[2] Creating a sense of story without actually telling one is one way Ernst fulfilled his goal of "the disruption and transvaluation of all known relations between the object and its environment." Like Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ernst's art could be described as a plenitude of images in search of a context that might illuminate their role. The story they tell always remains tantalizingly close at hand and just out of reach. Ubu Imperator, inspired by Alfred Jarry's dadaist play Ubu Roi, is an utterly strange creation consisting of utterly familiar things: the outline of a human body; eyes, nose, and mouth; the Tower of Pisa; a woman's long hair; human hands; a scythelike object; a characteristically surrealist dream-plain; the bottom of a spinning top. And all these familiar images add up to an unutterable enigma. To use another theatrical analogy, they are waiting for their clarifying Godot, who never appears. Indeed, the story-seeking viewers of Ernst are much like God-seeking modern people. Ernst's work is endowed with a quality the other surrealists lack: palpable, poignant mystery. Magritte plays games with familiar images for articulable purposes. The biomorphic shapes of Arp and Tanguy and the phantasmagorias of Masson don't look like anything we've ever seen. Dalí rarely depicts a recognizable image without absurdly distorting its aspect or proportions. Ernst is in a different category. We suspect that we've seen his images before, but here they have wandered into an environment where their obvious sense makes no sense—like a handful of English words in a long Chinese sentence. His most fanciful figures are as plausible as they are ungraspable. As in Ubu Imperator, every discrete element of The Robing of the Bride corresponds to something real. Even the peculiar creature in the lower right-hand corner is composed of realistic elements. Ernst is fantastic, not merely irrational or absurd. He mystifies reason; he doesn't assault it. The Fireside Angel was painted in 1937, during the final Republican defeats in the Spanish Civil War, and just as Hitler was about to consume Europe. Not since Goya's Goat (1820-1823) had an artist created such an uncanny portrayal of the demonic. The Fireside Angel's horror lies in its paradoxical touch of pathos and its grotesque citation of human feeling. The demon figure's rags are like a material impoverishment that has degenerated into mad fury; the small macabre figure pulling ecstatically on the demon's tattered clothes evokes love that turns into sensual cruelty. The picture's French title—L'ange du foyer—was the title of a popular romantic comedy playing in French cinemas at the time. Gide said that what made Kafka surreal were his sudden swerves to the actual. Proust famously observed that the most effective lies contain a portion of truth. In Ernst, the most preposterous fantasy, the most outlandish nightmare, has the uncanny intimacy of an event we have experienced but cannot recall. [to be cont'd]
