Community; Dada Max

<v Carrie Anna Criado>Welcome to Community. I'm Carrie Anna Criado with the Menil Collection for <v Carrie Anna Criado>a special edition of our program. <v Carrie Anna Criado>A few years ago, several key people at the Menil began to develop an idea that would <v Carrie Anna Criado>celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of German born artist Max <v Carrie Anna Criado>Ernst. Today, more than 180 pieces by the artist <v Carrie Anna Criado>are being displayed in an exhibit titled Max Ernst, Dada <v Carrie Anna Criado>and the Dawn of Surrealism. <v Carrie Anna Criado>Tonight, we devote our entire program to this extraordinary exhibit, which was created <v Carrie Anna Criado>by the Menil Collection. <v Walter Hopps>Dada is a virus. <v Walter Hopps>There is no such thing as Dada, and there is and there isn't.

<v Walter Hopps>And it did exist and it doesn't exist and it died, but it didn't die. <v Walter Hopps>The exhibition at hand, Max Ernst, "Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism" explores <v Walter Hopps>the first 15 mature years of his career. <v Walter Hopps>The most important period and uh <v Walter Hopps>between 1912 and 1927. <v Walter Hopps>And within that, we have his explosive <v Walter Hopps>and extraordinarily inventive period with Dada and we, <v Walter Hopps>which runs in Ernst's case from about 1919 <v Walter Hopps>until up to 24, 24 is a very precise date because <v Walter Hopps>that's when Bretton codified the movement <v Walter Hopps>surrealism, and signed the manifesto and anointed those who were to be part of it.

<v Walter Hopps>It's often pegged as anti-art, and it wasn't, it wasn't, of course. <v Walter Hopps>You have to have a yes-no answer to just about everything that's Dada. <v Walter Hopps>Was it destructive? Yes. Did they really care about art and try and preserve their art? <v Walter Hopps>Yes. Did they mean to destroy all art? <v Walter Hopps>No. <v Walter Hopps>Dada had explosive moments in the public, especially <v Walter Hopps>with the performers in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in the 1960s, there <v Walter Hopps>a tiny audience and the artist hustled the public there, by <v Walter Hopps>the way, they came up with the word Dada by chance, throwing a dart <v Walter Hopps>into a dictionary and it came up with the French word for hobby horse, Dada. <v Walter Hopps>So they began to make posters and they kind of sent out handbills <v Walter Hopps>and the disinformation around Zürich that a kind of racy

<v Walter Hopps>performer ?she?, the Great Dada was going to perform. <v Walter Hopps>Well, there was no such person. <v Walter Hopps>They ended up hearing Hans Arp on his hands and knees barking like a dog <v Walter Hopps>and Marcel Janco beating on an Indian drum and other nonsense and reading their <v Walter Hopps>nonsense poetry. And I'm sure their early audiences threw beer glasses <v Walter Hopps>and broke up the furniture in disgust that there was no wonderfully <v Walter Hopps>racy cabaret singer named Dada there to entertain them. <v William Camfield>Through his courses or through the former student of Freud, he was being exposed <v William Camfield>to modern psychology, including Freud's writings. <v William Camfield>Some other psychologists are not so well known. <v William Camfield>Very strange individuals. <v William Camfield>He was getting lots of literature and lots of art history. <v William Camfield>He's probably the most thoroughly art historically trained <v William Camfield>artist of the 20th century, and beyond that, he was encountering

<v William Camfield>modern art. <v William Camfield>Ernst was a born painter and <v William Camfield>one of the finest expressionist, even as a young man, 23-24 years <v William Camfield>old. If he had only pursued that, he would have had an entire <v William Camfield>outstanding career with that alone. <v William Camfield>Max Ernst response to the war is varied. <v William Camfield>If one reads his later writings, he begins saying like 1914, <v William Camfield>August 1914, Max Ernst and he refers in many instances to the <v William Camfield>imbecility of the war. <v William Camfield>Like many soldiers at the front, he tries to obey. <v William Camfield>It seems he tries to allay the concerns of the family, he'd give them postcards <v William Camfield>with sort of blank black humor from the trenches you know, a muddy <v William Camfield>semi destroyed or bombed out bunker with a sign out saying <v William Camfield>For Rent Cheap.

<v Paul Winkler>Well, Max had a great sense of humor and he was uh he was an alchemist in a sense. <v Paul Winkler>He was terrific, and he uh, he was-he was always <v Paul Winkler>reinventing himself as well. He had these alter egos, and it's just this it's-it's an <v Paul Winkler>openness to life that's absolutely extraordinary. <v Paul Winkler>And at the same time, particularly, some of the Dada works delivered <v Paul Winkler>to Menil said it best the other day we were talking about. <v Paul Winkler>She said he wasn't afraid to just spit in their face, you know. <v Paul Winkler>This war was hideous, you know what it had done to sort of to <v Paul Winkler>mankind, the culture, the civilization to, you know, just from the practical of- on <v Paul Winkler>point of view, plus also killing the spirit in a sense. <v Paul Winkler>And Max could swing from one side of the <v Paul Winkler>pendulum to the other with-with-with a light wonderful touch. <v Walter Hopps>The very first work that Jean and Dominique de Menil, who founded this

<v Walter Hopps>museum acquired was a Max Ernst. <v Walter Hopps>They were a young couple in Paris, 1934. <v Paul Winkler>Someone encouraged the De Menil's through a sort of beyond just beginning to collect at <v Paul Winkler>that time in Paris to go see this artist Max Ernst. <v Paul Winkler>So they went to a studio. <v Walter Hopps>They saw Ernst's work there and it just looked dreadful to them. <v Walter Hopps>They had no idea what this was, and they hated it. <v Walter Hopps>And Jean, being the kind of man he was, said, look to his wife, he said, <v Walter Hopps>look, this man obviously needs money. <v Walter Hopps>We can't stand the work. But maybe I could get him to paint your portrait, <v Walter Hopps>having no idea that this was an absurd request of a surrealist. <v Paul Winkler>And so Jean de Menil decided to commission Max to do a <v Paul Winkler>portrait of Dominique, and she went and sat a number of times. <v Walter Hopps>And a portrait of Dominique done by Ernst in 1934 <v Walter Hopps>with surrealist paraphernalia surrounding it a bit, beautiful, kind of

<v Walter Hopps>petrified life forms from another time and planet, almost imaginary <v Walter Hopps>is the result. <v Paul Winkler>And turns out that his wife at that time, Maria ?Barrett?, <v Paul Winkler>was had taken the painting to a framer to have it <v Paul Winkler>framed, and some way or another, she had sort of forgotten about <v Paul Winkler>it. And she had not given either her name or Max Ernst's name or <v Paul Winkler>the de Menil's name to the framers. So the framers had no idea whose portrait it was <v Paul Winkler>and whose picture it was. <v Walter Hopps>A priest found it, recognizing madam some <v Walter Hopps>years later for sale in a shop window. <v Paul Winkler>And thanks to that sort of encounter, the painting was saved and then returned to them <v Paul Winkler>and given to the de Menils and is in the collection now, but it's a wonderful <v Paul Winkler>piece. <v Walter Hopps>So the collection begins with Max Ernst, whose work <v Walter Hopps>our great patrons hated, and as they turned out, <v Walter Hopps>and indeed their opinion changed soon enough, because

<v Walter Hopps>the Menil Collection has perhaps around 150 <v Walter Hopps>works of Max Ernst, which is more than, I guess, any other public institution <v Walter Hopps>or private collector, I guess, in the world. <v Walter Hopps>In 1921, in a kind of amazing painting in the context of Dada, <v Walter Hopps>Ernst returned to painting and did <v Walter Hopps>before surrealism existed officially or even the word was <v Walter Hopps>current, did what's recognized as <v Walter Hopps>one of the surrealist masterpieces, it's called Celebes. <v Walter Hopps>It's over my shoulder here. <v Walter Hopps>Or sometimes the elephant Celebes. <v Walter Hopps>It's a perplexing and absurd painting. <v Walter Hopps>The central element of this great, hulking, rather mechanical <v Walter Hopps>looking, both comic and threatening, sort

<v Walter Hopps>of monstrous elephant like thing, it's some <v Walter Hopps>terrible cross of something you might encounter in National Geographic on the one hand, <v Walter Hopps>in some kind of science fiction on the other, is central to the painting. <v Walter Hopps>Perched on its back is this very interesting little <v Walter Hopps>piece of abstract sculpture. <v Walter Hopps>It's crazy, there are almost-there was no such abstract sculpture at the time this <v Walter Hopps>painting was made. <v Walter Hopps>And up in the right foreground, <v Walter Hopps>we have one of Ernst famous headless nude women kind of <v Walter Hopps>beckoning to the beast. <v Walter Hopps>Why headless? <v Walter Hopps>Is it misogynistic on his part? <v Walter Hopps>Possibly, but I think not. I think Ernst had the insight that his muse <v Walter Hopps>was going to be someone of the flesh and spirit and heart

<v Walter Hopps>beyond rationality. <v Walter Hopps>In both occult, Western and many Eastern <v Walter Hopps>philosophies and religions. The idea of the headless figure as a symbol <v Walter Hopps>of someone beyond the limits of the rational mind <v Walter Hopps>would be something Ernst was well aware of. <v Walter Hopps>So I don't think he uses his female muse <v Walter Hopps>nude to infer her sexuality, and Ernst felt that sexual <v Walter Hopps>energy was one of the basic driving forces in our life <v Walter Hopps>and certainly within our art. <v Walter Hopps>I think that Ernst, among other things, is telling us that sexual <v Walter Hopps>pursuits are better than violent ones. <v Walter Hopps>And I think we have beauty here tending to tame the beast, <v Walter Hopps>if we want to put it in terms of folklore. <v Walter Hopps>One of the most beautiful and haunting

<v Walter Hopps>painting like works that Ernst did in the Dada period <v Walter Hopps>in 1921 is called Approaching Puberty. <v Walter Hopps>That's the short title, it has a much longer inscription. <v Walter Hopps>It's actually a complex combination of <v Walter Hopps>collage with photographic elements and over painting <v Walter Hopps>textured reworking, but it reads as a small, exquisite painting. <v Walter Hopps>It's one of the prime examples of Ernst <v Walter Hopps>nude female headless figures in this case, again, <v Walter Hopps>very decidedly his muse. <v Walter Hopps>The figure's floating in a kind of blue sky. <v Walter Hopps>An arm is extended in a curious way or holding a device as though it's penetrated <v Walter Hopps>an orb. And in the upper right

<v Walter Hopps>portion of the painting, we have this curious, troubled, <v Walter Hopps>feathered convulsion, a sort of chaos <v Walter Hopps>and close inspection reveals the feathered nature of this <v Walter Hopps>and that we have nothing much else to associate with <v Walter Hopps>other than the fall of Icarus. <v Walter Hopps>The man who, in the presence of fathers and brothers, tried <v Walter Hopps>to fly to the sun and failed. <v Walter Hopps>That's the male adventure of the artist, as <v Walter Hopps>the female muse serenely ascends, <v Walter Hopps>or at least suspends in an atmosphere. <v Walter Hopps>Ernst is with some delicacy put it that in the face of inspiration, <v Walter Hopps>sometimes men fail. <v Walter Hopps>[Music plays]

<v Walter Hopps>By 1923, when Ernst, Paul Éluard and Gala, <v Walter Hopps>and the little child of Cécile of Paul and <v Walter Hopps>Gala are all living in a very comfortable townhouse <v Walter Hopps>provided by Éluard's father's money. <v Walter Hopps>On the outskirts of Paris, we find <v Walter Hopps>the entire extended family, this ménage á trois, an extraordinarily <v Walter Hopps>creative and joyous period. <v Walter Hopps>And Ernst in his great plaisir, I think, suggested that he do murals, and <v Walter Hopps>over my right shoulder, we're looking at one of the painted doors done <v Walter Hopps>in the manner of fresco, by the way. <v Walter Hopps>But the door itself has a kind of partially clothed female nude <v Walter Hopps>climbing about some imaginary landscape. <v Walter Hopps>And in her hand, we have in a most lascivious pose of abandon, <v Walter Hopps>a tiny female nude that she casts her nonetheless masked eyes

<v Walter Hopps>away from. But it's an amusing, and for Ernst, more <v Walter Hopps>decorative work, as were all these murals. <v Walter Hopps>It's almost like a kind of French restoration comedy done <v Walter Hopps>out in proto-surrealist form. <v Walter Hopps>It's sort of celebrated the joyous life they were having together. <v Walter Hopps>Another one we could look at is the loving couple where Ernst's great colleague, <v Walter Hopps>the poet Paul Éluard is coupled with his then <v Walter Hopps>wife, Gala, in the most strange <v Walter Hopps>pod like constraint. <v Walter Hopps>The setting is a peaceful landscape. The figures are silhouetted against the sky. <v Walter Hopps>They would seem to be put in nude embrace. <v Walter Hopps>Somehow the color blue, this unnatural blue skin for Éluard seems

<v Walter Hopps>appropriate. He's a poet of the night. <v Walter Hopps>Gala's made very fleshly and naturalistic in her color, the female. <v Walter Hopps>My colleague Campfield has pointed out how it's an absolute contradiction, <v Walter Hopps>they are in a naked juxtaposition as though in some <v Walter Hopps>sexual embrace, so they are together in that way, but Éluard <v Walter Hopps>is turned away. <v Walter Hopps>The figures are both pressed together and twisted apart <v Walter Hopps>in the same gesture, in one pose <v Walter Hopps>an enormous amount of the complications of uh <v Walter Hopps>sexual relations as to attraction and repulsion and <v Walter Hopps>trying to get something together, and it's not working. <v Walter Hopps>All the complexities that are-we tend to try not to think of <v Walter Hopps>purely solve and overcome in our lives are there forever in that painting. <v Walter Hopps>[Music plays]

<v Walter Hopps>There are a number of works that celebrate the end of this extraordinary <v Walter Hopps>ménage á trois and the kind of getting over Gala, <v Walter Hopps>which I think you suggested, at least in her earlier incarnation here, had <v Walter Hopps>the power and charisma of a Madonna. <v Walter Hopps>Ironically, we were speaking earlier of how in Salvador Dali's <v Walter Hopps>life and her role, she accepted as his devoted wife. <v Walter Hopps>He made her a kind of Virgin Mary who was very much in the background <v Walter Hopps>while he played the grown up Christ child. <v Walter Hopps>She was a mother to Salvador Dali as much as wife where she had been <v Walter Hopps>the Madonna we think of as the aggressive, active woman <v Walter Hopps>of the contemporary Madonna, in the lives of Max Ernst and Paul Éluard, <v Walter Hopps>but getting over her for both of these men

<v Walter Hopps>was something else. <v Walter Hopps>And I think perhaps the last important painting <v Walter Hopps>is this work of 1926, where we see <v Walter Hopps>in the far sky background the new world of protege <v Walter Hopps>and textured what we call autonomous art, the little orbs in <v Walter Hopps>the sky are made in a protege techniques which ?suggest? <v Walter Hopps>Max new invention post Gala. <v Walter Hopps>And at the bottom is though it were a kind of surface. <v Walter Hopps>A stage backdrop peeling away and rolling up, <v Walter Hopps>sinking soon to be rolled out of sight. <v Walter Hopps>We see the extraordinary eyes of Gala. <v Walter Hopps>I mean, it's a literal autobiographical painting. <v Walter Hopps>Now I'm going to peel Gala away and roll up. <v Walter Hopps>And the last thing he's seeing, one of her most extraordinary features were the-these <v Walter Hopps>intense eyes. [Music plays]

<v Walter Hopps>Breton wanted some work produced by Ernst <v Walter Hopps>that would be a powerful, even shocking visual manifesto <v Walter Hopps>for what surrealist-surrealism was in part, <v Walter Hopps>and it's not known precisely if he gave Ernst the specific <v Walter Hopps>subject. <v Walter Hopps>Now, Breton-Ernst had been born Catholic and had <v Walter Hopps>really left the church for practical purposes. <v Walter Hopps>But once a Catholic, always a Catholic, I suppose, and you know the weight <v Walter Hopps>of the doctrine, he sets up a curious space. <v Walter Hopps>And on a kind of constricted little plaza or dias in a kind of Italianate,

<v Walter Hopps>when I say mannerism, I think of Italian manner or ?start?, a <v Walter Hopps>kind of Italianate little constricted plaza and on a dias puts a great <v Walter Hopps>heroically scaled Virgin Mary, <v Walter Hopps>on her lap has a much too, doesn't have the infant, Jesus has a much too <v Walter Hopps>grown up naked young boy whom she's wailing <v Walter Hopps>the daylights out of. <v Walter Hopps>The idea of the Virgin Mary severely spanking, pubescent <v Walter Hopps>Jesus has-is not only blasphemous in the act, but has even greater <v Walter Hopps>psychosexual overtones that increase the blasphemy of this work. <v Walter Hopps>Jesus' posterior is pink and rosy from this spanking, <v Walter Hopps>her arm is raised in serious pursuit. <v Walter Hopps>Now the final curious element of the painting in a wall <v Walter Hopps>to the left side in a small constricted window

<v Walter Hopps>in that wall, we have the three witnesses that are suggested <v Walter Hopps>in the title. <v Walter Hopps>There are the three key leaders of surrealism at that <v Walter Hopps>time. There's Breton himself, the secular pope <v Walter Hopps>and leader facing away from the event as <v Walter Hopps>though in some thoughtful distraction where he didn't even need <v Walter Hopps>to look at it. <v Walter Hopps>We see him clearly rendered and to his-to <v Walter Hopps>the left of Breton, kind of with <v Walter Hopps>his head tipped back, almost looking down his nose, it's not clear out of disdain <v Walter Hopps>or a kind of trying to avert his eyes. <v Walter Hopps>We see Paul Éluard with his eyes almost closed, but still <v Walter Hopps>kind of looking through the lashes, perhaps at the event through the window. <v Walter Hopps>And the third witness staring straight dead ahead at us, the watchers, is <v Walter Hopps>Ernst. Duchamp, one of the great pre Dada pre-surrealist

<v Walter Hopps>theoreticians and great artist of the early modern era. <v Walter Hopps>He said that the creative act was never complete without The Spectator. <v Walter Hopps>Artists do what they do and perhaps they don't even know what they're doing. <v Walter Hopps>But the art work is complete when each of us in our own way <v Walter Hopps>look at it, and that's the final phase of the creative act. <v Walter Hopps>What goes on in terms of our responses when we bother to stare and form <v Walter Hopps>one? <v Carrie Anna Criado>Max Ernst, "Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism" can be seen at the Menil collection

<v Carrie Anna Criado>through August 29th. The exhibit will then travel to the Art Institute of Chicago. <v Carrie Anna Criado>For more on the artist, be sure to watch KUHT at 9 o'clock this Saturday evening. <v Carrie Anna Criado>At that time, Channel 8 will air Peter Schamoni's feature link study on the artist. <v Carrie Anna Criado>Thank you for joining us, and please call us with your comments and suggestions for <v Carrie Anna Criado>Community, I'm Carrie Anna Criado. <v Carrie Anna Criado>Good night.