Word: ernstli
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Every artist needs some source of inspiration. Max Ernst, the lyric German subversive who was born 100 years ago, had one that carried him through most of his life. He hated his father, a pious Catholic art teacher who worked in a school for deaf and mute children in a small forest town south of Cologne. Indeed, Ernst wanted to kill Papa and what he thought he represented: the authority of age, religion, the state and the image...
...surprising, despicable -- not a bad thumbnail note for Ernst's own art, especially as seen by others. We have reason to thank the large soft pencil of the man with the mustache. Ernst was not a great formal artist, not by a very long chalk. But in the 1920s and '30s especially, he was a brilliant maker of images. Their strength and edginess radiate like new in the centenary Ernst exhibit, organized by art historian Werner Spies, which is at London's Tate Gallery this month and moves in mid-May to Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie. Long after the art movements...
...means for doing so was collage, which means simply "gluing." Ernst cut photos and engravings from magazines, catalogs, albums, marrying things that / didn't belong together. Collage was a static relative of film cutting, then in its infancy. Seventy years later, America sees in collage because it grew up spinning the TV dial. No such fragmentation of images was built into the culture of France or Germany in the 1920s. The relations between image and thing seemed solid. Here was something to overturn, and collage was the lever. Ernst fell on the common vein of reproductory images like a miner...
Over there, across the park, one saw the works of Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and others. The viewer could imagine what demons stood behind them: the creeping Jew, the scheming Bolshevik, the Negro with his thick lips and saxophone, the slavering pervert. In here it was all David and the Apollo Belvedere, noble simplicity and calm grandeur as $ interpreted by such heirs of Michelangelo and Polyclitus as Hitler's favorite sculptor Arno Breker and his court painter Adolf Ziegler. What kind of Germany, the two shows asked, do you want...
...another nail-biting week for the number crunchers at Ernst & Young. America's biggest accounting firm tentatively agreed to pay some $40 million to the Federal Government for faulty work done by a predecessor firm, Arthur Young & Co., on behalf of Charles Keating's failed Lincoln Savings. The settlement could be a bargain: it should keep Ernst from being named in a $2 billion government fraud-and-racketeering suit stemming from Lincoln's collapse...