Welcome to the wild and fabulous world of Max Ernst "Beyond Painting."
If everybody will pause.
This is a wonderful photo of Max Ernst taken in 1941 by Arnold Newman and it shows Max
Ernst sitting in Peggy Guggenheim's apartment here in New York City where he lived out part
of World War II.
Ernst was born in 1891 in a little town just outside Cologne in Germany.
He went on to serve for four years in the German army during World War I, and he returned
from that experience traumatized to Cologne where he founded Cologne Dada.
So, this is the exhibition.
One of the fabulous things about this show is that it is drawn virtually entirely from
the Museum of Modern Art's own collection.
There are 100 works on view here and as you look around you can see that Max Ernst is
an artist who works on paper.
He makes print portfolios.
He makes books.
He makes oil paintings.
He makes collages and he makes reliefs.
So we're looking at a group of collages and over paintings that Max Ernst made while living
in Cologne in the 1920s, 1920 and in 1921.
So one thing
So one thing that's very fun to do in the show is to pay attention to all the little
inscriptions that he puts on things.
Here he's made it a little hard for you to see but if you look along the bottom it says,
"La Biciclette graminée garnie de grelots …” blah, blah, blah, which translates,
we did this for you, as "The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with Bells the Dappled Fire Damps
and the Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look for Caresses."
The way that he made this picture is he took a pedagogical chart, a teaching chart, that
was used to, I believe, illustrate the mutation, the metamorphosis of brewer's yeast cells.
So he takes this poster and the first thing he does is he turns it upside down.
He goes in with black paint and he begins to cover over...to over paint, to censor out
parts of the original image.
He adds along the bottom this wonderful little gray platform or stage which sort of angles
in like that.
And if you think about how, in old fashion, a Renaissance painting, the device that's
used to construct an illusionistic perspectival space, that kind of orthogonal recession,
as one of the key things.
But, of course, Ernst quotes it.
He sets the stage and then at the same time other parts of the picture are so resolutely
flat. he goes in and he adds little wheels and gears
and these great kind of flippy flappy...I don’t know what you would call them…fins
on the side of what was a yeast cell.
And it now looks for all the world like some sort of tightrope walker.
So he creates this great animated...I think one author has described it as a circus, right,
kind of a circus fantasy from something that at the start was prosaic and didactic.
So all of these are over paintings or collages that use found imagery in different ways.
So I’m just looking here…
“Weib, Greis, und Blume.”
So now, again, you get the little text here, his signature.
So Ernst, even before leaving Cologne, is thinking about...he's thinking about what
happens if you translate his collage or his over painting strategies into the larger format
of oil on canvas.
This work was one that he began in 1923.
He completed and then he went back to it later just like it was a found poster, a reproduction,
but it's his own picture.
He said one of the things that he loved about this was that it enabled him to achieve a
much insaner effect, right?
So a more immediate, hallucinatory quality that I think comes through.
Okay.
So should we look at other things?
Okay.
So what we're looking at here is one of my very, very favorite groups of works in the
show.
It’s 16 images selected from a portfolio of 34 that was called "Histoire Naturelle"
or "Natural History" that Ernst published in 1926.
The technique used to generate these images is called frottage which is a French word
for rubbing.
And if you get in close to any one of these, you can see that the way that Ernst generated
these pictures was by placing paper over found objects, found textures, and then he would
rub.
And then he would rub over those found textures.
So now he's gone from found imagery to found materials, again, another way of having an
assist, a collaborator, something, from the real world that he is using to provoke images
in his art sort of as a quasi-automatist technique.
And then he goes back in, right, and selectively adds details to transform what could have
just been an inert pattern into these strange beings and beasties.
He welcomed the way that reproduction, printing processes removed his image one further step
from the tactile material physical thing because it heightens the illusionism of them.
Anyway, this is called, this collage, "Loplop Introduces Members of the Surrealist Group"
and Loplop was Ernst's most beloved and well-known alter ego.
He described Loplop as a hybrid creature that was half bird, half human.
This was first published in a surrealist magazine.
It's almost an advertisement of sorts for who belong to the surrealist movement at the
moment this was created in 1931.
And as you go through it, saw this point out.
You can see Max Ernst right there.
There's Salvador Dali; Paul Eluard who collaborated with Ernst in some of his poetry books; Andre
Breton; the photographer, Man Ray; Luis Buñuel, the great filmmaker; Tanguy; Giacometti—they're
sort of all there.
Passing by I should point out that Max Ernst, beginning in the mid-30s, started to make
sculptures so we're very lucky to have some examples of those in the collection too.
And ,he in 1941, escaped from Europe and moved to the United States and here on this wall,
and this picture in particular, is one of the first that he completed upon his arrival
in 1941.
Its title is "Napoleon in the Wilderness."
It's work that he began in France before he left and then completed in the United States,
in California.
Apparently, he drove to with Peggy Guggenheim in her convertible on a road trip across country
from the East Coast.
It was produced using a technique that is referred to as the decalcomania.
The way that he makes all these different textures and variegated tones and colors is
by taking a pane of glass or paper, pressing it in wet paint and then transferring it to
the canvas that again produces a chance or a semi-automatic texture.
He wrote about this work subsequently as one that perhaps was an inadvertent expression
of how he felt himself to be at the time that he could empathize.
This isn’t a triumphant Napoleon in the wilderness.
It's not a victorious Napoleon.
It's Napoleon in exile on the island of Alba painted at a moment when Ernst himself is
living in exile.
The latest works in the show or the last work, the culminating work which is, in fact, the
most recently acquired.
It's a book called "65 Maximiliana" that Ernst created in collaboration with a book designer
and publisher called Illiazd.
so just in brief, what this is, "65 Maximiliana," is an homage on Ernst's part to unsung 19th-century
astronomer named Wilhelm Ernst Tempel or maybe it's Ernst Wilhelm Tempel.
I can't remember.
Anyway, Ernst is in there somewhere and the title "Maximiliana" refers to the name of
a planetoid that Tempel discovered in 1861 and named after the then king of Bavaria.
But, of course, Max Ernst I'm sure, with his penchant for self-reference and self-mythologizing,
must have loved that Maximiliana contains the name Max and that Tempel's first name
includes Ernst.
So there's always kind of that circling back.
We love concluding the show with this because if you think at the beginning of Ernst looking
at these small microscopic worlds, and then by the end of his life looking up right to
the planets and to the stars.
And back to his saying when asked, "What is your favorite occupation?" he's always saying,
"Seeing.”
This project and this homage to an unsung astronomer who has parallels with his own
life seems like a very poignant way to end.