[3] There are artists—such as Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and John Cage—who are seminal figures, but whose work holds little intrinsic interest beyond its breathtaking formal innovation. Ernst is one of those artists whose powerful originality is too private to spawn an influential style—like Odilon Redon, for example. Thus he is cherished more than he is emulated. Vox Angelica, a compendium of Ernst's artistic phases, portrays Ernst as an art-historical epoch unto himself. Still, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's retrospective of his work, currently on view, should make him more culturally relevant. Surrealist exhibitions have been proliferating in recent years: A giant reconsideration in Paris in 2002 titled "La Revolution surrealiste" has been followed by, among other shows, "Dalí," currently in Philadelphia, and "Surrealism USA," now at the National Academy Museum in New York. There is one simple reason why surrealism is getting so much curatorial attention at the present moment: the movies. With their rapidly moving images, dialogue, music, boundless camera angles, and time-frames ceaselessly collapsing into the present tense, movies have raised the stakes for holding the attention. Surrealism's busy, simultaneous appeals to the conscious and unconscious echo film's multilevel allure. Of all the surrealist work, Ernst's dynamic mysteries are closest to film's hectic visual pace. His techniques of frottage and grattage make you grasp tactility through your eyes, in the same disorienting way that a film's musical score sneaks an idea into your mind through your senses. In The Garden of France, the partially concealed woman's body is like a movie frame requiring successive frames to complete it; the combination of painted and photographed images with words resembles film's rich sensorium. Perhaps all that Ernst's images ever needed in order to add up to a meaningful tale was to be animated against a musical background. Perhaps the increasing ascendance of film over the other arts is the story that has been hidden in Ernst's work all along. The Garden of France, Max Ernst, 1962. Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris © 2004 Artists Rights Society, New York/ADAGP, Paris.
