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Lot Essay
Towards the end of 1921, Max Ernst began to translate the strange illogical poetry of Dadaist collage and photomontage into the realm of oil painting. The sudden and brief series of masterpieces – which include the present work, Seestück, alongside The Elephant Celebes of 1921 (Tate, London), Oedipus Rex of 1922 (Private collection), Castor and Pollution of 1923 (Private collection), and Saint Cecilia, also of 1923 (Staastsgalerie Stuttgart) – that resulted from Ernst working in oil according to the same principles with which he had begun to make his uniquely disturbing collages, photomontages, are today recognised as among the finest, most bizarre and enduring images of his entire career. Painted during the latter half of 1921, Seestück is probably the earliest of this strange and ultimately revolutionary sequence of paintings. Created around the same time as The Elephant Celebes, it is a work that appears to articulate a hidden language of poetic association lying behind the Dadaistic dismantling of the world of surface appearances, and to point the way to much later Surrealist painting.
As a student, Ernst had marked the following passage in his copy of Nietzsche’s treatise, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft: ‘What I can’t bear is the fact that it is more important to know the name of things than to know the things themselves. The name of things, the reputation of things, their outward appearance, their place in the hierarchy, all these were due initially to error and caprice. They were like clothes that people threw on without caring whether they suited their natures or the colour of their skins. But eventually, as generation after generation came to accept them, the names came to be identified with the things that they had been applied to. They were those things in the end... And now it would be the wildest illusion to suppose that by showing how all this came about, we can destroy this so-called “real” world. To destroy it, we have to create another, an alternative world. But there is another thing that we must not forget: that if we create new names, formulate new entities and put forward new probabilities we shall also, in the long run, create new “things”’ (quoted in J. Russell, Max Ernst, London, 1967, pp. 50-51).
Nietzsche’s belief that the so-called world of everyday reality was merely a surface or artifice underneath which, ‘another, altogether different reality lies concealed,’ held particular significance for Ernst, as it was to do for many artists of his generation (The Birth of Tragedy in O. Levy, ed., The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, New York, 1911, p. 23). Emerging from the nightmare of the First World War – a fast-track schooling in the blatant stupidity of man, the madness of civilization and the inherently brutal nature of mechanized modernity – Ernst explained that he and his generation had come, ‘back from the war dazed and our disgust simply had to find an outlet. This quite naturally took the form of attacks on the foundations of the civilization that had brought this war about – attacks on language, syntax, logic, literature, painting and so forth’ (quoted in W. Spies, ed., Max Ernst, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 82).
Through the pictorial language of collage – the assembling of disparate and seemingly unconnected imagery and rearranging it into surprising and subversive new associations – Ernst found not only a way to attack the conventions and hierarchies of modern ‘civilization,’ but also a new and disturbing reality that seemed to provoke and prick the conscience of modern man. ‘I am tempted,’ Ernst remarked, ‘to see in collage the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane.’ What he wanted to achieve, he wrote, was to, ‘create an electric or erotic tension between…elements that we have become accustomed to think of as mutually alien and unrelated. Discharges, high tension currents would result. And the more unexpected the elements brought together, the more surprising to me was the spark of poetry that jumped the gap’ (quoted in W. Spies, Max Ernst: Collages, London, 1988, p. 228).
Gradually, through the seemingly random and often humorous juxtaposition of images culled from technical manuals and magazine illustrations all transposed into new and surprising incarnations and arenas, Ernst’s art began to express a new and potent topography of the mind. From its schizophrenic collaged beginnings, strange landscapes and creatures began to emerge with increasing regularity in his work, and to articulate a fascinating new world beyond the looking-glass of crystallized reason and order. Ernst described the phenomenon as follows: ‘an hallucinating succession of self-contradictory images – double images, triple images, multiple images – laid one on top of another with the imperious rapidity which characterizes our memories of a love affair or the visions which come to us when we are half asleep and half-awake. These images demanded to be put on new levels of experience. Their encounters had to take a new place in a new unknown and on a place from which the idea of “fitness” or “propriety” was excluded. All that I had to do was to take a plate from the catalogue and add to it. I painted or drew, in docile fashion, whatever presented itself to me. Adding a patch of colour, pencilling in a detail or two, a landscape which had nothing to do with the objects represented a desert, a new sky, a geological cross-section, a floor, a simple straight line to represent the horizon, I secured for myself an exact and permanent image of my hallucination. And what had been simply the most banal pages of advertisement became so many dramas revelatory of my most secret desires’ (‘What is the mechanism of collage?’ quoted in op. cit., 1967, p. 51).
In 1921, with the prospects of the continuation of the Cologne Dada group waning, Ernst was eager to leave the German city for somewhere more conducive to the furthering of his art. At the instigation of his new-found friends Paul Eluard and André Breton, in May of that year he had sent several of his recent collages and ‘overpaintings’ to Paris for an exhibition where they had proved a revelation to the fledgling ‘Surrealist’ group. Encouraged by their reception in Paris, Ernst, soon afterwards and for the first time, began to paint in oil according to the same semi-automatic process of juxtaposing imagery and then intuitively creating an imaginary and illusionary mental landscape. The paintings Seestück and The Elephant Celebes were the results.
Whereas The Elephant Celebes is centred around a strange, animated image drawn from a photograph of a corn bin made by the Konkombwa people of Sudan, Seestück is a more open, panoramic landscape comprised of several disparate elements, foremost among them a giant samovar or tea-urn that dominates the desert landscape from a De Chirico-esque wooden stage pedestal in a way not unlike that of the elephantine construction of The Elephant Celebes. Reflected in this samovar is the image of a teacup and saucer set on a table as if the samovar were situated, as is usual, in a café or a house. Here, reflecting in the surface of the samovar, the image of the teacup takes on a bizarre and illogical presence, appearing as if it is not actually a reflection at all but an integral part of the samovar’s own nature and appearance, or a glimpse into another reality entirely.
From this central and puzzling object a chain of visual association is then set up that comes to define the bizarre landscape. The form of the samovar is pictorially echoed both on the horizon by a similar-shaped volcano spouting an eruption in the far distance, and at the bottom of the painting by the face of an idol, which similarly reflects a windowpane in the same way the samovar reflects the teacup. This three-way visual echo between the face of the idol, the samovar and the volcano is a new painterly technique that would later be taken up by Salvador Dalí who would develop this visual associating of different forms into the technique he called ‘paranoiac criticism.’
As Werner Spies has pointed out, the belt that is strapped around the head of this idol and connected to the telegraph poles in the lower left of Seestück probably derives from an illustration in Emil Kraeplin’s 1918 book Hundert Jahre Psychiatrie where, on page 58, such a device was shown being used as a restraint for aggressive psychiatric patients. This device also recalls the strange apparatus that Ernst would later depict in one of his illustrations for La femme 100 têtes (‘The Hundred Headless Woman’) (plate 44: L’oncle à peine étrangle, la jeune adulte sans pareille s’envole). In connecting this restraining device to the telegraph wire, Ernst conjures a mental association with the electric-shock treatment that was commonly in use to subdue troublesome mental patients during the war, as well as perhaps suggesting the potential of channeling such psychic or psychological energy elsewhere, into other unknown fields of energy and creativity. These wires are again pictorially echoed in the painting by a tiny populace who have joined into groups to fly a comparatively enormous kite that flies above the ‘nose’ of the samovar.
Magically evoking a bizarre yet vaguely logical sequence of pictorial events, the desert landscape of this presumably ironically-entitled Seestück is a magnificent painterly example of a proposition first voiced by the Romantic poet Novalis and later echoed by the Surrealists. The ‘great reality of fetish worship,’ Novalis wrote, is that ‘anything that is strange, accidental or individual can become our portal to the universe. A face, a star, a stretch of countryside, an old tree, etc., can make an epoch in our inner lives’ (quoted in op. cit., 1988, p. 11). From the apparent banality of an ordinary object such as a tea-urn of the kind that appeared in many cafés and railway stations, Ernst has woven a strange and evocative mental landscape that speaks of new and disquieting undiscovered worlds lying hidden within the surface appearances our everyday world of daily life.
As a student, Ernst had marked the following passage in his copy of Nietzsche’s treatise, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft: ‘What I can’t bear is the fact that it is more important to know the name of things than to know the things themselves. The name of things, the reputation of things, their outward appearance, their place in the hierarchy, all these were due initially to error and caprice. They were like clothes that people threw on without caring whether they suited their natures or the colour of their skins. But eventually, as generation after generation came to accept them, the names came to be identified with the things that they had been applied to. They were those things in the end... And now it would be the wildest illusion to suppose that by showing how all this came about, we can destroy this so-called “real” world. To destroy it, we have to create another, an alternative world. But there is another thing that we must not forget: that if we create new names, formulate new entities and put forward new probabilities we shall also, in the long run, create new “things”’ (quoted in J. Russell, Max Ernst, London, 1967, pp. 50-51).
Nietzsche’s belief that the so-called world of everyday reality was merely a surface or artifice underneath which, ‘another, altogether different reality lies concealed,’ held particular significance for Ernst, as it was to do for many artists of his generation (The Birth of Tragedy in O. Levy, ed., The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, New York, 1911, p. 23). Emerging from the nightmare of the First World War – a fast-track schooling in the blatant stupidity of man, the madness of civilization and the inherently brutal nature of mechanized modernity – Ernst explained that he and his generation had come, ‘back from the war dazed and our disgust simply had to find an outlet. This quite naturally took the form of attacks on the foundations of the civilization that had brought this war about – attacks on language, syntax, logic, literature, painting and so forth’ (quoted in W. Spies, ed., Max Ernst, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 82).
Through the pictorial language of collage – the assembling of disparate and seemingly unconnected imagery and rearranging it into surprising and subversive new associations – Ernst found not only a way to attack the conventions and hierarchies of modern ‘civilization,’ but also a new and disturbing reality that seemed to provoke and prick the conscience of modern man. ‘I am tempted,’ Ernst remarked, ‘to see in collage the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane.’ What he wanted to achieve, he wrote, was to, ‘create an electric or erotic tension between…elements that we have become accustomed to think of as mutually alien and unrelated. Discharges, high tension currents would result. And the more unexpected the elements brought together, the more surprising to me was the spark of poetry that jumped the gap’ (quoted in W. Spies, Max Ernst: Collages, London, 1988, p. 228).
Gradually, through the seemingly random and often humorous juxtaposition of images culled from technical manuals and magazine illustrations all transposed into new and surprising incarnations and arenas, Ernst’s art began to express a new and potent topography of the mind. From its schizophrenic collaged beginnings, strange landscapes and creatures began to emerge with increasing regularity in his work, and to articulate a fascinating new world beyond the looking-glass of crystallized reason and order. Ernst described the phenomenon as follows: ‘an hallucinating succession of self-contradictory images – double images, triple images, multiple images – laid one on top of another with the imperious rapidity which characterizes our memories of a love affair or the visions which come to us when we are half asleep and half-awake. These images demanded to be put on new levels of experience. Their encounters had to take a new place in a new unknown and on a place from which the idea of “fitness” or “propriety” was excluded. All that I had to do was to take a plate from the catalogue and add to it. I painted or drew, in docile fashion, whatever presented itself to me. Adding a patch of colour, pencilling in a detail or two, a landscape which had nothing to do with the objects represented a desert, a new sky, a geological cross-section, a floor, a simple straight line to represent the horizon, I secured for myself an exact and permanent image of my hallucination. And what had been simply the most banal pages of advertisement became so many dramas revelatory of my most secret desires’ (‘What is the mechanism of collage?’ quoted in op. cit., 1967, p. 51).
In 1921, with the prospects of the continuation of the Cologne Dada group waning, Ernst was eager to leave the German city for somewhere more conducive to the furthering of his art. At the instigation of his new-found friends Paul Eluard and André Breton, in May of that year he had sent several of his recent collages and ‘overpaintings’ to Paris for an exhibition where they had proved a revelation to the fledgling ‘Surrealist’ group. Encouraged by their reception in Paris, Ernst, soon afterwards and for the first time, began to paint in oil according to the same semi-automatic process of juxtaposing imagery and then intuitively creating an imaginary and illusionary mental landscape. The paintings Seestück and The Elephant Celebes were the results.
Whereas The Elephant Celebes is centred around a strange, animated image drawn from a photograph of a corn bin made by the Konkombwa people of Sudan, Seestück is a more open, panoramic landscape comprised of several disparate elements, foremost among them a giant samovar or tea-urn that dominates the desert landscape from a De Chirico-esque wooden stage pedestal in a way not unlike that of the elephantine construction of The Elephant Celebes. Reflected in this samovar is the image of a teacup and saucer set on a table as if the samovar were situated, as is usual, in a café or a house. Here, reflecting in the surface of the samovar, the image of the teacup takes on a bizarre and illogical presence, appearing as if it is not actually a reflection at all but an integral part of the samovar’s own nature and appearance, or a glimpse into another reality entirely.
From this central and puzzling object a chain of visual association is then set up that comes to define the bizarre landscape. The form of the samovar is pictorially echoed both on the horizon by a similar-shaped volcano spouting an eruption in the far distance, and at the bottom of the painting by the face of an idol, which similarly reflects a windowpane in the same way the samovar reflects the teacup. This three-way visual echo between the face of the idol, the samovar and the volcano is a new painterly technique that would later be taken up by Salvador Dalí who would develop this visual associating of different forms into the technique he called ‘paranoiac criticism.’
As Werner Spies has pointed out, the belt that is strapped around the head of this idol and connected to the telegraph poles in the lower left of Seestück probably derives from an illustration in Emil Kraeplin’s 1918 book Hundert Jahre Psychiatrie where, on page 58, such a device was shown being used as a restraint for aggressive psychiatric patients. This device also recalls the strange apparatus that Ernst would later depict in one of his illustrations for La femme 100 têtes (‘The Hundred Headless Woman’) (plate 44: L’oncle à peine étrangle, la jeune adulte sans pareille s’envole). In connecting this restraining device to the telegraph wire, Ernst conjures a mental association with the electric-shock treatment that was commonly in use to subdue troublesome mental patients during the war, as well as perhaps suggesting the potential of channeling such psychic or psychological energy elsewhere, into other unknown fields of energy and creativity. These wires are again pictorially echoed in the painting by a tiny populace who have joined into groups to fly a comparatively enormous kite that flies above the ‘nose’ of the samovar.
Magically evoking a bizarre yet vaguely logical sequence of pictorial events, the desert landscape of this presumably ironically-entitled Seestück is a magnificent painterly example of a proposition first voiced by the Romantic poet Novalis and later echoed by the Surrealists. The ‘great reality of fetish worship,’ Novalis wrote, is that ‘anything that is strange, accidental or individual can become our portal to the universe. A face, a star, a stretch of countryside, an old tree, etc., can make an epoch in our inner lives’ (quoted in op. cit., 1988, p. 11). From the apparent banality of an ordinary object such as a tea-urn of the kind that appeared in many cafés and railway stations, Ernst has woven a strange and evocative mental landscape that speaks of new and disquieting undiscovered worlds lying hidden within the surface appearances our everyday world of daily life.