Word: ernsting
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...Rebellious, heterogeneous, full of contradiction, [my work] is unacceptable to specialists of art, culture, morality. But it does have the ability to enchant my accomplices: poets, pataphysicians* and a few illiterates." Thus Max Ernst (tongue poked its usual quarter-length into one rubicund cheek) summed up his own career at the age of 68. "Accomplices" was the key word, for it is hard to look at a Max Ernst without feeling a pact between his secret language and one's own fantasies. The carnivorous or petrified landscapes, the enchanted pencil forests, the enigmatic rooms in which sinister things happen...
Twenty years ago, Ernst was still a minority taste (a large minority, it is true). But when he died last week in Paris, one day short of his 85th birthday, a chapter in the history of modern culture closed. Ernst was our century's incarnation of Hermes, the agile trickster, and we will not see his like again. He was, with the more phlegmatic Rene Magritte, the best of all the artists connected with surrealism-the master of the "alternative" tradition of mystery, unreason and demonic...
Childhood endowed Ernst with a rich compost of obsessions. His father was a fiercely authoritarian Roman Catholic, an amateur painter who taught in a school for deaf-mutes in the Rhineland town of Brühl. Little Max briefly persuaded this eccentric sire that he was the child Jesus. Memories of this sort underlie Ernst's most notorious thrust of anticlerical wit, a spanking Madonna entitled The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses (1926). When his baby sister was born and his favorite bird, a pink cockatoo, died on the same day in 1906, a whole...
...Ernst as a nervous, impressionable boy, in constant friction with authority, was in every way the father of the surrealist man: he even read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. It was World War I that clinched Ernst's attitudes to authority. He spent the war years in the German army, in both France and Poland. When he came out of the army he found comradeship with a generation of gifted, irascible young .intellectuals and artists whose loathing of that "whole immense Schweinerei of the imbecilic war" crossed the frontiers of Europe: Jean Arp and Tristan Tzara in Zurich...
...more intimate exhibits at the Busch: Ernst Barlach, the "Transformation of Good," woodblock prints...