Max Ernst in the Museum of Photography: Playing Fields of the Surreal

He was vain, the Dadamax and bird Loplop, as the artist liked to call himself. The exhibition shows Max Ernst in front of the camera in his quick transformations and self-reflections dozens of times. Sometimes he disguises himself in clouds of smoke as a mysterious magician, white-haired, sometimes he makes rows of faces in the photo booth. Then again he tenderly works on the plaster body of a female torso, which he of course created himself.

As a hands-on artist berserker, he goes to work on a giant mural with his bare torso. The magically auratized profile portrait for which his Parisian friend Man Ray pressed the shutter in 1932 became famous. The coolest and ravishingly sophisticated photograph of him was taken by the famous American Irving Penn: a star alongside his beautiful young wife Dorothea Tanning. The surrealist painter was the last in an illustrious line of women who combined her life with charismatic seriousness. In 1922, the circle of friends led by André Breton squeezed into a backdrop car for a group photo. In front of it, Max Ernst pedals sportily: a clever loner with the wind at his back.

Not just being one, but several, many: that was something that the son of a deaf-mute teacher, born in Brühl in 1891, clearly enjoyed. Max Ernst knew how to stage himself and fed his image into the emerging media machine of the 20th century. He never even picked up the camera. The 280 exhibits in the show at the Museum für Fotografie make it clear how complex Max Ernst’s relationship to the art of photography and its technical processes was.

The majority of the works on paper and artists’ books come from the Würth Collection, with which the State Museums have cooperated several times. The Baden-Württemberg entrepreneur Rudolf Würth struck when Lufthansa sold off its exquisite Max Ernst collection in 1996. It was curated by Werner Spies, who was a friend of the artist.

In addition to a few oil paintings, he also traveled to Berlin with a painted door: in the house of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard and his wife Gala in Eaubonne, Max Ernst transformed the two wings into a huge, colorfully iridescent butterfly. The entrance to a magical kingdom? Not taking reality at face value, but rather opening up views into other realities: that was Ernst’s profession. And photography, of all things, gave him plenty of inspiration.

As soon as you enter the show, the artist’s eye looks at you in close-up, zoomed in by British photographer Bill Brandt. In his own graphics, Max Ernst lets giant-sized individual eyes float like stars. Surreal vision freed itself from earthly ties. A whole cluster of similar motifs illustrates how much other surrealists were also fascinated by the motif of the eye. It looks inwards and outwards, is part of the real and at the same time the vehicle of a vision.

Curator Ludger Derenthal shows Max Ernst’s motif worlds closely intertwined with the work of other artists, photographers and writers. The media and the motives change in give and take. Across Europe, collage is becoming a principle of design that outdoes purely fact-based thinking. Max Ernst’s poetic ideas for Paul Éluard’s collection of poems “Répétions” rhythmize the various thematic sections.

His generation grew up with a growing flood of printed images and photos, for example in the field of nature research. Karl Blossfeldt’s and Anne Biermann’s highly aesthetic plant photographs, as it turns out, have precursors in early nature self-prints of the 19th century, in which a pressed chestnut leaf becomes a printing block.

Max Ernst responded to this tradition of hyper-precise vision with his frottage sequence “Histoire Naturelle” from 1926. From the microcosm of cell and leaf structures to the starry macrocosm it seems to be just a step lost in a dream. Technically versatile, Max Ernst scraped, scrubbed, scratched, hatched and cut his motifs like no other surrealist. A separate thematic focus is dedicated to the interplay between positive and negative, a genuine principle of analogue photography.

How the artist made use of mass media images for his enigmatic collage novels, such as “Une Semaine de Bonté”, is explained using individual examples. He took photos of hysteria patients in the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris and puzzled them into dark, ambiguous fictions. Ernst must have spent hours and days leafing through old magazines. But his quicksilver, ambiguous pictorial cosmos is not presented here as a singular individual work, but rather integrated into various contexts. The references, some of which are quite loosely woven, extend to the present day. Azuma Makoto’s ghostly lily of the valley X-rays from 2021 can also shine here.

Two particularly sensitive exhibits are secretly hidden behind light-protection curtains. What could that be? When you lift the first one you meet a dreamer who is deeply lost in himself, quite out of focus in the evening twilight. The Barbizon painter Camille Corot, a forerunner of the Impressionists, carved the “Cliché-Verre” into a light-sensitive plate around 1850. Dreaming didn’t just happen during the time of the Surrealists!

Man Ray created the second light-shy piece: For his photogram, he pushed everyday objects, like a pair of scissors, directly onto silver gelatin paper and exposed the whole thing. Photography without a camera: This came very close to the surrealist favorite idea of ​​creating images without turning on the mind. But when have Corot and Man Ray ever met on a wall? This exhibition is good for such inspiring connections. Max Ernst makes it possible.