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Max Ernst shown in the “Garden
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| Max Ernst “Surrealism and Painting” 1942, oil on canvas. |
By Virginia Billeaud Anderson
What better to cheer up our 401k shrunk, sorry selves than Ernst at the Menil? John and Dominique de Menil began purchasing art by Max Ernst in 1934, the year he painted Dominique’s portrait. Enlightened, sustained patronage is devoid of surface sentiment, but it is fun to imagine that Mrs. de Menil had a tiny crush on Ernst. Women found him powerful. Today, the Menil’s Ernst collection is the most extensive and art historically significant in the United States.
“Max Ernst in the Garden of Nymph Ancoli,” an exhibition of more than 100 paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures, is organized around the artist’s only surviving mural, “Petals and Garden of Nymph Ancolie,” painted in 1934 for a popular Zurich night spot. The recently restored mural is making its U.S. debut. As an exhibition focal point, it directs our attention to important themes and artistic techniques in Ernst’s oeuvre. Displayed are works from prominent U.S. and European collections, to which the Menil added its own, some rarely seen, works by Ernst. Any excuse to yank Ernst out of storage is groovy.
The reborn mural charms with colorful botanical figures and abstract biomorphic passages. A closer look reveals a naughty handheld phallic form at upper right that is balanced by a woman’s naked leg below. Beak-like imagery suggests this is beast bird Loplop, a recurring motif that was a dominant sexual metaphor.
Its dancing botanical, animal and human parts seem to celebrate interwar European life. Foreboding though is veiled below the surface. Ernst fought at the Russian front during World War I, a slaughter house Hemingway called “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place.” “Upon returning from that imbecilic war,” said Ernst, “his rage had to find expression.”
By 1940, there was more reason to artistically address death and devastation. Using innovative paint scraping and squashing techniques, Ernst created apocalyptic landscapes with hideous rock and decaying vegetation monsters. The monster with rotting flesh striding over city ruins in “Marlene” 1940-41 is Nazi obliterated Europe metamorphosed into a putrefied streetwalker.
These paint-rubbing innovations used to produce end of civilization narratives were developed while Ernst was interned in detention camps. The artist found a practical way to overcome war deprivation. (A man who would marry battleaxe Peggy Guggenheim to avoid deportation is “way” practical.) The paint-rubbing technique, called “decalcomie,” expanded his technical repertoire.
Prior to using paint scraping and pressing, Ernst invented in 1925 a pencil-rubbing technique (frottage), which he used until 1976. There are many examples of frottage in the exhibition. See in the “Age of Anxiety” 1925 nightmarish forest imagery made from rubbing pencil over floorboards. Creepy forest scenes were another repeated motif, inspired Ernst said, by scary childhood forest visits.
Paint rubbing and scraping allowed forms to appear somewhat by chance, adhering to the Surrealist canon of automatism and working from the unconscious. Even before Ernst took up with Surrealist Breton in Paris, he operated in the realm of fantasy and the irrational. The exhibition includes several mysterious pieces from the early Dada period. An example is the 1919-20 Picabia inspired drawing of bicycle wheels with heart and blood vessels. Stacked machine parts have been transformed into suggestively posed anthropomorphic figures.
Ernst’s 1942 masterwork “Surrealism and Painting” is hallucinatory and humorous. Loplop reappears with outrageous red and blue veined bulges channeling the sexual. The joke here is the bird is painting a canvas in Abstract Expressionist style. Given the dumb Surrealist Ab Ex rivalry, Ernst may have been beating his chest at the burgeoning art movement. It is interesting to know that pre-famous Pollock watched Ernst drip paint on canvas. Ernst abandoned the drip technique, but called it his “gift” to Pollock.
Dada Max loved collage. Culled from 19th century engraved manuscripts and catalogues, his collages were disturbing and metaphorically loaded. They surpassed in sophistication the kiddie level train ticket collages of the Cubists. One scholar believes Ernst equals Joyce in abundant allegories and complexity of associations. He certainly reaches up to Duchamp in exploring new artistic means. He was one of the most cerebral and remarkably original artists of the twentieth century. The exhibition runs through February 15, 2009.
Public Program
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 7 p.m.: A conversation with Menil director Josef Helfenstein and art historian William A. Camfield. Visit www.menil.org.
“Max Ernst in the Garden of Nymph Ancoli,” an exhibition of more than 100 paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures, is organized around the artist’s only surviving mural, “Petals and Garden of Nymph Ancolie,” painted in 1934 for a popular Zurich night spot. The recently restored mural is making its U.S. debut. As an exhibition focal point, it directs our attention to important themes and artistic techniques in Ernst’s oeuvre. Displayed are works from prominent U.S. and European collections, to which the Menil added its own, some rarely seen, works by Ernst. Any excuse to yank Ernst out of storage is groovy.
The reborn mural charms with colorful botanical figures and abstract biomorphic passages. A closer look reveals a naughty handheld phallic form at upper right that is balanced by a woman’s naked leg below. Beak-like imagery suggests this is beast bird Loplop, a recurring motif that was a dominant sexual metaphor.
Its dancing botanical, animal and human parts seem to celebrate interwar European life. Foreboding though is veiled below the surface. Ernst fought at the Russian front during World War I, a slaughter house Hemingway called “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place.” “Upon returning from that imbecilic war,” said Ernst, “his rage had to find expression.”
By 1940, there was more reason to artistically address death and devastation. Using innovative paint scraping and squashing techniques, Ernst created apocalyptic landscapes with hideous rock and decaying vegetation monsters. The monster with rotting flesh striding over city ruins in “Marlene” 1940-41 is Nazi obliterated Europe metamorphosed into a putrefied streetwalker.
These paint-rubbing innovations used to produce end of civilization narratives were developed while Ernst was interned in detention camps. The artist found a practical way to overcome war deprivation. (A man who would marry battleaxe Peggy Guggenheim to avoid deportation is “way” practical.) The paint-rubbing technique, called “decalcomie,” expanded his technical repertoire.
Prior to using paint scraping and pressing, Ernst invented in 1925 a pencil-rubbing technique (frottage), which he used until 1976. There are many examples of frottage in the exhibition. See in the “Age of Anxiety” 1925 nightmarish forest imagery made from rubbing pencil over floorboards. Creepy forest scenes were another repeated motif, inspired Ernst said, by scary childhood forest visits.
Paint rubbing and scraping allowed forms to appear somewhat by chance, adhering to the Surrealist canon of automatism and working from the unconscious. Even before Ernst took up with Surrealist Breton in Paris, he operated in the realm of fantasy and the irrational. The exhibition includes several mysterious pieces from the early Dada period. An example is the 1919-20 Picabia inspired drawing of bicycle wheels with heart and blood vessels. Stacked machine parts have been transformed into suggestively posed anthropomorphic figures.
Ernst’s 1942 masterwork “Surrealism and Painting” is hallucinatory and humorous. Loplop reappears with outrageous red and blue veined bulges channeling the sexual. The joke here is the bird is painting a canvas in Abstract Expressionist style. Given the dumb Surrealist Ab Ex rivalry, Ernst may have been beating his chest at the burgeoning art movement. It is interesting to know that pre-famous Pollock watched Ernst drip paint on canvas. Ernst abandoned the drip technique, but called it his “gift” to Pollock.
Dada Max loved collage. Culled from 19th century engraved manuscripts and catalogues, his collages were disturbing and metaphorically loaded. They surpassed in sophistication the kiddie level train ticket collages of the Cubists. One scholar believes Ernst equals Joyce in abundant allegories and complexity of associations. He certainly reaches up to Duchamp in exploring new artistic means. He was one of the most cerebral and remarkably original artists of the twentieth century. The exhibition runs through February 15, 2009.
Public Program
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 7 p.m.: A conversation with Menil director Josef Helfenstein and art historian William A. Camfield. Visit www.menil.org.
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