Max Ernst: Beyond Painting | MoMA Curator Explores Surrealist Art

Max Ernst's 1934 surrealist collage novel 'Une Semaine De Bonté' demonstrates how Victorian-era illustrations from old catalogs and pulp novels can be recombined to create surreal narratives, with the inherent strangeness of the source material enhancing the surrealist effect rather than undermining it.

Max Ernst pioneered the use of collage in Surrealist art by combining familiar 18th and 19th century illustrations with unexpected, disturbing elements to create irrational narratives, exemplified in his publication 'Une Semaine de Bonté' (A Week of Kindness), where viewers must construct their own stories from disconnected images featuring recurring characters like his mythological bird figure Lop-Lop.

In 1930, Max Ernst created collage novels, extraordinary works where he looked at illustrations from 19th-century scientific magazines, women's journals, and company catalogs, cut out images, and combined them in seemingly seamless ways. He rephotographed them to create haunting dream images that seemed provocative with a story but couldn't be fully deciphered. The first was 'The Woman of a Hundred Heads' with nine chapters and only titles as text. This was a new type of novel where illustrations are the story and the reader must decipher what's happening. 'The Woman of a Hundred Heads' has four different meanings depending on how you hear the title: 'La Femme à Cent Têtes' (the woman of a hundred heads), 'La Femme Sans Tête' (the woman without a head), 'La Femme de la Tête de Sang' (the woman's head of blood), or 'La Femme Tête de Sang' (the stubborn woman, the fallen sometimes). This pun reflects Max's approach to working at this point - constantly different ways to understand depending on who you are. 'A Week of Kindness' (1934) is probably the most successful of Max Ernst's collage novels, with 182 pages grouped in five different books (originally planned for seven). It contains extraordinary, compelling, bizarre, haunting images with often bird heads, and Loplop plays a big role. In 1933, Max Ernst created five paintings called 'Airplane Traps' using grattage. These paintings show planes that look almost like insects caught in some sort of trap where vegetation seems to be exploding from it or feeding on it. The images are haunting because it's unclear whether these are really planes (industrial machines) or insects that resemble planes, and whether they have a life of their own and are dying in a way an insect would die. This reflects Max's concern about Germany gearing up for military structure and Hitler coming into power. 'The Joy of Life' (1933) is a beautiful, exotic painting filled with plants and foliage, inspired by one of Max's favorite artists on Rivera. It shows a tiger attacking a buffalo, with insects and creatures that are extremely threatening and terrifying lurking within the beauty. This reflects Max's surrealist statement that monsters lurk within beauty. 'The Fireside Angel' is one of Max Ernst's most powerful paintings, painted right after the fall of the republican government in Spain. For Max, the idea was that this was the first step toward the trampling of everything - a gleeful horror of something crushing everything underneath its feet. He said 'let's go Spain's, so we'll go Europe,' and within two years, that's exactly what happened. The painting connects with Dali's 'The Metamorphosis of Narcissus' - both artists were in sync with each other, following the same mythological ideas in slightly different ways. 'The Robbing of the Bride' (1939) is a provocative painting with Freudian references, strange hermaphroditic references, and alchemy. It features incredible figures with textual painting that comes from both decalcomania and Max's precision as an artist. At this point, Max had grown to be one of the finest artists of the 20th century.

Many 19th-century collages have a surreal quality, particularly those made with photographic elements at the end of the century. Kate Greenaway created compositions featuring landscapes with ducks, birds, and flowers where faces were replaced with photographs of her friends' heads, creating surreal representations. This work anticipates later surrealist collage practices. Max Ernst's collage novels like 'Une Semaine de Bonté' use violent decapitation of images and giving people new heads, demonstrating how collage can create different kinds of realities. Artists like Pauline Boyton and Peter Blake later used Victorian imagery in modern art, showing how collage practices pioneered by Victorian women have important legacies in 20th-century art movements. Theorists have characterized collage as disruptive, interrogating boundaries and binaries, and interruptive because it dislocates and disentangles. From the 1960s onwards, collage was used toward aims of resistance and reaction. Punk music and aesthetics align with collage because both are invested in the aesthetics of juncture, ripping, destruction, and DIY culture.

Max Ernst invented the collage novel in 1929, creating hybrid genres combining text and images in book format. His three novels—'La Fam Saët' (147 images), 'Carmela' (parodic religious narrative), and 'A Week of Kindness' (seven deadly sins)—immersed readers in dreamlike, often violent universes. These works used 19th-century engravings from pamphlets and almanacs, isolating them from original contexts to create new meanings. Critics noted theatrical framing effects and melodramatic structures typical of serialized novels. The works blended allegory, mythology, fairy tales, and dream fragments with contemporary concerns about power, violence, and social critique, demonstrating how collage could reconstruct cultural narratives through subversive recombination.

World War II created a massive brain drain of European artists fleeing Nazi persecution, transforming American art permanently. Peggy Guggenheim married Max Ernst (1941-1946), opened The Art of This Century gallery in New York (1941), and became a patroness for European émigrés. The 'Artists in Exile' photograph (1942) documents this diaspora: Matta, Zadkine, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, André Breton, Piet Mondrian, and others. Arshile Gorky, who arrived in America in 1926, bridged European Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism. Breton declared him a surrealist, and Gorky embraced automatic techniques allowing paint to run and dribble. He befriended Willem de Kooning, directly linking Surrealist innovations to the New York School. This migration transferred European avant-garde ideas to America, establishing Abstract Expressionism as the dominant post-war movement. The famous Life magazine photograph 'The Irascibles' (1951) captures this generation that inherited surrealist ideas and went beyond them.

Max Ernst studied literature, philosophy, psychiatry, and art history, described as 'l'homme des possibilités infinies' (the man of infinite possibilities) by André Breton. He created the Dada movement in Cologne and joined the surrealists in Paris. He always started from the real, using everyday objects like agricultural tools and flower pots to create his artistic vocabulary. The frottage technique was invented when Ernst noticed worn parquet flooring with knots, creating his first forest drawings. The grattage technique emerged from these experiments. Max Ernst's forest paintings often feature a central solar element that appears to be 'rapporté' (attached) to the surface, creating a narrative where viewers can imagine climbing trees, reaching the moon, or escaping from what appears to be a nightmare below. The emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York marked a fundamental shift in the global art world. Before this movement, there were no major American artists or paintings. Max Ernst encountered Jackson Pollock and claimed to have given him a 'leçon de peinture' (painting lesson) that led to the drip technique.

The Surrealists André Breton, Max Ernst, and Claude Lévi-Strauss arrived in New York in spring 1941 as exiles escaping Nazi persecution. Breton stayed until 1946, the Vistrous until 1947. This American exile experience provided years of urban experience that Claude Lévi-Strauss documented in texts. The Surrealists recognized the fecund heuristic effect of juxtaposing different realities without fearing discontinuity, acknowledging their debt to Max Ernst on this subject. They challenged the traditional opposition between modern and archaic, instead recognizing New York as a complex space where multiple temporalities coexisted, prefiguring 1970s European urban conditions.

After World War II, the center of cultural supremacy shifted from Paris, France to New York, United States. This transformation occurred because the United States emerged as the great victor of the war, gaining international political and economic dominance. Two key factors drove this change: first, the US achieved international supremacy, and since art always follows power, cultural influence naturally followed; second, many European artists emigrated to the United States, which was safe from bombing and already had an established art scene welcoming European avant-garde movements. The United States had previously experienced a 'cultural inferiority complex' where American artists felt they were always following European trends, but this ended as the US began to take a leading role in international art. Expressionism Abstract was the first major art movement to emerge in the United States, predating Pop Art which began in England. The primary influence on Expressionism Abstract was surrealism, which itself was a child of dadaism. Key figures like André Breton and Max Ernst emigrated to the United States during World War II, bringing their established artistic languages with them. Peggy Guggenheim was a crucial figure in the development of American art, particularly in New York during the 1940s. She inherited $2.5 million at age 21 from her father Benjamin Guggenheim, a successful businessman of Jewish German origin who died in the Titanic sinking. Initially having limited knowledge of modern art, she met Duchamp who became her mentor and taught her to distinguish between abstract art and surrealism. Through her humility in recognizing what she did not know and her willingness to learn from others, she became one of the leading experts in contemporary art. In October 1942, she opened the 'Art of This Century' gallery in Manhattan, which became the center of American pictorial vanguard. Her support was essential for the emergence of Expressionism Abstract. She discovered Jackson Pollock through an advertisement she placed in Art Digest, seeking new American artists under 35 years old. Among the artists who responded was Jackson Pollock, who thus entered the cultural scene. Peggy died in December 1979 from a pulmonary embolism in Padua, Italy, having lived to be over 70 years old.

The emergence of American abstract expressionism resulted from a complex convergence of European surrealist refugees and American artists following World War II. Following the war, surrealist exiles like Kurt Seligman arrived in New York, establishing networks that would profoundly influence American art. Meyer Shapiro facilitated these connections, arranging financial support and mentorship opportunities. Robert Motherwell studied with Shapiro at Columbia, then worked directly with Seligman, gaining access to surrealist circles. Gordon Onslow Ford's lectures at the New School brought live surrealist figures to American audiences. These intellectual exchanges occurred in specific geographic locations—McDougall Street, Washington Square, Peggy Guggenheim's gallery—creating concentrated artistic communities. The First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in 1942 and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery on 57th Street provided institutional support. This migration created a unique moment of cultural exchange where European artistic traditions merged with American innovation, ultimately contributing to the emergence of abstract expressionism as the dominant international art movement by the late 1940s.

Conservation colleagues are essential but often unsung heroes of museum exhibitions, performing work that makes it possible to bring works out of storage. The 'Tender Loving Care' exhibition required significant conservation work for works like Joan Snyder's 'Resurrection' (1977), which hadn't been on view for 40 years. Conservators examine mixed media works carefully, create reversible treatments, and stabilize panels for exhibition. Daisy Brand's ceramic work required repairing a significant crack. This behind-the-scenes work is fundamental to every exhibition but is not typically included in wall labels or focused on during gallery visits.

Curators face challenges in planning exhibition spaces, especially when dealing with works of varying sizes. The curator used a method of translating points into circles and shapes to create a wall layout for displaying works. Effective curatorial work involves collaborative brainstorming among team members, where ideas are proposed, challenged, and refined through discussion. The curator describes this as an 'amazing discussion' where everyone contributes. Curators often discover unexpected solutions during exhibition preparation. The curator found corrugated sheets that were about to be thrown away and used them to sandwich fragile paper works, protecting them while maintaining the exhibition's theme of discovery and accident. For Samant's black canvases, the curator painted a room black and illuminated it in a particular way so that the paintings appear self-illuminating, allowing viewers to see every detail including brush strokes and meticulously placed dots.

This video showcases MoMA's behind-the-scenes operations, featuring senior paintings conservator Anny Aviram dusting Georges-Pierre Seurat's "The Channel at Gravelines" and Henri Rousseau's "The Dream," while Michael Duffy removes discolored restoration layers from Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy" using tested solvents; curator team Lana Hum, Christophe Cherix, and Esther Adler collaborate with artist Betye Saar on her exhibition design, organizing works thematically around family themes and key pieces; and Ellen Moody supervises the cleaning of Tony Smith's sculpture "Moondog" in the Sculpture Garden, demonstrating how museums balance technical conservation work with creative exhibition planning to preserve and present modern art for public appreciation.

Contemporary artworks with inherent vice—those whose very materiality is bound to deteriorate over time—present unique curatorial and conservation challenges that require collaborative decision-making, ongoing maintenance, and a culture of work that preserves both the physical object and the artist's conceptual intentions; Jason Rhoades' traveling exhibition 'Four Roads' exemplifies this challenge, where curators had to balance replacing deteriorating elements (like the sheetrock tool chest in Cherry Makita that was crumbling) while respecting the artist's original vision, ultimately creating an inventory system and training apprentices to ensure the work could be reassembled and maintained across different venues.

Curatorial practice aims to illuminate things in ways affecting indeterminacy between idea and matter, creating moments of understanding exceeding individual components. The exhibition and audience are interdependent—neither exists without the other. A fundamental contradiction exists within avant-garde practice: the need for white cube spaces supporting art's appearance versus desire to cross into social realms affecting change. This contra-contradiction is illustrated through Graciela Carnevale's performance locking visitors inside a gallery until someone broke the window, symbolizing tensions between institutional presentation and social engagement.