by John Updike
translates literally as being outside your own country, but its meaning also encompasses exile and disorientation.… Dépaysement also defined a favoured Surrealist mood, the feeling we all get when we arrive somewhere new for the first time, our senses sharpened by wonder and tinged with anxiety.
The exhaustion as well as the disorientation of travel was courted as a means to fresh perceptions. Surrealists walked from Blois to Moret and back, having visions and hallucinations in the creepy Solonge, and took steamers to Cuba, the Amazon, the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Freud had discovered a new territory within, the subconscious, and dreams, drugs, word games, séances, automatic writing, virtually random collage, and impulsive exotic travel were ways of exploring it. There was a political dimension to dépaysement: direct experience of France’s Pacific colonies confirmed the Surrealists’ antagonism to the jingoistic, often brutally exploitative colonizers, and to the European establishment.
Of course, breaking through the shell of reason and accepted order to profounder truths beneath is an idea as old as shamanistic trances, Greek oracles, and the mind-emptying exercises of yoga and Zen. Rimbaud, along with Gauguin a stellar example of self-exile, in 1871 had famously asserted that the poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and deliberate “dérèglement de tous les sens.”
Gala, Ernst, and Éluard achieved a dérèglement of social custom with their ménage and their escape to Saigon, where the three reassembled. Back in Paris, Éluard described it as a voyage idiot, a stupid trip, and in fact their triune rapport was never the same. Ernst returned later than the Éluards and took up separate residence in a Montmartre studio; Éluard entered a tuberculosis sanitarium, from which he wrote Gala longing letters, while she had entered into a period of intensified promiscuity and a campaign, successful, to captivate Salvador Dalí. When this was achieved, she made remarks that McNab translates as “Didn’t I do well to ditch Max Ernst: he’s a loser. But as for Dalí, just look at the success he’s become since I took over!” The French for “he’s a loser” was “il n’arrivera à rien”—“he’ll come to nothing” or “he’ll arrive nowhere.” Life is a journey. One of Éluard’s poems to Gala during their separation began, “At the end of a long journey, I can still see that corridor, that gloomy burrow, that warm darkness where a breeze blows in drifting off the surf.” What the trio did in French Indochina, besides pose for a Saigon street photographer and make the difficult trip to Angkor Wat, remains mysterious. Éluard burned all of Gala’s letters to him, and hers to Ernst are lost; only her actions speak for her. Of the three, Ernst seems the coolest, the blankest. Gala had the satisfaction of being desired by two men at once, and Éluard that of his steadfast forbearance and affection; Ernst’s role is purely that of a taker—of the younger man’s wife, house, and patronage. Only his artistic diligence can be admired.
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The show at the Metropolitan is itself a long-enough voyage to induce some trancelike feelings, as we wind, “our senses sharpened by wonder and tinged with anxiety,” through the Tisch Galleries and the multiple switchbacks of Ernst’s techniques and styles. The show quits, in fact, well before Ernst did; only a few displayed works follow the artist back to France after his American sojourn between 1941 and 1953; he lived and produced for more than twenty more years, dying one day short of his eighty-fifth birthday, on April 1, 1976. The 175 items—paintings, collages, sculptures—on view are almost all meticulous and inventive, but Ernst was not a very pleasing painter. A German dryness clings to his brushwork, and his drawing has a stilted quality that makes Dalí and Magritte, say, look like Renaissance masters. His cleverness with picture-generating gadgetry covers up the relative sparseness of his formal artistic education.
The canvases that a viewer can wholeheartedly cherish are relatively few. Beginning, at the age of twenty-two, with a naïve scene of a family embedded in a forest, wryly called Immortality (c. 1913), and moving, after the war, to gaudily colored animals and villages in the manner of Chagall or Franz Marc (Town with Animals, 1919), Ernst arrived, in 1921—having momentarily put aside Dadaesque collage and fantastic mechanical drawings in the style of Kurt Schwitters—at the painting that Paul Éluard purchased: Celebes, in which the form of a Sudanese corn bin is transformed into a blue-green elephant, its thick ringed hose of a trunk terminating in a white cuff shaped like a crown. A chalky headless nude in the lower right corner and several fish swimming in the sky in the upper left submit the requisite Surrealist credentials; but this canvas in its firmly rounded central enigma manifests a presence achieved through painterly rather than quasi-literary means. Surrealism was a thinking man’s movement. The poet Robert Desnos wrote, “Pour toujours la peinture est grosse de parole, la parole grosse de peinture”—“For always painting is pregnant with words, and words with painting”—and to an unparalleled degree artists in the two media collaborated and crossbred under Surrealism’s banner. For the viewer it too often means an uneasy wait in front of a rebuslike canvas in hopes that its verbal meaning will dawn. Celebes needs no help from words, and is beyond them. The influence of de Chirico, whom Ernst discovered in 1919, is happily at work here, subduing the German’s magpie mind to a single dominant image, sturdily shadowed and outlined in black.
Saint Cecilia (1923), playing an invisible organ and half enclosed in rough tan masonry, is one of a series of encased women. This one seems less a victim than most; her delicate hands hover in midair at the same level as the nearby bird thrillingly standing on its tail. Woman, Old Man, and Flower (1924), a bit of a jumble as its title suggests, with its peg-legged lion-man and fan-shaped great headdress, is structured by a sequence of verticals and swept together into a kind of beckoning by the calligraphically outlined arms of the transparent central figure: some invisible force is being welcomed. The Forest (c. 1924) presents one of his recurrent themes—Ernst was born among the Rhine forests—with the jagged boldness of Max Beckmann. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1936), a borrowed title he was to use more than once, takes a leaf less from Manet’s than from Picasso’s book in its elastic distortions and neoclassic air; it has among its pale gargoyles the round-eyed cartoon bird that, under the name Loplop, was to inspire a Dadaesque series early in the decade.
Ernst, Celebes, 1921. Oil on canvas.(Photo Credit Ill.29)
Birds, rendered in contours that from across the room suggest the deformed and foreshortened nudes of Francis Bacon, take an especially alien form in his two paintings of identical style and title, Monument to the Birds (both 1927); suspended rather than flying, the birds seem wooden forms torn from a baroque organ. Blind Swimmer: Effect of Touch (1934) is one of Ernst’s rare abstractions, and a brilliant one, of a striped curtain agreeably rough to the eye yet flowing like water around the two interruptions, a white lens and a peacock-feather eye. Nearly as abstract, A Night of Love (1927), painted the year he married his second wife, née Marie-Berthe Aurenche, took its main lines from paint-soaked strings tossed onto the canvas, but seems unusually personal and vital nevertheless, with stylized breasts and grasping hands scattered on a brown blanket while one lover’s teeth, two glowing arcs in an emptied head, join the nocturnal background of stars. The Bride of the Wind, from the same year, seems also exuberant and ethereal, a horse galloping itself to pieces. His bride was the product of a convent education and ultra-respectable parents; they at first tried to get Ernst arrested for interfering with a minor.
The original exhibition including Ernst’s assaultive painting The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E., and the Artist (1926) was closed by church pressure because of it; at the Met, alone on a large wall and protected by glass against possible Christian vandals, it exerts a sensuous spell. Perhaps Ernst was spurred by memories of his Catholic boyhood to revel in the intensely local colors, the delicately painted halos (the Virgin’s casts a dotted shadow on her hair; that of the Infant Jesus is jarred loose onto the floor), and such tender details as the blush on the Christ Child’s spanked butto
cks, the Pieroesque tinted planes of the outdoor environment, and Mary’s impossibly widespread bare feet, blurred as if by the vigor of her discipline, which is administered with a gesture reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Christ imposing the Last Judgment. Though this scene cannot be enrolled in Christian iconography—it has no Gospel authority, for one thing—Ernst has created something iconic, which all who take seriously the doctrine of the Incarnation, and all it entails, cannot lightly dismiss.1
Ernst was a zealous technician, who after mastering collage went on to frottage, the producing of an image by rubbing a relief, and grattage, the same process applied to scraped paint. Both these methods of making marks tend, in my view, to produce stiff and standoffish results, though in The Petrified City (1935) and its superior successor The Entire City (1935–36) the buildings, formed by the grattage of Rajput wood blocks used for printing muslin, do loom under their huge full moons as ominous memories, perhaps, of Angkor Wat’s immense ruins, or as contemporary foreboding at the rise of fascism, with its merciless architecture.
Ernst, The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E., and the Artist, 1926. Oil on canvas. (Photo Credit Ill.30)
The technique oddly named decalcomania, however, was very fruitful for Ernst, figuring in several masterpieces around the time of his narrow escape from Europe. The process, related to the monoprint, was invented by his fellow-Surrealist Oscar Dominguez and involved putting paints on canvas, pressing a sheet of paper or glass upon them, and then lifting. The effect, as described by Pepe Karmel in a catalogue essay, “pushes and pulls the colors into strange, visceral ridges, like those on the surface of a sponge.” As manipulated by Ernst in Totem and Taboo (1941), Napoleon in the Wilderness (1941), and, with supreme effect, Europe After the Rain (1940–42), the effect is of coral or rotted rock spun out into structures populated, with the artist’s fine and patient brush, by growths and creatures and human survivors in the sinister wreckage. Europe After the Rain, we are told, was begun by Ernst in a European prison camp and finished in the United States—a precarious transit, in that dire time, for a crusty canvas two feet by five.
The year 1940 saw the production of the one canvas that must have a place of honor in any history of Surrealism, the magnificent Robing of the Bride. Decalcomania contributes to the uncanny texture of the bride’s feathery orange robe and of the female attendant’s trapezoidal headdress. Both women are naked, with long ivory-white legs that augur well for the unseen groom’s happiness, but something has gone fearfully wrong with the bride’s head: it is much too small, and sits atop her petite, appetizing breasts like a shrunken head worn as a neck amulet. But perhaps it is not her head; a single eye peeks through a bulky hood of feathers capped by an owl’s cruel beak and staring eyes. In the bridal chamber, with its checkerboard floor as in a late-medieval palace, hangs a miniature version of the same scene, without the attendants, and the long white leg and torso emerging from not a robe of feathers but a heap of corroded minerals. The tableau is erotic and menacing, and pierces close to the heart of Ernst’s only partially friendly feelings concerning the fair sex, with which he was so successful. The work hangs in the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice; after a brief farmhouse idyll with the English artist and writer Leonora Carrington ended in Ernst’s being interned by the French as an enemy alien, it was Guggenheim who managed to get him out of Europe and who became, in New York, the third Mrs. Ernst.
Decalcomania figures, too, among the teeming array of techniques employed in The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1945), in which Ernst declares his German heritage by managing to out-Grünewald Grünewald and out-Bosch Bosch. As Robert Storr points out in his catalogue essay, whereas Grünewald gave his saint a fighting chance against these diabolical apparitions from the animal world, Ernst’s Anthony is being helplessly consumed by what seems a swarm of magnified lice—the artist was, as we know from his earliest collages, a connoisseur of magnification as illustrated in biological texts. His compulsively horrific painting won a competition, sponsored by a moviemaker, over entries by Dalí, Ivan Albright, and Dorothea Tanning, who became Ernst’s fourth wife in 1946. Among the other canvases produced in America, Surrealism and Painting (1942) struck me as oddly consummate; Ernst’s rather arid and logolike simplified birds have become flamingos of a sort, iridescent and obscenely flexible, snuggling into one another while a long-necked hand works away at a canvas displaying the artist’s newest resort to technical sorcery: the mathematically pure ellipses formed by a swinging paint can.
In addition to paintings there are Ernst’s celebrated collages, at which museumgoers dutifully squinted, bemused by a parade of ungettable jokes. Ernst fashioned them with remarkable care, rendering the seams all but invisible, and with an excellent, unwrinkling glue. A furiously energetic melodrama surges through these nineteenth-century woodcuts—wood engravings, more exactly, mass-produced for popular magazines and novels before the advent of photoengraving. A fanatic precision guided Ernst’s hand as he grafted birds’ and lions’ heads onto these agitated scenes, wreaking mutilation and metamorphosis upon the frock-coated, mustached men and the déshabillées maidens caught in some Gothic tale’s toils. But how much of the hybrids’ aesthetic interest—their perverse beauty—should be credited to the original illustrators and painstaking engravers? A fair amount, I decided after leafing through my own copy of Une Semaine de bonté. Onto these mass-produced popular materials Ernst soldered an inscrutable message, dredged, he confessed, from dreams and childhood memories. The effect is a childish, sadistic one, of an insatiable, ingenious taunting.
And there are sculptures, some of which—the horned chess player titled The King Playing with the Queen (1944)—are familiar and others of which—Bird Head (1934–35), Moonmad (1944)—go somewhat beyond what he learned from the young Giacometti. The stone sculptures with which he decorated the desert home he shared with Tanning were present only in photographs in the last room of the retrospective. His life’s journey arrived, for a time, at the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona—dépaysement with a vengeance. But enlarged photos of Ernst in ripe middle age show that though he sported an American tan he carried himself with a Puckish poise that only a European man could project. He and Tanning returned to France in 1953, where he became a legal French citizen and, heavy with years and honors, eventually died in Paris.
The Enduring Magritte
A TRIBUTE written for Los Angeles magazine, occasioned by the exhibition René Magritte: The Poetry of Silence, at UCLA’s Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, September 17, 1996–January 5, 1997.
The Surrealists have not aged well. Dalí seems in retrospect to have gone from sick to slick, from sensational to sentimental, his intensity too much a matter of bejewelled surface detail. The celebrated collages of Max Ernst savor of yellow paper and dried glue; the whole principle of incongruous juxtaposition has been turned into an MTV cliché. And Miró seems too much the cartoonist, his linear fancies centerless and spindly. Shock value fades; enduring resonance is an elusive quality not always spotted immediately. René Magritte, initially regarded as a staid Belgian outrider to Surrealism’s Paris-based movement, did not command much attention until after World War II, but now, nearly thirty years after his death in 1967, enjoys a high esteem in the art world. A few years after a large retrospective show that travelled from London to New York and thence on to Houston and Chicago, Magritte is now on display in Los Angeles through early 1997.
Magritte is not just a curator’s artist; he exerts an incalculably large influence in the imagery of advertisements, of posters and, one can say, of thought. Before deconstruction existed as a concept, when the philosophy of signs was a matter of obscure technical interest, he promulgated an impeccably straightforward painting of a burnished curved-stem pipe captioned “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) and titled La Trahison des images (1929). The treachery of images is his constant, fertile theme. We stand before the painting with
our minds in a buzz of alternating contradiction: it is a pipe, that is to say, an image of a pipe, which is not, come to think of it, a pipe. The fine seam between the real and its image is tirelessly traced in paintings which are, after all, only paintings. A window frames a scene which turns out to be painted on the window glass (La Lunette d’approche, or The Field-Glass, 1963; Le Soir qui tombe, or Evening Falls, 1964) or, in La Condition humaine (1933), a painting on its easel blends, but for the visible edges of the canvas, with the landscape being painted. Magritte, a willing explicator—unlike many painters—of his art, said of this last work:
The tree represented in the painting hid from view the real tree situated behind it, outside the room. It existed for the spectator, as it were, simultaneously in the mind, as both inside the room in the painting, and outside in the real landscape. Which is how we see the world: We see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves.
Magritte, La Trahison des images, 1929. Oil on canvas. (Photo Credit Ill.31)
The tricks of trompe l’oeil bring us up against this inner nature of a reality; the world is what we perceive of the world, and if, as in Les Promenades d’Euclide (Where Euclid Walked, 1955), a receding road bewilderingly resembles a conical tower, so be it. Reality is a thin skin of perception; the panorama of sea and clouds in Les Mémoires d’un saint (1960) is a papery arc which surrounds an invisible viewer. It opens, like the illusion of the stage, with curtains drawn apart. The world is a theatre of appearance that, as Shakespeare’s Prospero said, “shall dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.…”
Dreams, given new significance and importance by Freud’s theories, were a cornerstone of the Surrealist aesthetic. “Pure automatism,” in which the subconscious was encouraged to take over the pen, would, according to André Breton, generate a fresh literature. Miró’s wandering line was the painterly equivalent. Free association, part of Freudian therapy, became, in Dalí’s medleys of limp watches, dismembered anatomies, and Spanish deserts, a doorway to a deeper reality, the world of our private psychologies. Few artistic movements have been as self-consciously promulgated as Surrealism, with as coherent and plausible a program, and yet the ground of automatism proved to be shallow soil, producing some luxuriant growths but much weedy ephemera.