The magical art of Max Ernst on display in Milan – Daniele Cassandro

In his 1957 book, The magical art, André Breton tried to reread the entire history of art from a surrealist perspective. He started from prehistoric art and reached the avant-garde, always following the anti-positivist thread of spirituality, the unconscious and magic. Speaking of modern art, he wrote that “all the painting that counts in this first half of the twentieth century developed under the sign of de Chirico and the master of improvisation (Kandinskij)”. Later he added that the needle of this de Chirico-Kandinskij balance was Marcel Duchamp, “the great secret initiator of contemporary sensibility”.

Difficult to blame him, yet visiting the great Milanese retrospective dedicated to Max Ernst and curated by Martina Mazzotta and Jürgen Pech, one cannot help but think of the German master as a sort of additional needle of that ideal balance: a phantom needle that moves across the spectrum of modern painting according to a system of weights and measures of its own.

The ductility and polymorphism of Max Ernst, born in Brühl in the German region of Rhineland in 1891 (therefore a little younger than Duchamp) are evident. The first rooms of the exhibition follow a chronological criterion which will then fall apart in subsequent, more thematic rooms, precisely to keep up with its impressive variety of themes and techniques.

Prophet of contemporary art
The first drawings tell of the development of his style: from a youthful pencil portrait of his sister Loni in 1909 (happy in the sign but still immature) we pass to a Seated woman with hat from 1913 which, with its broad and decisive graphite strokes, already reveals a good familiarity with German expressionism. Ernst from 1911 was a friend of August Macke, one of the protagonists of the painting movement of the Blue Reiter (Blue Knight) which was also headed by Kandinskij. The encounter with Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysics takes place in 1919, when Ernst, on a visit to Munich, stops at the Goltz bookshop where he leafs through an issue of the Italian magazine Plastic values.

At the age of twenty-eight, Max Ernst already knows the two extremes of the balance of modern painting of which André Breton spoke, the spiritual colorism of Blaue Reiter (and of Kandinskij) and the alienating landscapes of de Chirico from Ferrara. Starting from that base, he begins a tireless experimentation, artistic but also of life, which will last until 1976, the year of his death. From the early twenties he experimented with collages and photomontages, very different from glued paper of Cubists and Dadaists. If the Cubists used collage as a means to bring fragments of everyday life into the picture – sheet music, newspaper, sequins and sequins of the variety – Ernst used it to create a hermetic and personal system of signs from scratch: he fished among the illustrations more obsolete with a taste for the démodé discovery that today we would define camp and that we are used to seeing in so much contemporary art.

On display we see some plates of his collage-novel A week of goodness (1934, recently reprinted by Adelphi) who assemble shoddy illustrations from addendum novels of love or adventure, clippings of old encyclopedias in a way that, with a different sign, passed from surrealism to pop art.

Room after room, theme after theme, technique after technique, Max Ernst presents himself to today’s visitor as a kind of magician and prophet of contemporary art. Oedipus the king, a large canvas from 1922, looks like the remix of a painting by de Chirico, but with its clear fifteenth-century perspective all busted: a large hand emerges from a brick wall and holds out a walnut pierced by a bow and an arrow, which they stick like pins into two creatures with their necks trapped by a masonry structure. One of the two is a bird with human eyes and rigged as a slingshot of the variety. The Manifesto of surrealism by André Breton will be released only two years later, on October 18, 1924, but Oedipus the king it is already a pictorial manifesto: the hermeticism of symbols, Freudian themes, the dream as a mine of themes and motifs and a disturbing sense of sexual taboo. In the Kiss (1927), from the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice (Ernst had been briefly married to Guggenheim in the early 1940s), we see a fusion between Ernst’s dreamlike and metaphysical surrealism with Picasso’s plastic and sensual one: the lands are still those by de Chirico, but the turquoise of the sky on which the two figure-sculptures stand out is reminiscent of that of certain bathers by the Spanish artist.

From the same year are the surrealist landscapes: Forest of red thorns, Forest and dove (in which the theme of the stylized bird recurs as in certain pre-Columbian art) and above all the Forest of the Guggenheim collection, with its totem trees, full of mysterious signs and engravings.

It’s hard to imagine the covers of post-war science fiction pocket novels without these twilight and eerie landscapes. With the Spanish War and the approach of the Second World War (Ernst had fought as a boy in the first) Ernst’s painting becomes more distressing but also more ironic. The angel of the hearth (1937), on loan from a private Swiss collection, is once again a kind of bird-man, a Frankenstein made up of colored parts of other creatures. The figure may appear enraged or engaged in a frenzied dance. “I painted it after the fall of the republicans in Spain”, explained Ernst in a television interview: “The angel of the hearth is an ironic title for a kind of wader who destroys and annihilates everything in its path. This was my impression of what the world was heading for, and I was right ”.

The angel of the hearth also anticipates monstrous creatures born in the postwar period in popular culture: Japanese post-atom monsters like Godzilla or certain gigantic creatures on the covers of US comic magazines like Tales to astonish e Strange tales. The further one advances in the exhibition halls, the clearer it is how surrealism, with its experimentalism and what today we would call multimedia, influenced all the arts, even the most popular and low-key ones, of the post-war period. Ernst himself seems not to care about the distinction between art for art and applied art: he designs his catalogs, illustrates his stories, creates sculptures, jewels and dishes.

The porosity of Max Ernst’s art and his ability to penetrate even the practice of younger generations is evident in a 1943 work entitled The year 1939. The work is a collage on paper made during the period in which he lived with Peggy Guggenheim on Cape Cod. A skeletal trunk stirs its disjointed limbs and all around a series of disordered signs, of rapid spots of black ink give a rapid sensation of movement .

Ernst had achieved that effect by piercing a can and filling it with a black color. The perforated can was tied to a two-meter long rope which was then made to swing on the sheet: the randomness of the swing created effects that were only partly dependent on the artist’s will. It was a variant of the many surrealist automatism practices practiced by Ernst since 1919 between scraping, rubbing e overpainting. Some young US painters are struck by this technique and one in particular, Jackson Pollock, will call it dripping (dripping) and, involving his whole body and very large canvases, he will use it as a base for theaction painting.