vaults in Recollections and Silence, 1962 (p. 49), punctuated by glowing reds that suggest the crematorium ovens, an eerie juxtaposition that may reflect the Catholic Church’s silence on the wholesale murder of Jews. Similarly, in Chronicle, 1964 (back cover and p. 55), there is a suggestion of a Gothic window on the right and, above a barrier of black bars on the left, a fiery explosion. There is a religious quality to these densely layered sonorous paintings of the 1960s that makes one recall that Ernst’s favorite painting was Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, a work that encompasses both darkness and radiance, the starkness of the Crucifixion panel, the triumph of the golden angel musicians in the Nativity, and the blaze of glory of the Resurrection. I think he wanted something of this range of emotions and grandeur of scale in the work that followed his return to Germany. During the same period Ernst did several moving paintings on the theme of Icarus, a subject he had first attempted in 1945 (1964 version, p. 53; a larger 1962 version is in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In his autobiography he recalls his alarm on seeing Breughel’s Fall of Icarus in an exhibition at the Orangerie in Paris. On a scrap of paper found in his studio were the words: “Recall Icarus legend—the father’s feathers—but would it be art?” Did he think of himself in that role, ascending with wings fashioned by his father and attempting to fly too high? Although Ernst harbored resentful and conflicting feelings about his father, it seems clear that in his paintings as well as his writing he distanced himself from Max, that he sought to live his own life very differently, and that he wanted above all to banish negativity from his art. On another scrap of paper, one with tack holes in it, he had typed in capitals the following words: “No work of art has ever come out of self-pity or hate, indignation or sadness. . . perhaps.” Whatever the underlying motivation may have been, he made two of his most poignant and radiant paintings using the Icarus image. The feathered brushstroke he had developed by lifting his brush in a certain way naturally suited the image of the dissolving wings, useless to stop the freefall of the plummeting youth. The wings are still illuminated but seem about to merge into the surrounding blue, while the sun’s heat is reflected by the reds in the sea below. Through his use of minute touches of paint and meshes of fine lines Ernst achieves the effect of a pulsating nature in which all substances merge and into which the hapless Icarus will be absorbed.
Jimmy and Dallas Ernst and their children, Eric and Amy, with the sculpture Capricorn, 1948, by Max Ernst in Sedona, Arizona, c. 1960.
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In 1982 Ernst circled back in time to recuperate an icon from his early experience, the Hopi Kachina. On arriving in the United States he had been driven by his sponsor to New Mexico, where he lived for several months with an anthropologist in a tent a few feet behind a Navajo Hogan. At the trading post that served the neighboring Hopi reservation he first saw a variety of Kachina dolls with feathered headdresses.9 Three years later he was with Max when the latter purchased the entire stock of Kachinas from a local trading post. In the 1950s he and his family stayed in the homestead turned over to them by Max and Dorothea Tanning and they began to acquire Kachinas of their own. The figures in Kachina White, 1982 (p. 79), hover like apparitions in a pale mist. They represent the Hemis Kachina, which traditionally appears in the last ceremony of the year just