Ernst Paramyths preview

MAX ERNST PAR A MY THS: SCULP TURE, 1934 -1967

O C T O BE R 2 2 - D E C E M BE R 5 , 2 0 1 5

PA U L K A S M I N G A L L E R Y 51 5 W E S T 2 7 T H S T R E E T N E W YO R K

Let a ready-made reality with a naïve purpose apparently settle once for all (i.e. an umbrella) be suddenly juxtaposed to another very distant and no less ridiculous reality (i.e. a sewing machine) in a place where both must be felt as out of place (i.e. upon a dissecting table) and precisely thereby it will be robbed of its naïve purpose and its identity; through a relativity it will pass from its false to a novel absoluteness, at once true and poetic: umbrella and sewing machine will make love. This very simple example seems to me to reveal the mechanism of the process. Complete transmutation followed by a pure act, such as the act of love, must necessarily occur every time the given facts make conditions favorable: the pairing of two realities which apparently cannot be paired on a plane apparently not suited to them.

in the sand on the beach. I shape a model out of forms, and then I start playing around, humanizing them.” Indirectly and full of allusions, he

points out that individual groups of works, such as the granite sculptures

from Malta or the plaster pieces from Long Island, were made while he was on holiday, or in retreats he sought out to get away from the big cities of Paris and New York. He decorated his houses in St. Martin d’Ardèche and Sedona with numerous cement sculptures. Later, in the other secluded spots, Huismes and Seillans, he worked on plaster and stone sculptures. But even his Dadaist work in Cologne and the Surrealist creations in Paris were accompanied by assemblages or objects, most of which no longer exist, or are only documented or known through photographs.

Besides associating his plastic works of art with carefree times of his life, whether vacation or childhood, Ernst also linked them to love, as he did in his first text on art theory, written in 1932, “Inspiration to Order.” Here, he alluded to the Comte de Lautrément’s famous quotation (“Beautiful like the chance meeting upon a dissecting table of a sewing machine with an umbrella”) to illustrate his collage process:

In front of this backdrop, the photographic portrait that Lord Snowdon took of Max Ernst working on the plaster model of Capricorne, 1963, should be thought of as a deliberately staged record; his portrait is a visual translation of Ernst’s artistic confessional, unifying sculptural work and love. above Lothar and Loni Pretzell, Dorothea Tanning, and Max Ernst, Huismes, 1961, with Le génie de la Bastille. Photos courtesy Jürgen Pech, Bonn.

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At the turn of the century this absolutely extraordinary and unique ensemble found a new home. Thanks to the engagement of the Kreissparkasse Cologne, the artist’s personal collection was secured for the artist’s hometown of Brühl, as a permanent loan to the Max Ernst Museum. With fifty-nine bronze sculptures and one work in stone, this extensive, top-quality collection represents ninety percent of the bronzes that Ernst produced during his lifetime. The exceptional collection contains works of art from a period of over forty years, from the 1930s to the 1970s, and thus allows a concentrated perspective of the artist’s sculptural œuvre. In acquiring the ensemble of sculptures, the Kreissparkass Cologne made an important investment in the future of the Rhineland and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, setting an extremely desirable, new accent in cultural policy.

This photograph was part of the exhibition in the artist’s hometown of Brühl, Max Ernst – Photographic Portraits and Documents, which celebrated the artist’s one hundredth birthday and later traveled to Seillans in the south of France, where Ernst lived in his later years. The home of Ernst’s friend and biographer, Patrick Waldberg, contained several stories of history, allowing visitors to go on a journey through time to the various stations of Ernst’s life: his childhood and youth in Brühl, university years in Bonn, military service in World War I, the Dada era in Cologne and the two Dada meetings in the Tyrol in the early 1920s, his move to Paris and participation in the Surrealist movement, designing his house in Saint-Martin d’Ardèche in the late 1930s, his defamation in Nazi Germany as a “degenerate” artist, internment by the Vichy regime in France and immigration to the United States, the early years in New York, his friendship with the artist Dorothea Tanning and their marriage, building a log cabin in Sedona, Arizona, which was expanded with a stone structure with friezes of masks, the couple’s return to Europe in the early 1950s, and finally, his residences and studios in Huismes and Seillans.

A small selection of the works were shown in late 2003 in North RhineWestphalia’s new state agency in Berlin. The bronze sculpture, The King Playing with the Queen (acquired by the Max Ernst Foundation two years prior with financial assistance from the Kulturstiftung der Länder in Berlin, the State of North RhineWestphalia’s Stiftung Kunst und Kultur in Düsseldorf, the Federal Commisson for Cultural and Media

Dorothea Tanning traveled to see the show in Seillans and I found out that Max Ernst’s personal collection of his bronzes was still Affairs, and the Landschaftsverband Rheinland), in her possession. Over the years, the idea was added to the presentation, along with the bronze developed of showing both groups of works, the sculpture, An Anxious Friend/Un ami empressé, which city of Brühl’s photographic collection, and the was on loan from the German federal government. bronze sculptures all together—his œuvre in an The new building, whose halls are flooded with light, actual space, surrounded by photographs of his offered the ideal setting for a sculpture exhibition. life. Sune Nordgren first realized the concept Colorful pedestals allowed the works to be positioned in 1995, presenting both life and work in the in a free and richly varied manner, while also pointing wide, bright halls and individual galleries of the out that the groups are organized according to the Malmö Konsthall (p.14). The show was picked places and times in which they were created. Works up by other institutions and eventually became from 1934/35 were assigned the color red, a reference a traveling exhibition. The Yorkshire Sculpture to the Surrealist revolution in Paris; the groups Ernst Park, home to Henry Moore’s work, paid created during his American exile in the summer of MA X ERNST tribute to Ernst; here, the show was opened by 1944 on Long Island were assigned an orange tone George Melly, author, jazz musician, and friend reminiscent of “Indian summer.” For the 1948 mask of the Surrealists. In 1996 Ida Gianelli hosted the show on the entire top friezes from Sedona, yellow expressed the vast barrens of the Arizona floor of the Castello di Rivoli near Turin. Later, the exhibition went to desert; green was reserved for the sculptures made in the 1950s and the Museu Brasileiro da Escultura Marillisa Rathsam in Sao Paulo, the 1960s in Huismes, the garden of France; and, finally blue accompanied Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt in Austria, the Boyman-van Veunigen Museum the works from 1973/74, referring to Seillans in the south of France in in Rotterdam, and finally, in 2000, the Tokyo Station Gallery, across the Mediterranean region (p.14). from the imperial palace in the capital of Japan.

It’s like child’s play; I do it in the same way you play in the sand on the beach.

I shape a model out of forms, and then I start playing around, humanizing them.

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DRE A M ROSE 1959 bronze 11 1/2 x 9 5/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 29.2 x 24.4 x 23.5 cm

The little creature known as Dream Rose has found its place. Its four paws—inspired by shell shapes, which Max Ernst eventually cast in bronze—take up the entire circular base, although the feet jut out slightly from the rounded edges. The body ends in an equally round collar, out of which rises a truncated cone. Two years later, Ernst used the circular shape and truncated cone to make the dress for his Woman from Tours. The footprint for La Tourangelle, however, is employed as the face for Dream Rose. The creature sticks out its tongue at the viewer, and its semicircular eyes are protected by a surrounding indentation. Curiosity and fear are both shown to advantage.

“Dream Rose” was the name that Ernst and Dorothea Tanning gave to one of the dogs they had owned since their initial meeting in 1942; Ernst traded the first one in New York for a painting. Over time, the dog became an emblematic animal in Tanning’s work; in her memoirs, Tanning mentions the first dog, a Lhasa terrier named Kachina, in her description of Ernst’s move into her apartment: “A glory of objects and pictures expanding my rooms, making other worlds out of my walls. And as if that were not enough, the Hopi idols, Northwest coast wolf mask, New Guinea shields. There was a totem pole that just touched the ceiling. A little dog named Kachina came with him and sat trembling under the Eskimo potlatch . . . standing between the two front windows.”

J.P.

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above, right

above, left Head of a Bird, 1948, oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches, 54 x 54 cm. Private Collection.

Max Ernst and Julien Levy, with the plaster of Jeune homme au cœur battant, Great River, Long Island, 1944.

Courtesy of the Estate of Jean F. Levy, and the Julien Levy Estate and/or the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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The work has multiple facets, not just formally, but in terms of content, as well.

On an initial interpretive level, the name can refer to Flora, the Roman goddess of spring. Yet, the fish tail expands the floral reference into the context of fauna.

Besides her flower shape, the young girl also has the figure of a mermaid. The openly ambiguous figure also embraces the theme of space, and a comparison of it and the painting Il ne voit pas – Il vois (Nageur aveugle) from 1946 suggests this (p.78). Both the painting’s title, He doesn’t see – he sees (Blind Swimmer), and its depiction of a head with one eye open and the other closed, address the notion of expanded vision, the internal and external Surrealist gaze. This programmatic image of enhanced perception visualizes the dissolution of opposites, which André Breton proclaimed at the start of his “Second Manifeste du Surréalisme” (1929): Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.

The curving lines that run through the face in the painting, circle around the eyes and even penetrate into its surroundings on the right side, correspond to the sculpture’s lines, which extend from the center of the plate out to its edges. In 1935, Ernst had examined the contorted space of non-Euclidean geometry in his sculpture, Gai (p.52), and these two works, created a decade later, demonstrate his renewed interest in the notion of expanding space. Breton’s “certain point of the mind” in Surrealism shifts toward the notion of potentiating ideas and possibilities and the idea of infinite space.

J.P.