Born in Cologne, Max Ernst (1891-1976) was a leader of the dada movement in Germany. He invented photomontage—collages that recombined recognizable images, as distinct from the collages of Picasso and Braque, which played abstractly with formal aesthetic values. Settling in Paris in the mid-'20s, Ernst began painting in a surrealist style that retained his strange dada literalness. Later, he recontextualized illustrations from old books, exoticized botanical and zoological pictures, and finally returned to making paintings that seemed to sum up all of his artistic phases. After living in America during and following World War II, he moved back to France in 1953. Early on, Ernst had constructed an artistic alter ego named Loplop, Superior of the Birds. Ernst was a strikingly handsome man who married several times, yet he also looked very much like a bird. Gazing at himself in the mirror, he perhaps had the impression of recognizing an avian form that did not actually exist. In his art, we recognize a familiarity that we cannot understand. Dada and surrealism were influenced by the ideas of Freud, so it might be interesting to take a look at where our culture stands psychologically before looking more closely at Ernst's art. Recently, the National Institutes of Health issued a pamphlet titled "A Crisis in Cognition," in which the organization expressed concern over widespread mental fragmentation, feelings of estrangement from the physical world, and a loss of meaning—a condition that the report summed up as "the disruption and transvaluation of all known relations between the object and its environment." Television was cited as the main culprit, but also the Internet, e-mail, and cell phones. Forgive me, but I made the report up; there's no such thing. The quote is Ernst's description of his artistic method. It's remarkable how today's language of social and cultural malaise often precisely echoes modernist art's most affirmative goals. Maybe that's why Ernst is so satisfying to look at. He uses the very stuff of modernity to escape it. In his 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann asserted that artistic forms have been exhausted, leaving only parody as a fresh artistic possibility. Ernst seems partly to agree: He often manipulates pre-existing graphic or photographic images or synthesizes other artistic styles, but never in a parodic manner. Sometimes, he literally steals the contours of a pre-existing object, as in his techniques of frottage and grattage, in which he places the canvas over, say, a wooden floor and rubs it with a pencil, or presses a painted canvas onto a material surface and then scrapes away the paint. In Oedipus Rex, one can detect the influence of the illusionistic spaces of cubism and of the proto-surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, whom Ernst knew and revered. But the screwlike object piercing the finger resembles a device from an earlier work by Ernst, and the bird heads are precursors of Loplop. Oedipus is both Sophocles' hero and Freud's inspiration, but nothing in the painting refers to either. Rather than parodying other artistic styles or ideas, Ernst is obviously using them to tell a new kind of story. But we'll never know what story he's telling. [to be cont'd]
