Max Ernst

THE Max Ernst show, "Works on Paper," now at the Busch-Reisinger is a connoisser's show, well organized, comprehensive, and, among other things, it reunites two important series of Ernsts works. Yet it is all too raisonne; the daring, the shock, the excitement of Ernst and the Dadaist-Surrealists seems to have escaped.

Dadism, starting in Zurich after World War I, was anti-art--the art of rebellion, aimed at attacking traditional sensibilities, shocking them, and confusing them. Surrealism followed, combining cubism and dadism, using often grotesque fantasy and dream elements to attempt an art of the sub-conscious and irrational.

Ernst belonged to both movements, and played a particularly important part in developing new techniques for executing the new art forms. It was he who first painted by taking a can of paint with a small hole in it and-swinging it above his canvas. The so-called frottage, producing an image by placing paper over a surface and rubbing it with a pencil and later with paints, was his invention as well. It transferred the three dimensional surface of the object directly onto the two-dimensional surface of the paper.

This frottage technique has a whole room devoted to it at the Busch-Reisinger show. "The Head" is an obvious example of the technique used to horrible advantage. Just as frottage depends on a raised surface beneath the paper, the veins on the head seem to run beneath the surface.

SOME of the frottage pictures deny the technique rather than capitalize upon it. "Forest, Sun, Birds" is a lithograph-like combination of oil and frottage, Great dark shafts of stylized trees, with glimmers of yellow and blue for shadow and sun create the forest. A large blind eye and the desperate outline of a baby bird, containing a subtle light ambiguously suggests the life within the bird and a clearing in the forest.

The unity of color and form is "Forest, Sun, Birds" is reversed and turned to eery, inexplicable horror in many of the Dada and Proto-Surrealist works, and to humor in others. "Le Jeune Prince" and "The Swan is Very Peaceful," made of pasted photoengravings, combine seemingly incoherent images to acheive inexplicably creepy works, preying on irrational and subconscious resources of the observer.

Such provocation is not forthcoming, however, from most of the works. "La Petite Fille Qui Voulet Entrer a Carmel" is a large collection of plates from a novel by Ernst, which, though they contain strange conglomerations of figures pasted together, and remind us of the association between surealist art and literature, are strangely static and uninteresting as they hang, a quality which unfortunately repeats itself throughout the show. This is partially due to the limited nature of the exhibit--that it is mainly pencil and photoengraving on paper and therefore not so powerful or organically real as much work in oil. Hanging many of the works in richly carved frames drains them further. Most of them are small and yellowing, more deserving of intimate, informal presentation than encasement in the self-conscious, serious trappings of traditional museum presentation.

Ernst, in his own writings, returns again and again to a strangely fascinating sentence: "Enter, enter, have no fear of being blinded. . . ." He seems to say--don't be afraid to face disturbing images, don't be afraid of the subconscious they provoke. The show is certainly worth entering, but there is little fear of being blinded.