ART REVIEW : Max Ernst: A Show of Sculptural Ideas

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 an exhausted-looking 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.”

An avid collector of expressive sculpture from non-Western cultures, Ernst incorporated various ethnographic influences in his sculptural tableau, “Capricorn”--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: a milk carton for the mask-like face topping the king’s tall scepter (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.

In common with most of his other sculptures from the ‘30s and ‘40s, “Capricorn” was seldom seen publicly until a cast edition was produced years later, in a slightly different form. In the bronze version, the goddess/queen has grown a more substantial fishtail and the god/king baby-sits a miniature goddess. At once monumental, amusing and lovably domestic, the piece is the irresistible centerpiece of the show.

Organized by Themis Visual Arts of Edinburgh, Scotland, this exhibit 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 engravings clipped from old books), 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 expressive potential of the human body. During the first few decades of the 20th Century, Picasso, Giacometti, Ernst and others dared to raise the curtain that separated polite, normative behavior from “forbidden” thoughts and actions. These artists were emboldened by a kaleidoscope of influences that included the exhaustion of academic tradition, increased awareness of non-Western art forms, wartime destruction and breakthroughs in psychology (Ernst was especially interested in art made by mental patients).

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.

With a wink at the standardized parts of machine technology, he assembled figural sculptures from plaster casts he made of such household basics as bottles, cups, plates and sand pails. Two of these early (1934) pieces were versions of “Oedipus.” Made of simple elements stuck onto each other in a seemingly artless way, these works already displayed Ernst’s witty shorthand for body parts and mental states.

Projecting elements serve equally as noses and phalli--and perhaps also as horns, referring to Oedipus’ cuckolded dead father figure and the female cuckoo bird’s habit of changing mates. (Ernst’s art is full of bird images, supposedly because of a bizarre adolescent confusion between the simultaneous death of his pet bird and the birth of one of his sisters.)

Broad slits in these Freudian forms can be read as mouths or female sex organs. Figures perching on top of other figures exert psychological weight--the equivalent to having something “on” your mind. (See “The Imbecile” and “Bird Head” for more examples of Ernst’s amusing visualization of mental preoccupations.)

Dating from the ‘40s, “Young Woman in the Shape of a Flower” is a valentine to the vagina, which appears proudly front and center, in the guise of a “flower” shape that serves as the body of a square-headed little figure. The winsome “Young Man With Beating Heart” has a cowboy’s bowlegged stance, with a shallow indentation on his torso to mark his lovelorn heart. At the end of his gawky neck, a curling petal-like form might be an abbreviated Stetson or an anatomical reference to his beloved.

Wittiest of all is the sex- and chess-themed “The King Playing With the Queen” (1944). The King, a commanding, concave horned figure with praying mantis arms, curves one hand around his diminutive Queen; the other hand, hidden behind his back, conceals a breast-shaped Pawn. In Ernst’s hands, even the Bishop’s traditional miter is naughtily suggestive of another portion of female anatomy.

Ernst’s sculpture often is reminiscent of caricature. In “An Anxious Friend,” two figures seem to have backed inadvertently into each other. The taller figure is open-mouthed; the shorter one exposes its private parts, as if to symbolize the ultimate social embarrassment of being caught “with your pants down.”

Even Ernst’s totemic columns tend to be topped with quirky figures that are the antithesis of what we expect from towering sculptural landmarks. “Beneath the Bridges of Paris” turns out to be a tribute to a squarish, pop-eyed Everyman--probably one of the clochards (bums) who traditionally live under those bridges.

Very occasionally, Ernst sheds his sweetly punning persona for a sterner or more coolly enigmatic effect. In “Are You Niniche?” a 1956 assemblage, he pairs two yokes to make a crude figure standing on a printing plate embossed with the nonsense letters, NINICHE. “A Microbe Seen Through a Temperament” (1964) mingles delicacy and brute form in a seemingly ominous way. A chain-link “spider web” stretches across a tall, lyre-like yoke, as if some persistent force were blocking off access to the world of art. Below, a bulky group of metal machine parts form the lineaments of a cold, humanoid face.

Of course, not all of the 80 works in the exhibit are of equal quality. For the most part, the silver and gold reliefs Ernst made from the late ‘50s to the early ‘70s--when he was living in Paris--are little more than whimsical baubles without the wry edge that marks his best work. The set of silver plates from 1973 essentially recycles old themes in collector-pleasing form.

Other quibbles have to do with the installation. Several of the small pieces are hung so low that you have to crouch or kneel to see them properly. And “Janus”--a two-faced piece that shares a platform with a group of other works--is thoughtlessly positioned so that the reverse side is almost impossible to see.

Finally, it is somewhat disconcerting to see an exhibit devoted entirely to Ernst’s sculpture that offers no tangible reminders (not even photographs) of his work in other media. For all his importance to 20th-Century art and Surrealism, Ernst is not nearly as well known as Picasso or Marcel Duchamp. Delightful as it is to see a village of Ernst figures sprouting up in one gallery, they beg to be reunited with their spiritual kin in some of his other idiosyncratic inventions.