REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Max Ernst retrospective
Ruth Berenson on New York today, Paris tomorrow
The full-length Max Ernst retrospective currently on view at New York's Guggenheim Museum is the latest reason why that institution has, in recent years, replaced the Museum of Modern Art in the affections of the novelty-seeking art crowd. Its Czech-born, Harvard-educated director, Thomas Messer, seems to have a feeling for twentieth-century artists of quality who, for one reason or another, have been under-exposed, at least in New York; in the last few seasons he has successfully presented comprehensive surveys of such relatively unfamiliar figures as Klimt, Schiele, Hodler and the Giacometti This year's attraction, the largest Ernst show ever — there are more than 300 items — is also packing them in. Europeans who will see it at the Petit Palais in Paris, where it opens on May 20, may well envy Americans who can progress easily from item to item merely by, strolling down the Guggenheim's continuous sloping ramp, Frank Lloyd Wright's balm to the museum-goer's chronic sore feet. Parisians won't have it so easy — but it's safe to predict that they, too, will conclude that the octogenarian Max Ernst appears here as a star of the first magnitude.
The show's organiser, Diane Waldman, who also (in an unfortunately pedestrian style) wrote the fact-filled catalogue, spent, we are told, three years at her task. It is perhaps understandable that in the course of her labours she fell so in love with her subject as to contend that Ernst's role in the evolution of twentieth-century art is as pivotal
as was Picasso's: Ernst represents and, in her eyes, dominates its irrational, romantic, Dionysiac strain as Picasso does its rational, classical, Apollonian. Her case seems somewhat over-stated: for much of his career, Ernst's art, despite its undeniable power, was highly derivative, even imitative. 'His claimed technical innovations — frottage (rubbing a pencil over a textured surface, something generations of children have amused themselves with); grattage (covering a canvas with layers of paint, placing it over a textured surface and scraping off selected sections); and what he called decalcomania (spreading paint thinly on a canvas with a smooth implement like a pane of glass) — all turn out to have been invented by others. This is also true of his admittedly exciting collages. Still, his importance — and not just as a pioneer of Dada and surrealism—is undeniable, and his influence, especially on the young American artists with whom he came in contact in the 1940s, has had lasting impact.
Born and brought up in Bri1111, a small place between Cologne and Bonn, the son of a devout Catholic; schoolmaster who seems also to have been an amateur painter of sorts, Ernst was apparently a rebel born, starting from the age of five when he first ran away from home. Though he briefly attended the, University of Bonn, he had no formal artistic training, learning to paint by studying the work of others. Instead of trying to imitate the academic artists his father: painstakingly copied, from the beginning he looked to what was new and modern, as is evident from a group of recently discovered pictures dating from his teens. The earliest, 'Woman in Red', probably painted when he was sixteen, derives from Edvard Munch, then at the height of his German fame; a sensitive self-portrait of around the same time recalls the linearities of Ferdinand Hodler, while a landscape of 1909, brilliant in colour, is modelled on Van Gogh. By 191344; he was aware of Chagall's fantasy and Grosz's social satire, the diagonalism of Kirchner and the extravagances of the other German Expressionists. Predictably, he reacted to his war experiences as violently as so many of his German contemporaries, proudly proclaiming himself "Dadamax“, .leaCier of the Dada movement in Cologne.' But within a few short years his hostility to the status quo, to what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Weimar republic, had expanded to include Germany and everything German, leading him to flee to Paris illegally in 1922 when the French occupying forces kept refusing to grant him a visa. Except for his twelve years in America, 1941-1953, France has been his home. He did not even visit Germany until 1951 when Bri1111 honoured him with a retrospective in its baroque schloss.
Despite this, and notwithstanding Ernst's prompt self-identification with the poets and painters of surrealism, essentially a French movement, what strikes one about his art when seen in extenso is how very German it appears. Ernst's stubborn insistence on the importance of content — he has never dabbled in pure abstraction — is, at the very least, not French. Moreover, his mysticism, his use of symbol, the way his emotions are expressed through exaggerations, distortions and incongruous juxtapositions have been characteristic of German art from the days of Grunewald to our own. The often mordant humour of the collages is similar to that of German cabarets and music halls of preand postWorld War I Vintage: the impish forms of his sculpture recall both Gothic grotesques and the masks which, to this day, are a feature of
• the Cologne Carnival. Certainly the haunting 'Forest' pictures hark back to the artist's childhood memories of forests near Brilhl where the deep foliage seemed to transform night into day and to be peopled with mysterious beings. His work, early and late, abounds' ,in references to northern art: his bird-like alter-ego, Loplop, might have been lifted from a Bosch fantasy; the 'Cities' series recall Schinkel's architectural fantasies, and the great grattage jungles of the late 'thirties, visions as eerily, prophetic of Armageddon as Picasso's contemporary `Guernica', recall both Altdorfer and the nineteenth-century visionary and mystic, Caspar David Friedrich. For those who like to pigeonhole, Ernst fits perfectly into the venerable tradition of German romanticism.
To the American painters of the, so-called New York School who first met him when he and they hung out at Peggy Guggenheim's 'Art of This Century' gallery during ' the war years, Ernst occupies a very special place; it is perhaps no 'exaggeration to say that American' painting might have followed quite a different course without him. At the time, these young artists were trying to break away from the provincial realism of 'American Scene' painting, but were attracted neither by the cold calculation of geometrical abstraction nor by the recondite subtleties of doctrinaire surrealism as practised by Dali, Tanguy and Masson who were then also in New York. Ernst, however,' seemed different, and his method of s probing the unconscious mores promising. His stay in America` seems to have had no effect-iin
art. Unlike so many of his American disciples, craftsmanship has always been important to him, and the ,exquisite precision with which he manipulates his material makes one wonder what he thinks of the crude primitivism of so many
Abstract Expressionists, their repudiation of reality, their scorn of tradition. For this eighty-fouryear-old revolutionary has always, albeit in his own unique way.; remained faithful to his past.
Ruth Berenson is art critic of the. American magazine, National Review
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