Word: ernsting
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Essentially untrained as a painter, he fell in with the German Expressionists in 1910-12 by sheer brightness of character. He knew August Macke, whose ideas about pantheistic nature were to reverberate in Ernst's work right up to its end. Macke was killed in the trenches. Ernst survived the war and emerged from its troglodytic lunacy with a deep hatred of Kaiser and country...
...first collage painting, Celebes, 1921, is one of his funniest. It started life as an anthropological photo of an African corn bin. This reminded Ernst of an elephant. Then he saw a swollen human figure in it -- a failed behemoth, which he associated with the absurd and nasty king of Alfred Jarry's proto-Surrealist comedy, Ubu Roi. Add to that a dirty children's rhyme he remembered from his school days, which in English would have been a limerick; it concerned an elephant in Sumatra that tried to, well, connect with its grandmother. The naked woman in the foreground...
...technical question of who "invented" collage fades to unimportance when you look at what Ernst did with it. Some Surrealist collages look as dated as Victorian screens, but his tiny, rigorous visions never do. By making realities collide, he slips you into a parallel world whose features are both precise and ineffably odd, where things are not what they seem. Ernst loved images that enumerated things: mechanical and scientific drawing, illustrations from 1900 boulevardier magazines, old catalogs. Their factual neutrality made their paradoxes weirder. Sometimes this serves mainly lyrical ends, as in the Klee-like plant-personages that rear...
...Ernst's work was continuously open to chance. The arresting drawings of his 1925 Natural History were made by laying sheets of paper on the wooden floor of his hotel room in a French seaside town and going over them with the (paternal?) soft pencil; the resulting images, altered and edited, received the name frottages, or rubbings. The name of the town, by an exquisite coincidence, was Pornic...
...desire to freeze accident remained with Ernst until the end of his life. After he escaped from Europe to America in 1941 -- his ticket was paid by Peggy Guggenheim, who was sexually obsessed by Ernst -- he lived for some years in Arizona, whose vast skies and mesas repeated the visions inscribed in certain Ernsts of the '30s like The Petrified City. There he made paintings by swinging a can with a hole in it over a canvas; these rhythmical dribbles were seen by Jackson Pollock...