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Ernst, Max(1891-1976)
The scandals associated with the name of Max Ernst during the early
post-war period have become legendary. They were sparked off by radical
actions designed to épater les bourgeois to the utmost. Yet the artist's
involvement in this type of activity was sporadic and temporary. He once
explained why this was so during a visit he and I made in 1967 to the
great Dada retrospective in Paris. Being a Dadaist by profession, he
said, was a contradiction in terms. There was no such thing as an
unchanging state of revolution. And to put the spirit of Dada on
exhibition, he continued, was no more than a weak illustration, like
trying to capture the violence of an explosion by presenting the
shrapnel.
"Behind this rejection one could sense a realization that the deep and
intense despair that had triggered off the first post-war works had been
rendered harmless to the point of cuteness by the subsequent,
reverential appreciation of Dada. The artistic character now so
matter-of-factly attributed to these works was by no means intended by
Max Ernst and the other members of the Dada groups. This is indicated by
the revolutionary, self-destructive elements that occur in so many of
Ernst's texts. Not only do they pillory and abuse established society,
their hate is equally directed inwards, expressing itself in
self-abasement and a radical renunciation of humanistic values and of
belief in utopias. After a phase of extreme disillusionment which, as
all the texts in Bulletin D or die schammade indicate, could react to
the destruction of war only by reviling and distorting established
values all the more, there gradually emerged works in which the pendulum
of destruction began to swing back. The radicality with which, in the
course of a few months in 1919, Ernst demolished the institutional and
definitional parameters of art both traditional and avant-garde was
followed before the year was out by the building of the world of
collage.
"The positive term 'building' is appropriate in this connection,
although it may seem an extraordinary paradox. A few examples will serve
to show what is meant. Max Ernst's rejection of art was given a
stylistically determined form. The works that now emerged were
structured by principles that governed the choice of materials and by
constants that determined their use. From the beginning Ernst knew how
to set limits on the infinite number of possibilities offered by
existing materials and forms. When he invented this new working
procedure based on quotation in 1920/21 he immediately recognized both
its potential and the dangers it involved.
"The expressive possibilities of collage seem so simple that one is
tempted to think that anyone could employ them to equal effect. Yet when
one reviews the works of this early period - the printer's plate prints,
say, those compositions made with the aid of old line blocks found in a
printer's shop - it becomes obvious that Max Ernst's brilliant
accomplishment consisted of having developed a syntax by which the
employment of this found material could be controlled. For all their
independence from traditional artistic techniques and the imitation of
nature, it is surprising how much stylistic unity these works evince.
Thanks to his stylistic syntax Ernst created recognizable links between
the works, which form a coherent sequence. Criteria of choice and
criteria of employment are everywhere in evidence. Indeed, the effect of
every Max Ernst image depends largely on the fact that it sets its own
limits. One might add, as a general principle, that the collages and
frottages (and the painting and sculpture derived from these techniques)
arc so astonishingly effective because their creator succeeded in
placing conscious restrictions on the arbitrariness and amorphousness to
which such semi-automatic techniques all too easily lead. Ernst not only
created individual, disparate works; more importantly, with the aid of
variations and series, he simultaneously created the climate in which
these works live and breathe. And one should note that it was a climate
his contemporaries found almost unbearably bracing. In an announcement
in die schammade for the portfolio Fiat modes - pereat ars Max Ernst
characterized himself, in an untranslatable pull on the German word for
uterus, Gebarmutter, as 'der gebaervater methodischen irrsinns', the
male mother of methodical madness. If we take 'methodical' to be the
operative term which reveals the essence of his procedure, we have the
precondition for the fascinating developments that now began.
"These are observations that run entirely counter to the first radical
phase of Cologne Dada, whose attack on aesthetic conventions placed it
closer to Duchamp and Francis Picabia than, say, to the Dadaists in
Berlin. This is why, in dealing with Max Ernst's work, it is impossible
to do without the concept of processing, the conscious reworking of
existing material. It is pointless to speak of anti-art in this
connection, because what we are dealing with, quite objectively, is the
genesis of a superb and far-reaching aesthetic. This is the point at
which Ernst, the artist, comes on the scene. We must face up to a
paradox: his early work had no direction, and was a far cry from his
subsequent Dada activities. His first paintings, done within the orbit
of August Macke, the Sturm gallery and the Cologne Sonderbund exhibition,
were as planless and stylistically inconsistent as his Dada period was
definitely articulated, a world of stylistically and morally defined
resistance.
"Again, the crux is this: Max Ernst's careful selection of seminal
imagery employed in collages and all the variants of collage, and the
formal criteria which determined the composition of the printer's plate
prints, rubbings, overpaining,s montages of photographic positives and
paste-ups of wood engravings all indicate the primacy of control.
Everywhere we look, we find invariables that oppose the seemingly
unlimited availability of the material, that place considerable
restrictions on its character and use.
"Let us try to define a few of the constants of this pictorial syntax.
The most important is that Max Ernst's collages, for all their
strangeness, strive for overall coherence and technical plausibility.
This 'plausible' imagery, unlike the papiers colles of Picasso and
Georges Braque, depends on an expurgation of the visible difference
between artist's hand and non-artistic quotation. The joins and
overlappings had to be concealed from the viewer. This is why Ernst
frequently published his composite imagery only in printed form, in
photographic reproduction or in versions later touched up with
watercolour. Thanks to these tactics of concealment he succeeded in
presenting collage as that which he thought it should be: a completely
developed and autonomous system in which the origin of the separate
elements is submerged in the final, total image. He was out to produce
irritating imagery in which, as in the perfect crime, every clue to its
identity had been erased. The joins between the collage elements,
moreover, were not so much physical as mental in nature. The hinges
linking one piece of source material with another had to remain
invisible, which also explains why leaps in scale tended to be avoided.
These would have given too much emphasis to the original meaning of the
elements, upsetting the coherence of the final image. It is easy to see
that such strict conditions limited the use of collage material to a
much grater extent than is initially apparent.
"The collages require a redefinition of categories, since the
fabrication of such imagery is bound up with a completely innovative
notion of tradition and with an extraordinarily intense involvement with
illustrations. A literal quotation of the illustrations employed would
obviously contradict the meaning of the new image constructed from them,
and also the circumstance that this new image must become part of a
defined stylistic context. Considerations of this kind served Max Ernst
as a guideline in making his selection from the plethora of
intrinsically neutral material available to him.
"The laws of Dada - this seeming contradiction in terms is one of the
most consequential results of a systematic investigation of the
aesthetics of collage in Max Ernst's work. A glance around his studio
will illustrate what I mean. Everywhere you looked there were stacks of
illustrated books, scraps of wallpaper, raw materials of every
description which the artist built into his works right up to the end of
his career. When one leafs through the nineteenth-century folio volumes,
illustrated with wood engravings, which were one of his favourite
sources, one is surprised to find that he proceeded differently from the
way one would have assumed in view of the enigmatic imagery that
resulted from his use of them. Spectacular depictions with Dadaist or
surreal qualities of their own interested him hardly at all. Instead, it
was the banal, insignificant, run-of-the-mill illustrations that
inspired him to pictorial statements of the most dazzling kind.
"In the collages various levels of meaning coexist on a single pictorial
plane. Confronted with this composite imagery we have no choice but to
apply the notion, familiar from traditional art, of the picture as a
unity, a totality. Looking at pictures has accustomed us to considering
the motifs that appear within an image as a whole. If we were not
compelled by the coherent nature of the collages to employ this
simultaneous perception, we might be able to perceive the elements from
which they are constructed individually and divide the enigmatic image
into intelligible parts. This involves us in a continual clash between
overall perception and a need for interpretation that fastens on one
detail after another; and this clash, in turn, is the source of that
unique mood produced by any confrontation with a Max Ernst image -
elements that are intelligible in isolation become ambivalent on the
level of composition and communication.
"This discussion of his materials and their processing enables us to
define the categories that determined what could enter his imagery and,
by the same token, the criteria according to which certain materials
were excluded from use in collage. After all, the principles governing
the choice and employment of material also define the artist's rejection
of an unlimited range of combinations of information in collage, what
Theodor Adorno once called its 'bad boundlessness'. It was Ernst's
refusal to accept information at random that led to the recognizability
of his collages as his own. His resistance to a world captured in visual
media was the basis for his style. For style is not merely a technical
category, but all ethical one. As Joe Bousquet once put it: 'For all of
the liberties he helped us conceive of, for every notion he discredited,
Max Ernst paid the highest price. His life withstood continual tension
between a creative furore that nothing could contain and an extremely
rigorous method based on almost incredible demands.
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