Word: ernsting
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...impossible to name all the artists or point out all of the outstanding works. Miro, Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, de Stael, Matisse, Kandinsky, Vlamink--they are all there. Three very gentle and humourous Dubuffet's, a marvelous Miro bull, Max Ernst's flowers with sea-shell impressions for petals are examples of traditionally but well represented artists. Picasso steps out of the norm with a stage curtain painted for Diaghilev's Russian Ballet, recapturing Paris's sense of community, in contrast to the unique achievements of each artist separately...
...Ernst show, "Works on Paper," now at the Busch-Reisinger is a connoisser's show, well organized, comprehensive, and, among other things, it reunites two important series of Ernsts works. Yet it is all too raisonne; the daring, the shock, the excitement of Ernst and the Dadaist-Surrealists seems to have escaped...
...Ernst belonged to both movements, and played a particularly important part in developing new techniques for executing the new art forms. It was he who first painted by taking a can of paint with a small hole in it and-swinging it above his canvas. The so-called frottage, producing an image by placing paper over a surface and rubbing it with a pencil and later with paints, was his invention as well. It transferred the three dimensional surface of the object directly onto the two-dimensional surface of the paper...
Such provocation is not forthcoming, however, from most of the works. "La Petite Fille Qui Voulet Entrer a Carmel" is a large collection of plates from a novel by Ernst, which, though they contain strange conglomerations of figures pasted together, and remind us of the association between surealist art and literature, are strangely static and uninteresting as they hang, a quality which unfortunately repeats itself throughout the show. This is partially due to the limited nature of the exhibit--that it is mainly pencil and photoengraving on paper and therefore not so powerful or organically real as much work...
...Ernst, in his own writings, returns again and again to a strangely fascinating sentence: "Enter, enter, have no fear of being blinded. . . ." He seems to say--don't be afraid to face disturbing images, don't be afraid of the subconscious they provoke. The show is certainly worth entering, but there is little fear of being blinded...