essay, Werner Spies asserts that virtually all of Ernst’s art can be characterized as collage. Certainly his art can’t be found in the quality of his painted surfaces or in the rhythm of the lines in his drawings. (There’s an old joke to the effect that the Surrealists had so many nightmares because they knew how badly they painted.) If every line, every gap between lines, every fragment of light in a Rembrandt canvas is a window onto something beyond the visible, the solidity of Ernst’s forms tends to stop the eye at the surface, where one notices collisions between forms, which is what stimulates the imagination. In the drawing Baudelaire Returns Late (1922) there’s no special visual music in the lines of the staircase or of Baudelaire’s suit; what’s interesting is the contrast between the bland stairway setting and the strange object hovering above the banister, which Baudelaire appears to be pulling at with a rope.
Intertwined shapes and the suggestions of genitals are frequent. In an untitled painting from 1920 an abstract landscape against a black sky is filled with what appear to be strange plant forms; each has the quality of a newly minted being, yet each also suggests human genitalia. In fact these shapes are mostly the reproductive organs of plants taken from the teaching-aids catalog.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Christopher Gallagher, courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.
