Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting between the Wars 9780226029313

Citation preview

prehistoric future

Prehistoric Future max ernst and the return of painting between the wars ralph ubl

Translated by Elizabeth Tucker

the university of chicago press Chicago and London

Ralph Ubl is professor

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

of art history at the

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

University of Basel

Originally published as Prähistorische Zukunft: Max Ernst und die

in Switzerland.

Ungleichzeitigkeit des Bildes © 2004 Wilhelm Fink Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Paderborn / Germany English translation © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in China 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-82372-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-02931-3 (e-book) The translator would like to thank Stephanie Ezrol for her help with the French passages. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ubl, Ralph. [Prähistorische Zukunft. English] Prehistoric future: Max Ernst and the return of painting between the wars / Ralph Ubl; translated by Elizabeth Tucker. pages; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-82372-0 (cloth: alkaline paper)—isbn 978-0226-02931-3 (e-book) 1. Ernst, Max, 1891–1976—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ernst, Max, 1891–1976—Influence. 3. Painting, Modern—20th century—History. 4. Dadaism. 5. Surrealism. I. Title. n6888.e7u2413 2014 709.2—dc23

2013002936

o This paper meets the requirements of ansi / niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

contents

Preface vii Introduction 1 1 From Dada to Surrealism: The Ghost Story of Mimesis 13 2 Natural History in Service to the Surrealist Revolution 64 3 Max Ernst and Freud 111 4 Prehistory and Modern History: The Return of the First World War 131 Excursus: The Earth: A Formal History of a Theme 160 5 Prehistory and Modern History: Europe after the Rain, 1933 172 Afterword: Walter Benjamin and Max Ernst 192 Notes 203 Index 240 Plates follow page 106.

preface

I wrote this book in Vienna and Berlin between 1998 and 2002. It was first published in 2004. For the present translation, I left the main body of the German original unaltered except for some minor clarifications and corrections of factual errors. The introduction has been completely rewritten and a new afterword added. These two parts include references to scholarly work published after 2004 that is of particular importance to this study. Looking back at the various stages of my work on Max Ernst, I am filled with gratitude for the support I enjoyed along the way. First of all, my thanks go to Friedrich Teja Bach. Without his dedication as adviser and his scholarly example, I would have never had the courage to commit myself to this project. From my Viennese friends, I have learned more than I can say. Ever since our student days, Wolfram Pichler, Barbara Wittmann, Karin Gludovatz, Markus Klammer, and Stefan Neuner have been vital sources of encouragement and inspiration. I would not have dared to come back to my first book if it had not been the occasion of a few stimulating exchanges over the last ten years. Particularly important in this regard has been the impression of conversations with Gottfried Boehm, Michael Fried, Mark Haxthausen, Josef Helfenstein, Inka Mülder-Bach, Robert Pippin, Beate Söntgen, Nicola Suthor, Juliane Vogel, Gerhard Wolf, and Christopher Wood. I also want to thank Andrei Pop, who, at the very last moment, made two important suggestions. Last but not least, I want to express my warmest gratitude to Elizabeth Tucker for her elegant and thoughtful translation.

introduction

Max Ernst’s pictures can be read as shrewd experiments in various techniques. They test the possibilities of collage, frottage, grattage, di=erent methods of painting and printing, but also wordplay—and the mutual imitation and intersection of these devices. Louis Aragon introduced this view as early as 1923, in his text “Max Ernst, peintre des illusions” (“Max Ernst, Painter of Illusions”), in which he demonstrated the novelty and uniqueness of the Dadaist’s works through a comparison with cubist collage. According to Aragon, while the cubists pasted newsprint into their pictures because they wanted to emphasize the “reality” of the painting—in other words, its tactile support—in his collages Ernst employs not materials but images: “printed drawings, drawings from advertisements, popular images, images from dictionaries and newspapers.”1 These images are subject to an array of working processes. They are cut apart, retouched, and photographically reproduced; they are reassembled, traced, and copied in paint: “Each of these tableaux attests to the discovery of an alternative technique.”2 The goal, however, is not to call attention to the material aspects of these di=erent procedures and make their operations into the theme of art, but rather to manipulate the found images in such a way that they gain a new meaning. Aragon describes Ernst as a virtuoso of artistic procedure who plays with the operations of the human mind: Ernst has created “a type of intellectual collage.”3 That same year, 1923, Aragon’s friend and fellow soldier of Dada, André Breton, wrote a text on Ernst that presents an entirely di=erent artist. This Ernst is possessed of a “marvelous ability”4 that causes the unity of space and time, memory and personal identity, to break apart. This ability makes him a poet who does not understand his own visions anymore—as Breton implies, it makes him a poet whose relationship to his visions is no longer merely “Platonic,” but bodily.5 Film provides a similar experience by placing before the eyes distant, animate phantoms and speeding them up or slowing them down, enlarging or reducing their size. The comparison with the new medium allows Breton to conceive of the artist not as the master of his own techniques, but rather as himself a medium:

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the same explosive power courses through him as through the inspired poet, as well as through film. While Breton emphasizes the artist’s receptivity, Aragon is interested in the artist’s procedures. This contrast between passivity and activity can also be observed in Ernst’s writings. By means of their form, they make it apparent that they were meticulously fabricated. Even the title of his autobiographical notes, presented to an American readership in 1942, mixes the factual and the legendary: “Some Data on the Youth of M.E. as Told by Himself ” anticipates a reader who will detect the ironic disparity between the gathering of data and autobiographical narration. In the first, German version, the notes are titled “Wahrheitsund Lügengewebe”6 (“Tissue of Truth, Tissue of Lies”). In their content, however, this and other Ernst texts are devoted to advancing the thesis that artworks are symptoms of psychic processes that evade the artist’s control. As an example, there is the frequently cited passage in which Ernst relates the origin of collage: One rainy day in 1919, finding myself in a village on the Rhine, I was struck by the obsession which held under my gaze the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, and paleontologic demonstration. There I found brought together elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep. . . . It was enough at that time to embellish these catalogue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me, a color, a pencil mark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon . . . thus I obtained a faithful fixed image of my hallucination and transformed into revealing dramas my most secret desires—from what had been before only some banal pages of advertising.7 Art has its origin in a passive eye that is both overwhelmed and stimulated by the heterogeneity of already-existing images, and the artist’s work is restricted to the performance of a secondary service (“gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me”). Nevertheless, at this point, one is compelled to ask: In what

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way does this passage describe collage? In other places, Ernst makes it clear that he does not conceive of collage as the activity that is performed with scissors and glue: “Ce n’est pas la colle qui fait le collage.”8 (It isn’t the glue that makes collage.) Rather, collage is the basic principle of all the di=erent procedures he used in his Dadaist and surrealist works, inasmuch as they all lead to the same revolutionary goal. Frottage, grattage, various printing and reproduction processes, wordplay, and also collage with glue and scissors all aim for “the magisterial eruption of the irrational in all domains of art, of poetry, of science, in the private life of individuals, in the public life of peoples.”9 Collage in this expanded sense is not a technique for the artist’s manipulation; it is a form of image production that takes possession of the artist’s visual experience and is capable of a=ecting all people. However, even when Ernst asserts that collage is not a goal-oriented fabrication but an unconscious production that subverts human intentions, the way his writing is crafted simultaneously indicates a di=erent artist—one who with meticulous care, but also with tongue in cheek, has laid a “tissue of lies and truth” over his past and his poetics. Ernst declined to choose between the virtuosic use of artistic devices and the surrender to an unconscious production. His writings gloss over the di=erence between these alternatives by showing both possibilities, depending on whether one considers their content or their rhetorical form. For Ernst, collage is always both: it is an unconscious process and simultaneously an artistic procedure with a superior capacity to emphasize the moment of fabrication. Art history, however, has not shown any interest in this vacillation. The most important works on this topic can be characterized by their taking up one of the two attitudes suggested by Aragon and Breton in 1923. On the one hand, Ernst’s artful handling of diverse techniques and heterogeneous image sources presented a rich field for discoveries. It was up to art historians to determine whether a work was a collage or an overpainting and to reconstruct the stages through which it had passed: how certain images had been cut apart and reassembled, how the result had been photographed or copied in oils, how the oil painting had then been used as an underlay for a frottage. The images that Ernst had used as raw materials were traced to sources ranging from a teaching aids catalog, which figures prominently in his Cologne works, to the illustrations and popular science books of the nineteenth century, which form the basis for many of the pictures in his collage novels.10 On the other hand, art historians persisted

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in developing new, and to an extent also increasingly refined, interpretations of Ernst’s pictures as symptoms of an unconscious production. Here, Freud’s and later Lacan’s psychoanalysis o=ered the theoretical framework.11 One also recalls that Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Giedion, and Theodor W. Adorno saw in Ernst’s collages a collision of the present era with the nineteenth century, which they diagnosed as the product of modern history: modernity represses its own past and transforms it into a foreign epoch that seems as far removed as prehistoric time.12 In these two approaches to Ernst’s work, one can see yet another example of the well-known (and highly unproductive) division of art history in general into a concentration on material pictures and their historical genesis, on the one hand, and a theoretically inspired criticism, on the other. Rather than pursuing either of these strategies at the other’s expense, I would like to propose that this division in the research is the manifestation of a conflict already virulent in Dada and surrealism between two ideas of what the art of the avant-garde was based on: It was attributed either to a new poetics that could be described through particular procedures and their implementation or to a new state of openness to powers that fundamentally evade human attempts at fabrication. To take this perspective is to position the avant-garde and art history’s view of it within the larger theoretical context of the modern aesthetic of originality. Nineteenth-century romanticism through modernism can be described as the history of various attempts to reconcile originality—that is, a production that even the artist cannot repeat because its sources are not readily accessed—with the routine of the studio. The fabrication of a painting was conceived as an unrepeatable process dependent on singular factors that reveal within the artist a deeper origin of art. These factors include momentary bodily or emotional states, presence in a particular location, particular light conditions, certain paints, brushes, or models, and, finally, new procedures in the application of paint, in composition, and in painting in general. Under these conditions, procedures not only served in the fabrication of a painting; they were intended to relate the process of fabrication to a production that the artist himself did not control. The term “techniques of originality” has therefore been suitably applied.13 The avant-garde took up this problematics and radicalized it by giving equally urgent emphasis to both technicity and originality, thus bringing them into opposing positions. The artwork is reduced to the result of various procedures; collage or the readymade exposes an artwork’s status as

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sheer artifact.14 However, in the di=erent avant-garde movements since futurism, higher or deeper powers of production—life, the unconscious, language, capital, the body, and so on—are summoned as the real authorities of art. It seems to me that for the art historian, it cannot be a question of aiming for one of these two poles of artistic production. Rather, the field of tension between them must be examined. In this way, an avant-gardist such as Ernst can be understood as an artist who was committed both to the reduction of art to its procedures as well as to its channeling of unavailable powers, and who conceived of this double commitment as a productive contradiction. Before I turn to this project, I would like to do my part to clarify what the terms “procedure” and “unconscious production” can be taken to mean. It is important to note that “procedure” cannot automatically be equated with a technical innovation. Ernst was right to assert that collage does not come from glue. This and other procedures can only be analyzed in their respective specific contexts of application, which themselves are di