The Inexhaustible Max

Max Ernst will be 82 this year. He is rightly held to be one of the fathers of modern art, having outlasted most of his progeny. Dada and Surrealism, the movements that he helped fertilize, are now ticketed and labeled. Their revolutionary ambitions have been reduced to connoisseurship and slipped into the museum. Most of Ernst's allies in the Surrealist adventure are dead.

Yet Ernst continues, and he eludes the categories. Five years before Pollock, he dripped paint on a canvas from a swinging can. Long after Surrealism died as a movement, he preserved the fresh poetry of the Surrealist dialogue between images. He is the master of invoked accident and controlled chance, and he still paints as if the world could be directed--if not quite controlled--by a nudge of complicity.

Last month Rice University's Institute for the Arts in Houston opened a remarkable tribute to the inexhaustible Max: the 104 Ernsts acquired in the past 30 years by Houston's leading collectors, John and Dominique de Menil. In its range--from early Dada collages to the remarkable but underrated bronzes of the artist as sculptor--this is one of the most remarkable private collections of Ernst in the world.

Ernst was born in a small town outside Cologne. His father was a schoolteacher. From earliest childhood Ernst seems to have acquired haunting visual images. Some came during sickness. He remembers being ill and staring for hours at some mahogany plywood paneling, discerning there the shape of a dove, a nightingale, a girl-chimera--all familiar in his work.

Other visions were apparently acquired from emotional events and trying circumstances in his life. His father was stern and autocratic. When young Ernst was only 14, his pet cockatoo died. The same day, almost to the hour, his favorite younger sister was born. Thereafter, Ernst's subconscious apparently kept mixing the images of a bird as hope, maybe with sex and therefore regeneration; of father as creator and destroyer; and of the whole world as both a dreadful and exciting place.

During a later illness, Ernst remembers, he stared at the wood flooring and ended up discovering a new painting technique that he called "frottage." He took paper and pencil, laid them over the textured surface, and scribbled away --as many a child has done over a penny on many a boring day. Allied to this was Ernst's use of paint sponged and knifed on a canvas, with the images it suggested later sharpened with a brush. Figure--Mythological Woman was produced in just such a way.

Pedigree. Ernst went to the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, and psychiatry at a time, 1909, when the subject was barely acknowledged as a discipline. After serving in the German artillery in World War I, he continued painting, and eventually reached Paris at a time when Dada was in full swing and Surrealism was about to be born. One purpose of Dada was to negate everything that art had stood for in the past. Yet Ernst's love of images that rise from chance blots has a pedigree that goes back to Leonardo, who spoke of finding battle scenes in stains on a wall. His obsessive themes--the haunted garden of decaying vegetation, the birds and chimeras, the figures of Loplop and La Belle Jardiniere--describe a territory of imagination that seems both mysterious and exactly mapped.

In 1940 he took refuge in New York, and married the heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim a year later. After the war ended, he divorced Peggy, married Artist Dorothea Tanning and built a house in Arizona. Life there resulted in a magnificent series of Arizona mountains, bleak and burning under their immobile suns.

Eventually Ernst migrated back to Europe and a small house in the south of France, where he is busy doing lithographs and engravings. One of his better recent works is a collage of the church St. Sulpice in Paris, complete with that insistent bird.

What has always rescued Ernst from the programmatic side of surrealism is that he has an incredible sense of abstract design and (in his later years) a total freedom from meticulous realistic detail. If one can judge from this show, Ernst has recovered in old age the ebullience that can make him imagine an abstract sun setting over an abstract Arizona desert, re-create from memory a fine old image of Adam and Eve, or reduce a bird to one aggressive beak above a red colored square. He may not be getting better but it is clear that, even past 80, he is still inventing.

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