Max Ernst, the philosopher who plays

Madrid,

Hippolyte Taine said that painting, like the perception it reproduces, is hallucinatory by nature and that hallucination, however abnormal it may be considered, is the essence of our mental life. His statement can help us a lot to understand the surrealist postulates, and not only those that were put onto canvas, but also those that reached sculpture or cinema.

Within the framework of the activities with which the Círculo de Bellas Artes commemorates the centenary of the movement and its Manifesto, directed by André Breton, its Picasso room now hosts a very extensive exhibition that delves into the future (we cannot talk about evolution ) of Max Ernst’s art over seven decades and, above all, in his links with the big screen. The purpose implies an important challenge, because this German author was a painter, sculptor, engraver, draftsman, poeticist and theorist – above all a gamer who did not set limits to his experimentation – and because he was related to Dadaists and Surrealists, but a no small part of his production had a romantic aspect and another of his references was Renaissance humanism.

Comfortable with his image and his celebrity, he posed for numerous photographers (there are many snapshots in this anthology that show us creating, resting or playing chess with Dorothea Tanning) and he also participated as an actor in quite a few films and documentaries, although that Physical presence was not the only way in which he became involved – we will see – in the seventh art. His very notion of creation already had a lot of scenography and fiction: the theatrical sets, the setting of his figures in fake settings or the use of wooden platforms refer to a consideration of representation that is very distant from naturalism, but also very close. to childhood, which is not directly present in his creations, but is present in spirit; Ernst was a fervent believer in the power of play.

Born in the industrial city of Brühl in 1891, he had already studied philosophy, art history, literature and psychiatry in Bonn, and was a good friend of Macke, before enlisting in the army in World War I. After his end he settled in Cologne, where he participated in a Dadaist movement already underway, creating unpublished collages that combined photography and woodcut, and in 1922 he would settle, although illegally, in France, where he was well received for the early surrealist features that he manifested. his work, in the form of a juxtaposition of distant realities that generated, it was said, sparks. Breton himself anticipated, already in the early twenties, Ernst’s close relationship with the cameras that would come later; assured him that he projects before our eyes the most captivating film in the world, without losing the grace of his smile. To achieve this, his sources would be, at first, Muybridge and Marey, pioneer photographers in capturing movement, and who at that time was considered almost a magician: Georges Méliès.

It would not take long for the artist to transfer to painting the principles he had applied to collage: an early example is found in the Círculo in Oedipus the King (1922), in which a nut and a pierced hand are unexpectedly large in relation to the house from which they protrude, without this implying a break in harmony. His first Dadaist forays seem to converge here with concerns typical of De Chirico and his metaphysical painting, with his knowledge of ancient Greek literature and contemporary psychoanalysis. The reference to perforation alludes to the liberation of the gaze to address inner worlds and would be the basis of the famous sequence of the cut eye of An Andalusian dogseven years after that work; and that is not the only element in Buñuel and Dalí’s film that will refer to Max Ernst. Speaking of Dalí, this Christmas the Círculo will exhibit at its Fernando de Rojas Theater the original curtains he designed for his first paranoid ballet, called Bacchanale.

One of Ernst’s most attractive compositions among his arrivals in Madrid is dedicated, precisely, to his friends: we can say that Au rendez-vous of friends combines the portrait with the manifesto; Furthermore, dated 1922, it already captures all the figures that would shape surrealism a couple of years later, conveniently numbered so they can be identified. They also rub shoulders with artists of the past, in an image close to collage in form and allegory in content: we are referring to Rafael Sanzio and Dostoevsky; and are accompanied by alchemical or astral symbols. Contemporary sources and authors make up here, therefore, an inspired and inspiring collective.

In reality, Paris would bring Ernst, also in the second half of the twenties, a large group of ties, personal and artistic, and his unconventional methods would be echoed by those close to him. He was one of the first to cultivate automatic writing, of course the frottage and, in general, all processes that involve automatism and the free expression of inner emotion. We remember what this technique of frottage: By rubbing a pencil on a sheet of paper arranged on grained wooden boards, he made small universes of biomorphic creatures similar to ancient fossils germinate. Thus he created his natural history in 1926, a testimony to his observation of nature, but also to his interest in the book of Genesis.

Near these works we can see a fragment of the documentary My life as a vagabond-My restlessnesssuitable for reviewing all of Ernst’s creative concerns, from his Dada and Surrealist stages in Cologne and Paris to his experience with the Hopi Indians of Arizona and his last return to Europe, passing through his Provençal and New York phases.

Max Ernst. Surrealism. Art and cinema. Circle of Fine Arts, Madrid

Throughout his extensive life he interacted with intellectual and cultured women; His female nudes, for this or other reasons, reach very global dimensions: they bring together references to the cosmos and myth, to the plant and animal kingdom, to minerals and mechanical figures. Part of his novel-collage has arrived at the Círculo The woman with a hundred headswhich could be considered almost a surrealist manifesto from its ambiguous title: in French, referring to that hundred teats It can literally mean a hundred heads, none, or just one very stubborn one.

That work, in any case, was the starting point for a medium-length film that Eric Duvivier recorded in 1997, a free adaptation. And returning to the cinema, we will find it in the first part of The golden age of his friend Buñuel: that woman with 100 heads could be the basis of one of the key scenes of the film, while two pages of the first booklet of A week of bonté could have emerged, in turn, from that film (The lion of Belfort). When Buñuel’s work was screened in 1930 at the Studio 28 cinema in Paris, works by Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Dalí, Miró, Man Ray and Tanguy accompanied the event from the lobby (they were bombed by the scandal caused by that film , the German’s was not damaged).

Not much later, in 1932, the American gallery owner Julien Levy, a pioneer in exposing the surrealists in America, dedicated two short films to our artist during a trip to Paris, both recorded in his house called The Moulin du Soleil; can be seen, for the first time, on the occasion of this exhibition and are titled Illegal film and Weekend at Caresse Crossby’s.

We referred before to A week of bonté: It is one of his fundamental projects and deserves its own section in this tour. This novel-collage is structured in booklets linked to the four elements and the days of the week and are based on clippings from nineteenth-century books and magazines, but without text. In Madrid they could see each other for the first time, in 1936 (they narrowly escaped the bombs), and again in 2009, on that occasion at the MAPFRE Foundation. They would also have their film, late but faithful: directed by Jean Desvilles, it was also called A week of bonté and comes to show the work on screen instead of in a book; in a frame-by-frame cropped animation, an exercise in redefining collage.

World War II would also affect Ernst, although he had not been in his country for almost two decades before: he was imprisoned in France several times as hostile alien and he remained in Marseille, along with other artists, waiting to be able to leave the country; That stage is recreated, although this time without historical rigor, in the recent Netflix series Transatlantic. One of the episodes captured without fidelity in that fiction is the exhibition that Ernst dedicated to Peggy Guggenheim in a banana tree; A painting present in the exhibition was part of it, The bride’s dresswhich in turn appeared in the chapter Desire from the Hans Richter film Dreams that money can buy (1947), which, closing the circle, was produced by Guggenheim itself. It is articulated in episodes, each one devised by an artist: in addition to Ernst, Calder, Duchamp, Léger, Man Ray and Richter himself joined. John Cage, among other greats, participated in the soundtrack.

Visitors will be surprised by the radical contemporaneity of the language of The Temptation of Saint Anthonya painting in which the saint is shown trapped between monsters with brutal claws and beaks worthy of manga; This composition would win a contest to be included in the film Bel Ami’s private lifeby David L. Loew, in a call that was also attended by the aforementioned Duchamp, Paul Delvaux, Dalí, Leonora Carrington and Tanning. The $2,500 he received as a prize allowed him to purchase land in Arizona. Ernst was quite graphic when describing the piece: Screaming for help and light through the stagnant water of his dark and sick soul, Saint Anthony receives in response the echo of his fear, the laughter of the monsters created by his visions.

He would remain in the United States for a decade, a time in which he focused his work on researching the cosmos and the universe and brought microbes to his decals that he defined as bacteria that fed his brain. He created landscapes as small as a toenail to underline the links between the micro and the macro, and even between the exterior and interior landscape. Bob Towers filmed him working on them almost like a medieval miniaturist.

The journey of this exhibition, which leaves no trace of his concerns to be addressed, closes with his chess designs (it was Georges Bataille who referred to Ernst as a philosopher who plays, and he would be filmed again in that task, in the movie 8×8: Chess Sonata in 8 moves); with his sculpture Hommecreated to be presented as an award at the Oberhausen film festival; with the beautiful astronomical-inspired engravings of the series Maximiliancombined with poetry; and with its lithographic series The soldier’s balladdesigned to accompany verses by Ribemont-Desaignes and with a clearly anti-war meaning.

The whole of Ernst’s production is a suggestive invitation to look outwards, but above all inwards: it illuminated a complex and exciting world of images in which the human and the animal, the organic and the immaterial, intermingled without hierarchies. , which he did not print using either technique. This is one of the most ambitious exhibitions that the Círculo has hosted in the last five years.