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Surrealism in Collage: The Novels of Max Ernst
Max Ernst (1891-1976) is, after Salvador Dali, the most famous of the
original surrealists. An artist of undeniable skill and vision, Ernst created
many justifiably famous paintings in his lifetime, including “L’Ange Du Foyer”
and “Europe after the Rain.” However, I believe Ernst’s supreme masterworks are
his collage novels THE HUNDRED HEADLESS WOMAN (1929), A LITTLE GIRL DREAMS OF
TAKING THE VEIL (1930) and A WEEK OF KINDNESS (1934).
Ernst
created these “novels” by cutting out sentimental woodcut illustrations and
reconfiguring them into perverse and surreal collages. The results are
seamlessly pasted together, so much so that it often seems difficult to imagine
how these renderings could have possibly started out differently. Many other
artists before and since have made similar attempts (see Freddie Baer’s ECSTATIC
INCISIONS), but none of the collage work I’ve seen comes close to matching
Ernst’s accomplishments.
THE HUNDRED HEADLESS WOMAN (LE FEMME 100 TETES) was
published in the US by George Braziller in 1981--and, I’m sorry to add,
is now long out of print--with English translations by Ernst’s widow Dorothea
Tanning. It consists of 147 seemingly random collages grouped into nine
“chapters.” Each collage has a quintessentially surreal caption below it--“The
might-have-been Immaculate Conception,” “The charm of transportations and
wounds will be increased in silence by boiling laundry,” “Loud chirpings
of Sunday phantoms,” “So he who speculates the vanity of the dead remains
the phantom of repopulation.” Among the pictures are a tiny statue grabbing
a man’s crotch (with the caption “The exorbitant reward”); a woman’s nude
torso draped around a guy’s neck; a fountain spouting from a top hat; a fishing
net hauling in naked people; a man relaxing in a chair situated atop a crashing
wave; a woman going down on a rendering of Cezanne; a “swamp of dreams” flowing
through Paris.
As for narrative continuity, that’s up to the
individual reader to decipher for him/herself. Characters (identified by the
captions) include a wise monkey who pops up periodically; Loplop the “Bird
Superior,” a recurring figure in Ernst’s art who initially appears as a bird and
later takes on the guise of a human; and the spectral Hundred Headless Woman (sic),
who assumes many identities throughout the book--as one caption reads, “It’s
enough for me to see the Hundred Headless Woman to know. It’s enough for you to
demand an explanation, not to know.” That essentially sums up this
maddening but altogether extraordinary work.
A LITTLE GIRL DREAMS OF TAKING THE VEIL (REVE D’
UNE PETITE FILLE QUI VOULUT ENTRER AU CARMEL) was again published in English by
George Braziller and again with translations by Dorothea Tanning (and--dammit!--it’s
again out of print). It is in many ways the pinnacle of Ernst’s collage
novels.
Unlike Ernst’s other books, A LITTLE GIRL DREAMS
contains a somewhat coherent narrative, being the blasphemous, erotic and
schizophrenic dream of sixteen-year-old Marceline-Marie. A 5-page text
introduction fills us in on the life of M-M before the dream, marked by a rape
at age seven and a mystical episode four years later, in which she levitated in
church and thereafter devoted her life to a religious vocation.
Those things are all obliquely addressed in the dream
that follows, consisting of 77 collages “explained” by surrealistic captions and
divided into four chapters: “The Tenebreuse,” “The Hair,” “The Knife” (which the
girl was holding during her levitation) and “The Celestial Bridegroom” (who she
referenced during the episode). The cockeyed magic of THE HUNDRED HEADLESS
WOMAN is once again in evidence, with the text in conjunction with the pictures
creating unforgettable configurations.
The dream begins with a picture of the title character
smooching her father--and a glass in the foreground obscuring the figures’
liplock. Two pages later Marceline-Marie literally splits in two, spending the
remainder of the dream as Marceline and Marie. Marceline-Marie
frequently has trouble distinguishing between her two selves, and on occasion
even confuses herself with other characters, including an “indecent Amazon” and
an “obscure beetle.” Marceline and Marie are frequently accosted by Father
Dulac, who administered M-M’s first communion and who encourages both to “Follow
me, my beauty, to the cracks in the walls...” At the end of each chapter
M-M awakens to examine her bed clothes, and always finds her nightgown pulled up
past her knees in “indecent” fashion.
As for the illustrations, they’re among and most
densely layered and tantalizingly mysterious of all Ernst’s work. Stand-out
images include a woman leaning out a window to address a pair of bodiless heads;
a party stocked by billowing smoke, brawling men and decaying corpses; another
depiction of Ernst’s alter ego Loplop, here a king attended to by a bird-headed
sentry; a naked woman dancing amidst a swarm of crickets; bundles of hair
sprouting from ship’s masts and the faces of pall-bearers (“the better to put
you in your place, my child”); a man walking on water, exhorting shipwrecked
sailors to “Come and admire the view from the top of the mast.” There
are dozens more equally eerie, mind-bending sights on display, but most are
frankly beyond my power to describe.
A WEEK OF
KINDNESS (UNE SEMAINE DE BONTE),
appeared in the US under the original French moniker in 1976, courtesy of
Dover (the English translation this time was by Stanley Appelbaum), and it
at least is still in print. It was the last and most elaborate of Ernst’s
experiments in collage, with 182 illustrations divided into seven parts. As the
title suggests, the book is set over the course of a week (the “Kindness” part
is obviously ironic), with each day based around an “Element” and “Example”. On
Sunday that element is mud and the example is “The Lion of Belfort”--hence, each
illustration features a man with a lion head.
Monday’s element and example is water, and so nearly
everything on this day centers on flooding and/or pooled water. Tuesday’s
example is the “Court of The Dragon,” meaning there’s a dragon or part of one
appearing in every panel. We also see more examples of Loplop the bird-head,
who all-but takes over on Wednesday, which features the book’s most striking
illustrations: they all revolve around bird-headed people doing strange and
pervy things (the Example here is Oedipus!). On Thursday more bird-heads turn
up, all of them roosters, the Example being “The Rooster’s Laughter.” On Friday
we again see people with weird heads, this time Easter Island statues.
Saturday is the most abstract section, split into two
parts. One is called “Three Visible Poems”, presenting several panels featuring
bones, foliage and other ephemera stuck together. The other is “The Key to
Songs,” which consists largely of floating women, making for a fitting end to
the most overtly poetic of the three books. While it’s not my favorite of
Ernst’s collage novels, A WEEK OF KINDNESS does close things out on a suitably
ambitious note.
The shock and awe that initially greeted these books (they were vigorously denounced by the Nazis) has long since worn off, but the charm, beauty and sheer genius of their conception and execution have not. It’s good to know A WEEK OF KINDNESS is in print and readily available; let’s hope the two former books follow, as all three are must-own grown-up picture books that have yet to be surpassed.
--9/18/08