Lebanon - Goethe Institute - Ernst's Art Contradicts Reality
Nishee
artist’s work
Helen Khal
Special to The Daily Star
Understanding and appreciating surrealist art is not easy, even when you’re
familiar with the Freudian id and dream theories that acted as its conceptual
catalyst. Often disturbing and devoid of visual harmony, ambiguous in emotive
content, obscure in meaning and pathologically imaginative in imagery, the
power of surrealism rests on the unsettling contradictions between reality and
fantasy.
Among the biggest names in surrealism is Max Ernst, the German-born,
French-bred, American emigre who was one of the first and most provocative
practitioners of the art of the absurd. This month, the Goethe Institute
together with the Sursock Museum presents 196 original graphics and 26
illustrated books from three different periods of the Ernst oeuvre, beginning
with the early Dada influence in the 1920s, followed by the dramatic move into
surrealism and then on into a later period in which the artist departs from
figurative images to clothe his surreal thoughts in abstract elements of
geometric or biomorphic origin.
While I marvel at the indisputably high aesthetic level of Ernst’s graphic
skills, I must admit that I’m emotionally left out in the cold by the
acrobatics of his surreal imagination, as much as I would be were I reading
Kafka. But I’m curious, and like everyone else at the exhibition, I closely
study each picture and try to make sense of it.
Let me describe just one: the print entitled Oedipus Complex taken from A Week
of Kindness or the Seven Principal Elements, one of the many books Ernst
illustrated. We see two sharp-beaked birds (father and son?) garbed in suits
and ties caught in a preparatory instant of flight against the backdrop of what
appears to be a medieval seaport village. From the window of the house next to
them a determined female hand holds out a tatting tool clasping a single
delicate feather.
The tensed faces and bodies of the bird figures convey agitation, fear and
bewilderment. Turning their backs on the seductive feather offering, the
bird-men sprint down a no-exit path looking for a way out, completely oblivious
to the ship masts in the distance that signal a possible escape route.
Would these images hold coherent meaning to most of us had they not been given
the “Oedipus complex” title? With this cryptic combination of the real and
unreal, the surrealist artist apparently wants to tax our minds. Ernst
consciously sought such contradiction in his work and once said: “Painting
takes place on two separate yet complementary planes … It evokes both
aggressivity and elation.”
In the exhibition catalog, the German critic Werner Spies wrote: “Almost from
the outset, Max Ernst possessed what he called a ‘miraculous faculty’ for
bringing two discreet realities gradually closer together until their proximity
‘produces a spark,’ a ‘surreal picture’ ... a picture that marginalizes
and annihilates the two original realities.”
Throughout his career, Ernst explored a variety of techniques and styles, some
of which left strong influence on a number of painters. Among them was Jackson
Pollock, the giant of American abstract expressionism, who recorded how Ernst
introduced him in the Forties to the gestural technique of dripping paint, from
which Pollock later developed his signature style.
Another important Ernst innovation was frottage, the technique he’s credited
with discovering in 1925, in which a design is created by rubbing a pencil or
crayon on paper placed over a textured surface. In his book Beyond Painting,
Ernst wrote: “I was struck by the obsession that showed to my excited gaze
the floor boards upon which a thousand scrubbings had deepened the grooves. I
decided then to investigate the symbolism of this obsession, and in order to
aid my meditative and hallucinatory faculties I made from the boards a series
of drawings by placing on them at random sheets of paper which I undertook to
rub with black lead ...
“I was surprised by the sudden intensification of my visionary capacities and
by the hallucinatory succession of contradictory images superimposed, one upon
the other.” One of his first, entitled Habit of Leaves, is included in the
Sursock show.
Max Ernst was no stranger to Beirut, nor to the Sursock. He came here in 1969
to exhibit his work at Brigitte Shehadeh’s Art Contemporaine gallery and
visited the museum, where he inscribed its official guest book with a typical
Ernst greeting not in French or German or English, but in four
indecipherable lines of surreal hieroglyphics.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Goethe Institute will be showing a film
(with English subtitles) on the life and works of Max Ernst on March 21 at 7pm
at the institute; and on March 23 at 6pm, the Sursock Museum will be presenting
a lecture (in French) by professor and art critic Gaby Maamari, entitled Max
Ernst: Painting beyond Painting.
Goethe Institute, 10am to 1pm and from 4pm to 7pm daily including Sunday. Runs
to March 31. Tel: (01) 334-133.