At the entrance to "Max Ernst: The Sculpture" (at the Newport Harbor Art Museum through Sept. 6), a blowup of a 1947 snapshot shows a woman with her eyes closed, reclining luxuriously against the outstretched concrete arm of a giant creature with a stylized goat's head.
This regal figure--accompanied by his demure, long-necked goddess/queen, a manic-looking kid with Martian-style antennae, and a big-nosed bird--rules benignly over a patch of scrubby land in Sedona, Ariz. Beaming happily over the goat god's left shoulder is Ernst himself, one of the founding fathers of Dada and Surrealism.
The 56-year-old German-born artist was in his element that summer, happily posing with his fourth (and last) wife, Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Her precarious health had brought them from a threadbare but culturally rich life in New York (where he fled after being interned in France as an enemy alien during World War II) to the stunning isolation of Arizona. There they built themselves a lopsided two-room house they grandly dubbed "Capricorn Hill." Ernst assembled his domestic shrine for the homeliest of reasons: to celebrate the laying of a utility pipe that freed the couple from having to haul water from a well five miles away.
An avid collector of expressive sculpture from non-Western cultures, he installed a Northwest Indian totem in the front yard. His sculptural tableau, "Capricorn," incorporated various ethnographic influences visible in exaggerated body proportions and serenely simplified faces. But the piece also was uniquely an Ernst creation, a paean to impromptu inspiration.
Everything was pieced together from cement casts of odds and ends: milk cartons cast and piled on top of each other to make the king's scepter (also reminiscent of Brancusi's undulating "Endless Column"), eggshells for the queen's downcast eyes, a cello (harking back to Cubist still lifes) for her body.
Like most of his other sculptures from the '30s and '40s, this piece was seldom seen publicly until it was cast in bronze years later (in this case, in a slightly different form). This exhibit, organized by Themis Visual Arts of Edinburgh, Scotland, is the first to concentrate specifically on Ernst's sculpture in bronze and precious metals.
The sensibility that informed these large and small three-dimensional works was the same puckish, deliberately irrational and willfully inventive spirit that earlier led Ernst to make collages of bizarre encounters (based on illustrations clipped from magazines), fantasy drawings based on rubbings ( frottages ) from pieces of wood, leaves and other materials, and dreamlike paintings.
What we tend to forget is that these sculptures also represented a revolutionary way of viewing the human body, beyond traditional Western representations of ideal or actual human figures. During the first few decades of the 20th Century, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Ernst and others dared to raise the curtain that separated polite, normative behavior from secret and "forbidden" thoughts and actions.
These artists were emboldened by a kaleidoscope of influences that included Cubism, increased awareness of non-Western art forms, the exhaustion of academic tradition, wartime destruction, and breakthroughs in psychology. (Ernst was especially interested in art made by mental patients.)
Artists gave themselves permission to reinterpret the human body from the inside out, as an extension of mental states rather than a reflection of what the eye sees. They frequently allowed themselves to scramble, duplicate, omit or exaggerate body parts, especially those charged with sexual potency. Made of simple, discrete elements stuck onto each other in a "primitive" way, Ernst's sculptures generally represent gut feelings.
His lack of formal training as a sculptor was liberating, while his relish for chance encounters gave him the equivalent of an extra pair of eyes. It wasn't altogether surprising that an artist who habitually saw hallucinatory visions in wood grain and cracks in the wall would seize upon ordinary objects as a basis for his sculptures. His first pieces, made in 1934, were stones he found in a stream, to which he added color and or made shallow carvings.
Surrealists as a group were crazy about objects. Certain objects--natural or man-made--were believed to offer great revelations if perceived serendipitously and wisely interpreted. Perhaps the best known example of Ernst's object-mania is his lithograph "The Hat Makes the Man," in which branching stacks of bowler hats served as stand-ins for an actual flesh-and-blood figure.
