Max Ernst A Retrospective Werner Spies Sabine Rewald Eds

Max Ernst A Retrospective Werner Spies Sabine
Rewald Eds download
https://ebookbell.com/product/max-ernst-a-retrospective-werner-
spies-sabine-rewald-eds-52479700
Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.
Max Ernst And Alchemy A Magician In Search Of Myth M E Warlick
Franklin Rosemont
https://ebookbell.com/product/max-ernst-and-alchemy-a-magician-in-
search-of-myth-m-e-warlick-franklin-rosemont-51923874
Max Ernst And Alchemy A Magician In Search Of Myth 2001 The Surrealist
Revolution M E Warlick
https://ebookbell.com/product/max-ernst-and-alchemy-a-magician-in-
search-of-myth-2001-the-surrealist-revolution-m-e-warlick-2214384
A Little Girl Dreams Of Taking The Veil Ernst Maxtanning Dorothea
https://ebookbell.com/product/a-little-girl-dreams-of-taking-the-veil-
ernst-maxtanning-dorothea-11814550
Germanjewish Cultural Identity From 1900 To The Aftermath Of The First
World War A Comparative Study Of Moritz Goldstein Julius Bab And Ernst
Lissauer Reprint 2013 Elisabeth Albanis
https://ebookbell.com/product/germanjewish-cultural-identity-
from-1900-to-the-aftermath-of-the-first-world-war-a-comparative-study-
of-moritz-goldstein-julius-bab-and-ernst-lissauer-
reprint-2013-elisabeth-albanis-49421388

The Hundred Headless Woman Max Ernst
https://ebookbell.com/product/the-hundred-headless-woman-max-
ernst-48843358
Prehistoric Future Max Ernst And The Return Of Painting Between The
Wars Ralph Ubl Elizabeth Tucker
https://ebookbell.com/product/prehistoric-future-max-ernst-and-the-
return-of-painting-between-the-wars-ralph-ubl-elizabeth-
tucker-51442144
Prehistoric Future Max Ernst And The Return Of Painting Between The
Wars Ralph Ubl
https://ebookbell.com/product/prehistoric-future-max-ernst-and-the-
return-of-painting-between-the-wars-ralph-ubl-5278172
Between Lives An Artist And Her World First Edition Ernst Maxtanning
https://ebookbell.com/product/between-lives-an-artist-and-her-world-
first-edition-ernst-maxtanning-11814548
Revolution In The Air 2018th Edition Max Elbaum
https://ebookbell.com/product/revolution-in-the-air-2018th-edition-
max-elbaum-45325470

THE METROPO
N PUBLIC LIBRARY
HWANG AN
33 477 O04 SOS 944
TAN MUSEUM OF ART
$ “3
A Retrospective ‘

‘Max Ernst _/
Edited by
Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald
Ts
=
Max Ernst st (1891-1976) isa rarity, a German artist who |
e impressed his French peers with his wit and imagination. —
He was also an artist who profoundly influenced more
than one generation of American as well as European
painters: only Picasso played a role as decisive as Ernst
in the invention of modern techniques and styles. As a
leader of the Cologne Dada movement immediately after
World War I, Ernst created collages in which he com-
bined mundane and banal materials, transforming them
into magical, surprising images by means of what has
been called “visual alchemy.” Proto-Surrealist paintings
he produced between 1921 and 1923, first in Cologne,
then in Paris—where he moved in 1922—are signature
works of the Surrealist movement. Powerfully appealing
and mysterious, these pictures inspired the early efforts of
Tanguy, Magritte, Dali, and other Surrealists. Even more |
emblematic of Surrealist style than ‘the paintings are
Ernst’s collages, in particular his utterly unique and
bizarre collage novels composed of disparate elements cut
from nineteenth- entury engravings. The paintings and
collages alike are steeped in Freudian metaphor, private |
mythology, and { eyocations of childhood memories.
vork developed, he for the most part |
eschewed the ‘magic-realist imagery of one strain of
‘Surrealism, channeling his energies into experiments
with the unusual techniques of frottage, grattage, and
decalcomania, Forced by World War II to flee Europe for
the United States, the artist began his American career in
1941. He produced paintings, collages, and sculptures,
initially in New York and later in Arizona, that were an
important influence on the emerging Abstract Expression-
ists and were subsequently to inspire new generations of |
artists. After the war, Ernst returned to Europe, settling
in France, where he continued | to work until his death.
This volume accompanies a major retrospective of
Ernst’s work at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the:
first held in the United States in thirty years. Every work
in the exhibition is reproduced in the lavish plates sec- |
tion of the book, and many comparative illustrations are |
included. The texts by experts in the field follow Ernst’s |
peripatetic career and offer fresh insights into his oeuvre.
Sabine Rewald’s introduction gives an overview of,
_ Ernst’s, character and career. In one essay Werner Spies | |
writes of the coexistence of nightmare and exaltation in| |
Ernst’s work, and in a second text he interprets the |
artist’s career in America, especially in regard to the auto- |
biographical painting Vox Angelica. Ludger Derenthal
(continued on back flap)
ff

W,

Max Ernst 4 Retrospective

Max Ernst
Jal Retrospective
Edited by
Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
New York
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Haven and London

This volume has been published in conjunction with
the exhibition Max Ernst: A Retrospective, organized
by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
and held there from April 7 to July 10, 2005.
The exhibition is made possible by
a
4 ALTANA
The exhibition catalogue is made possible by
the Doris Duke Fund for Publications and the
Mary and Louis S. Myers Foundation.
An indemnity has been granted by the Federal
Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
John P. O’Neill, Editor in Chief
Carol Fuerstein, Editor
Don Quaintance, Designer
Peter Antony and Sally VanDevanter, Production
Minjee Cho, Desktop Publishing
Jane S. Tai, Photograph Research
Jean Wagner, Bibliographer
Copyright © 2005 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any informa-
tion storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.
Typeset in Adobe Caslon and Kievit
Printed on 130 gram Lumisilk
Separations by Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois
Printed and bound by CS Graphics PTE Ltd., Singapore
Translations of essays by Ludger Derenthal, Thomas Gaehtgens, and Werner Spies by
Russell M. Stockman
The essay “Max Ernst in America: ‘Vox Angelica” by Werner Spies appeared in German
in a shorter version in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 15, 2003, and is
published here by permission. Readers interested in this article can obtain it from
Frankfurter Allgemeine Archiv, www.faz-archiv.de
Jacket/cover illustration: cat. no. 132, The Robing of the Bride, 1940
Frontispieces:
p. ii, Max Ernst, New York, 1942. © Arnold Newman/Getty Images
p. xviii, detail, cat. no. 88, Marceline-Marie.... (Illustration from Réve d'une petite fille qui
voulut entrer au Carmel), 1929-30
p. 106, detail, cat. no. 76, The Hundred-Headed Woman....(Illustration from La femme
100 tétes), 1929
p. 282, detail, cat. no. 87, Marceline-Marie....(Illustration from Réve d'une petite fille qui
voulut entrer au Carmel), 1929-30
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ernst, Max, 1891-1976.
Max Ernst: a retrospective / edited by Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald.
p. cm.
Catalog of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Apr. 7—
July 10, 2005.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58839-151-5 (hardcover)—1sBN 1-58839-152-3 (pbk.)—isBn 0-300-10718-8
(Yale University Press)
1. Ernst, Max, 1891-1976—Exhibitions. I. Spies, Werner, 1937— II. Rewald, Sabine.
III. Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) IV. Title.
N6888.E7A4 2005
709'.2—de22
2005000843

Nikolaus Schweickart and
Andrea Firmenich
Philippe de Montebello
Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald
Sabine Rewald
Werner Spies
Ludger Derenthal
Thomas Gaehtgens
Robert Storr
Werner Spies
Pepe Karmel
Catherine Heroy
21
107
284
290
294
301
Contents
Sponsor’s Statement
Director’s Foreword
Acknowledgments
Lenders to the Exhibition
Introduction
Nightmare and Deliverance
Max Ernst and Politics
Max Ernst and the Great Masters
Past Imperfect, Present Conditional
Max Ernst in America: “Vox Angelica”
Terrors of the Encyclopedia: Max Ernst and Contemporary Art
Works in the Exhibition
Chronology
Selected Bibliography
Index
Photograph Credits

Vi
Sponsor’s Statement MAX ERNST, MORE THAN ANY OTHER twentieth-century artist of German origin,
stands through his work, biography, and teaching as a symbolic figure for transcend-
ing borders and for openness. France soon became the chosen home for the German-
born artist. In France, through his innovative ideas, along with his circle of friends,
which included Hans Arp, André Breton, Joan Miro, Alberto Giacometti, and Mar-
cel Duchamp, he determined the direction art would take in Europe.
During his American exile, Ernst also exerted a lasting influence on the art scene
in New York. After his return to Europe, he continued to be acclaimed as one of
the foremost avant-garde artists of his time. Today Ernst is still considered one of the
most significant figures of modern art, whose surreal, visionary universe continues
to be a source of enrichment and fascination.
For ALTANA AG, openness to the world and constant, prolific exchange of
diverse ideas and perspectives stand as the highest goals of cultural engagement. That
is why it is not only natural for us but also brings us great joy to support the Max
Ernst exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first retrospective exhibi-
tion of the artist’s work held in the United States in thirty years. Four years ago, the
ALTANA Cultural Forum brought to life a program dedicated to the promotion of
twentieth-century German art in the United States. This program exemplifies the
fundamental belief of ALTANA AG that civic responsibility is inseparable from entre-
preneurial activities.
As an international pharmaceuticals and chemical group, ALTANA AG pursues
cultural and business endeavors that conform to the aforementioned beliefs. Our cul-
tural programs strive for continuity and sustainability, and therefore we perceive the
collaboration between the ALTANA Cultural Forum and The Metropolitan Museum
of Art not simply as a onetime occurrence but rather as the beginning of a long-
standing partnership.
Nikolaus Schweickart Andrea Firmenich
President and Chief Executive Officer Director
ALTANA AG ALTANA Cultural Forum
4% ALTANA

Director’s Foreword THE IMPORTANCE OF MAX ERNST in the history of Dada and Surrealism has long
been recognized. Few twentieth-century artists have played a role as decisive as
Ernst’s in the invention of modern techniques and styles. His paintings and collages,
steeped in Freudian metaphor, private mythology, and evocations of childhood mem-
ories, are icons of Surrealist art. The collages, even more than the paintings, are em-
blematic of the Surrealist movement. In them Ernst combined elements cut from a
variety of sources, including engravings from popular nineteenth-century novels and
mail-order catalogues and botanical and scientific prints from teaching manuals.
Juxtaposed illogically in Ernst’s compositions, these elements are transformed into
fantastic, magical, sometimes disquieting, and always surprising images.
The range and depth of Ernst’s work are somewhat unfamiliar in the United States
today. It is our hope that this situation will be redressed by our retrospective, which traces
the artist’s career from its beginning in Germany before World War | and its continuation
in France between the wars and in the United States during World War II to its con-
clusion in France. During the past thirty years the names of Max Ernst and Werner
Spies seem to have become synonymous. Thus it was fitting that this distinguished Ernst
scholar proposed an exhibition of the artist’s work to the Metropolitan Museum two
years ago. Functioning as guest curator together with Sabine Rewald, Curator in the
Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, Mr. Spies drew
up the preliminary list of works in the exhibition and chose the authors of the catalogue.
His boundless and infectious enthusiasm for Ernst’s art helped secure loans from private
and public sources and was crucial in persuading ALTANA AG to sponsor the exhibition.
The Museum extends its most sincere thanks to the many lenders to the exhibition,
both public institutions and private collectors in several European countries and in the
United States. Some of their names appear in this catalogue’s list of lenders, but many
have chosen to remain anonymous. We are indebted to them all for their generosity.
Special acknowledgment is also due Dorothea Tanning, painter, poet, and the artist’s
widow, for her lively interest in this project and her unflagging support of it.
We extend our deepest gratitude to ALTANA AG, whose exceptional commitment
to this exhibition has greatly enriched the project. It is only through such an extraordinary
partnership that the Museum could have realized this important project. We are indebted
to Dr. Nikolaus Schweickart, President and Chief Executive Officer of ALTANA AG, and
Andrea Firmenich, Director of the ALTANA Cultural Forum, for their unwavering support.
We acknowledge as well the invaluable support of the Doris Duke Fund for
Publications and the Mary and Louis S. Myers Foundation, which made this publica-
tion possible. We also thank the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities for
contributing to the realization of the project.
The generous sponsorship of ALTANA AG allowed us to achieve this retrospective,
the first survey of Max Ernst’s oeuvre held in this country in thirty years. It enables
many viewers to reacquaint themselves with Ernst’s work and, just as important, offers
a new generation its first in-depth view of his art.
Philippe de Montebello
Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Vil

Vill
Acknowledgments THE FRAMING OF ACKNOWLEDGMENTS is a happy task. As they are usually among
the very last words that have to be written for a book before it is sent to the printer,
they signal a publication’s successful conclusion. More important, they offer the op-
portunity to publicly thank the numerous individuals who contributed to an exhibi-
tion and its accompanying catalogue.
We extend our gratitude to Philippe de Montebello for supporting this exhibi-
tion, which offers the public the first opportunity in seme three decades to see a com-
plete overview of Max Ernst’s work in New York. As always, Gary Tinterow provided
encouragement and intelligent advice. Throughout Europe and America, curators and
collectors consented to lend their cherished masterpieces. In addition to the individu-
als and institutions named in this catalogue’s list of lenders, the following should
be thanked for their generous contributions to the project: Christian Bau, Timothy
Baum, Reinhold Baumstark, Frances Beatty, Christoph Becker, Sven Berggoetz,
Claude Berri, Ernst Beyeler, Marc Blondeau, Jacques Boissonnas, Christoph
Brockhaus, Dieter Brusberg, Frieder Burda, Richard Calvocoressi, Markus Castor,
Frangois Chapon, Pierpaolo Cimatti, Sophie Collombat, Héléne and Michel David-
Weill, Ludger Derenthal, Christian Derouet, Paul Destribats, Daniela Deuss, Martin
Dexel, Julia Drost, Ira Drukier, Matthew Drutt, John Elderfield, Richard Feigen,
Walter Feilchenfeldt, Daniel Filipacchi, Christian Fischer, David Fleiss, Marcel
Fleiss, Thomas Gaehtgens, Hartwig Garnerus, Gary Garrels, Hubertus Gassner,
Daniéle Giraudy, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Geneviéve and Pierre Hebey, Josef
Helfenstein, Fabrice Hergott, Evangeline Hersaint, Francoise Hersaint, Ann Hindry,
Christian von Holst, Gottfried Honnefelder, Jean-Frangois Jaeger, Mimi Johnson,
Jean-Paul Kahn, Pepe Karmel, Anna-Maria Kellen, Christian Klemm, Kasper Konig,
Leonard Lauder, Ronald Lauder, Katharine Lee-Reid, Jochen Link, Jeffrey H. Loria,
Glenn D. Lowry, Virginia and Herbert Lust, Daniel Malingue, Gisela Mandl,
Massimo Martino, Jacqueline Matisse Monnier, Valérie de Maulmin, Karin von
Maur, Hans Mayer, James Mayor, Adelaide de Menil, Francois de Menil, Isabelle
Merly, Sigrid Metken, Bettina Dorothée Mette, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Jose
Mugrabi, Maria Miiller-Scharek, Jacqueline and Philippe Nordmann, Didier
Ottinger, Alfred Pacquement, Jiirgen Pech, Carlo Perrone, Almine and Bernard
Picasso, Clarissa and Jiirgen Pierburg, Ingeborg Pohl, Earl A. Powell II, Renée Price,
Gabriele Quandt-Langenscheidt, Robert Rainwater, Gérard Régnier, Ned Rifkin,
Ludwig Roselius, Philip Rylands, Sylvie and Mare Sator, Hilde Scharf, Vera
Schernus, Tania Schindler-Waser, Angela Schneider, Peter Schneppenheim, Paul
Schénewald, Klaus Schrenk, Caspar H. Schiibbe, Sabine Schulze, Carla Schulz-
Hoffmann, Peter-Klaus Schuster, Kate Sellers, Nicholas Serota, Natalie Seroussi,
Sophie and Jér6me Seydoux, Adriane Siempelkamp, Patrick Spies, Beate von Starck,
Claudia Stark, Monika Steinhauser, Robert Storr, Virginia Tandy, Alain Tarica,
Michael Taylor, Ann Temkin, Jiirgen Tesch, Eugene Thaw, Frangois Tréves,
Alexandra Turcat, Christoph Vitali, Sylvia Weber, Marianne and Sigbert Weinberg,
Reinhold Wiirth, Armin Zweite. We also thank Dallas Ernst and her children, Amy
and Eric, for their cooperation.

At the Metropolitan Museum many colleagues were generous with their assis-
tance and are due acknowledgment. Mahrukh Tarapor provided much needed counsel,
as did Martha Deese and Heather Woodworth. Lucy Belloli, Rachel Mustalish, and
Yale Kneeland gave help regarding conservation, respectively, of paintings, works on
paper, and sculptures. Lisa Cain oversaw all transportation arrangements for the
works, and Aileen K. Chuk offered seasoned advice in this area. The creative task of
exhibition and graphic design was in the hands, respectively, of Michael Langley and
Connie Norkin. Carol E. Lekarew provided assistance in the Photograph and Slide
Library. We thank Emily Kernan Rafferty, Nina McN. Diefenbach, Andrea Kann,
and the staff of the Development Office for their efforts to secure funding. As always,
Linda M. Sylling administered the budget and scheduling with skill.
John P. O'Neill, Editor in Chief, oversaw the publication of this catalogue with
his usual decisiveness and wisdom. Carol Fuerstein edited the manuscript with expert
knowledge, great skill, and much patience. Barbara Cavaliere, Jane Bobko, Sue Potter,
and Dale Tucker provided editorial assistance in the production phase. Russell M.
Stockman translated the sometimes dense German manuscripts into fluid English,
and Lory Frankel translated passages of French. Jane Tai deftly took on the task of
ordering documentary and comparative illustrations, oversaw the scanning of the
images, and secured rights to their reproduction. Margaret Rennolds Chace coordi-
nated details and trafficked the proofs. Jean Wagner brought order to many unwieldy
footnotes and compiled the bibliography. Sally VanDevanter skillfully and cheerfully
took charge of the production of the volume. Paula Torres helped in the early stage
of production. Peter Antony expertly supervised production and color reproduction
and saw the book through the presses. Minjee Cho meticulously handled the desktop
publishing. Don Quaintance provided the handsome catalogue design, set type, and
procured many fine photographs.
Sabine Rewald wishes to express her deepest appreciation to Catherine Heroy.
Catherine’s quick intelligence and effortless grace in handling all administrative
aspects of this project benefited not only the exhibition and catalogue but also all
those who worked with her.
Werner Spies Sabine Rewald
Guest Curator, Curator, Department of Nineteenth-Century,
Paris Modern, and Contemporary Art,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Lenders to the Exhibition MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES
France
The numbers in this list are catalogue Marseilles, Musée Cantini 70
es Paris, Blondeau & Associés 14, 26, 30, 87, 89, 100
Paris, Galerie Jeanne-Bucher 59
Paris, Galerie Daniel Malingue 41
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne 47, 112, 119,
159, 160
Vézelay, Musée Zervos 31
Germany :
Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie Berlin 144
Cologne, Museum Ludwig 64
Duisburg, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Foundation—Center of International
Sculpture 148
Diisseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 46, 71, 120
Diisseldorf, WestLB 17
Essen, Museum Folkwang 11
Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle 51
Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe 49, 65
Kuinzelsau, Museum Wirth 162
Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Pinakothek der Moderne 124, 133
Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart 45, 130
Italy
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
New York) 110, 132
Switzerland
Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel 68
Basel/Riehen, Fondation Beyeler 74, 154
Geneva, BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services 39
Zurich, Kunsthaus Ziirich 109, 115
United Kingdom
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 10, 54, 121
London, Tate Modern 33
Manchester, Manchester City Galleries 114

United States
Bloomington, Indiana University Museum of Art 127
Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art 143
Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum 135
Houston, The Menil Collection 58, 76, 86, 106, 107, 108, 116, 137, 138, 139, 142,
145, 150; 1153, 156, 158
New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery 61
New York, Isidore Ducasse Fine Arts 140
New York, Eyeball International, Inc. 27
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 3
New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library 126
New York, The Museum of Modern Art 13, 48, 53, 102, 104, 123, 134, 157
New York, The New York Public Library 165, 167, 171, 172, 174
New York and Cologne, Michael Werner Gallery 105
Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Museum of Art 50, 73
Sag Harbor, Ernst Art Limited Trust 2
Saint Louis, The Saint Louis Art Museum 43
Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 146, 147
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art 129
PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Timothy Baum 22, 77, 83, 152, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 170, 173, 175, 176, 177
Francey A. and Dr. Martin L. Gecht 6
Ambassador and Mrs. Wilhelm Haas 122
Maja Oeri, Basel 60
Michael and Judy Steinhardt, New York 12, 111
Dorothea Tanning 93, 95, 96, 161
R. Vanthournout, Belgium 34
ANONYMOUS LENDERS
NAN 7s On oontO bs,.19) 209 Dt) 324.225 .29, 09, 32.35, 50; 37; 30, 40) ey
44, 52, 55, 56, 57, 62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 72, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91,
92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 113, 117, 118, 125, 128, 131, 136, 141, 149, 151, 155
Xl

Max Ernst 4 Retrospective

XIV
Introduction
Sabine Rewald
IT Is RARE FOR A GERMAN ARTIST to impress his French peers with his wit and
imagination. Max Ernst did. It is also unusual for a German artist to change lan-
guages and countries three times and make his career and his mark in all of them.
Max Ernst did that too. A German Surrealist might appear to be an oxymoron. But
after he moved to France Max Ernst was one. Had he remained in his native country,
a branch of German Surrealism might have developed, though it is hard to imagine.
Who was this wizard who bewitched his contemporaries in three different countries?
What in his rock-solid bourgeois background and upbringing prepared him for this
unique path? This short introduction is meant not to answer these questions by ana-
lyzing the artist’s life and career but only to offer a brief summary of both.
The third of nine children, Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Briihl, a small
town not far from the Rhine between Bonn and Cologne. His father, Philipp Ernst,
a devout Catholic and a teacher of the deaf and dumb, was an avid amateur painter
who worked in an academic style. He was also a strict disciplinarian who inspired in
his son an everlasting defiance of authority and a penchant for mischievous subver-
sion. At the University of Bonn Ernst studied philosophy, literature, art history, psy-
chology, and psychiatry. With a painter at home, he also learned that profession by
osmosis. As a student he made ink studies in the garden of the Briihl castle and paint-
ed small portraits of his sister and himself, soon adopting a.whimsical Expressionist
style. Ernst described these works as the “sins of my youth” when he saw them again
on the walls of the Guggenheim Museum in 1975 during his visit on the occasion of
his last retrospective exhibition in this country. With a gift for friendship, Ernst
forged close ties with Hans Arp and August Macke. After he completed his univer-
sity studies in the summer of 1914, World War I interrupted his life, as it did the lives
of most young men his age. He served first on the Western and then on the Eastern
front, later summing up the experience: “On the first of August 1914 M.E. died. He
was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918.”
His rebirth after the war coincided with the arrival of Dada in Germany. The
Dadaists, poets and writers at first and artists soon thereafter, belonged to the generation
of young men who had returned disillusioned and dispossessed from a futile war. They
did not really care to shock the bourgeoisie — it was shocked enough by the war — but
instead wanted to turn the world upside down, as the catastrophe had turned theirs
around. With friends Ernst formed the Cologne Dada group, published short-lived
magazines and broadsheets, and organized Dada exhibitions. The much-written-
about opening ceremony of the first Dada exhibition would be called a “happening”
today. Ernst’s encounter with reproductions of the metaphysical works of de Chirico
left such a deep impression that he emulated their confounding perspectives and stark
shadows in a portfolio of prints. More important, inspired by de Chirico’s strange
juxtapositions of objects, in 1919 he created his first collages, in which he combined
the most mundane and banal materials to the most magical, fantastic, and surprising
new effect. Ernst arranged cutout details from a variety of sources—nineteenth-century
engravings from popular novels and mail-order catalogues, and botanical and scien-
tific prints from teaching manuals—in a way that transformed them into what has

Max Ernst, Invitation to the exhibition Max Ernst:
Derniéres oeuvres, Cahiers d’Art, Paris, May 17-31,
1935
Photograph with broken glass and paper
Private collection
sm 2168
been described as “visual alchemy.” André Breton and his poet friends in Paris
admired these works and saw in them analogies to their own poetic experiments.
Ernst was unable to get papers and travel to Paris, so meetings and visits were
arranged in the Tirol and Cologne with his French admirers. Collaborations between
Ernst and his French friends ensued despite the distance separating them. His con-
tacts with the French avant-garde were decisive for him, as was his increasingly close
friendship with the poet Paul Eluard and his wife, Gala. Always following his passions
and with no use for convention, Ernst moved to Paris in 1922, leaving behind his
wife, Luise, and young son. He would never again work or live in Germany. While
still moored in Cologne waiting for papers that would never arrive, he had begun his
series of astounding, proto-Surrealist paintings with Celebes (cat. no. 33) and Oedipus
Rex (cat. no. 36), both acquired by Eluard. Like the other pictures of this sequence
that followed in Paris, among them Saint Cecilia (cat. no. 45), The Wavering
Woman (cat. no. 46), and Ubu Imperator (cat. no. 47), they mingle menace and com-
edy and defy interpretation. They also reveal the painter’s erudition, vast knowledge
culled from voracious reading, familiarity with myth and Freudian theories, and
sharp, often acid wit.
Thus began Max Ernst’s first French career, lasting from 1922 until 1941. He
was thirty-one years old, strikingly handsome with penetrating blue eyes. During the
next three years he lived with the Eluards in a suburb of Paris in a ménage 4 trois,
worked at various odd jobs, and painted pictures that refer subtly or not so subtly to
the ways of couples, for example The Couple (cat. no. 41), Long Live Love or Charming
Countryside (cat. no. 43), and Castor and Pollution (cat. no. 44). He also created such
icons of Surrealism as Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (cat. no. 53) and
The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: A.B., PE. and the
Artist (cat. no. 64). Whereas his earlier pictures resemble painted collages, the latter
XV

INTRODUCTION
XVI
Max Ernst, 1945. Photograph by Frederick
Sommer
canvas refers to the tradition of painting, turning the conventional depiction of
Madonna and Child on its head in a blasphemous narrative: an athletically built Virgin
spanks the adolescent Jesus, whose halo tumbles to the floor while Breton, Eluard,
and the artist, voyeurs behind a wall, peer at the scene.
In 1924 Breton published his “First Surrealist Manifesto,” Surrealism superseded
Dada, and Max Ernst became one of the movement’s founding members in Paris,
albeit a slightly detached one. The next decade and a half were productive, including
a contract with a gallery and a new marriage to the young Frenchwoman Marie
Berthe Aurenche. He eschewed the disturbing magic-realist images of one strain of
Surrealism, channeling his technical virtuosity, flexibility, and quick awareness of visual
stimuli into experiments with the technique of frottage, or rubbing, as displayed in the
Histoire Naturelle series (see cat. nos. 54-60). Adapting frottage to painting in order
to produce the process of grattage, he developed themes he had explored in the Histoire
Naturelle series: nature’s plants and creatures magnified or transformed. The new series
treat the forest (see cat. nos. 62, 68, 129), shell flowers (see cat. nos. 73, 74), birds
(see cat. nos. 70-72), petrified cities (see cat. nos. 114, 115), garden aeroplane traps
(see cat. nos. 110-13), and hordes and strange beasts (see cat. nos. 124, 125), the last
ominously foreshadowing the political storm clouds gathering over Europe. In addi-
tion, he created sculptures and utterly original collage novels, and painted using the
technique of decalcomania, as demonstrated in The Robing of the Bride (cat. no. 132). In
1938 Ernst moved with the young English painter Leonora Carrington to St.Martin
d’Ardéche in the south of France; there they lived in a group of ruined buildings they
renovated and decorated with sculptures of mythical animals and birds. Their idyll
came to an end when, at the beginning of World War II, Ernst was interned as an
enemy alien by the French. He was released, only to be interned twice again. After
two escapes, Ernst finally left France for the United States in 1941.
He was fifty years old when his American career began. His introduction to this
country was eased by his marriage to Peggy Guggenheim, the flamboyant heiress, col-
lector of modern art, and gallery owner who became his third wife. Ernst was one of
many European artists and writers who had fled Fascism and come to New York.

In the famous group photograph taken at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in
1942 on the occasion of the exhibition Artists in Exile (fig. 85), we see him with some
of them, posing in the front row. Ernst and the other Surrealists in New York, among
them Breton, Tanguy, Masson, and Matta, were highly influential, inspiring the tech-
niques and concepts of the nascent American Abstract Expressionists. After the war
most of these European artists returned to their native countries.
Ernst went in the opposite direction. In 1946 he moved to Arizona with the
American painter Dorothea Tanning, who would become his fourth wife. They built
a house in Sedona in a landscape that was uncannily like those Ernst had created years
earlier in his mind’s eye. Themes of foreboding and memory mark Totem and Taboo
(cat. no. 133), Europe after the Rain (cat. no. 135), Day and Night (cat. no. 142), and
many other remarkable paintings Ernst created during his time in the United States.
The impressive Vox Angelica (cat. no. 141) is a poignant memory picture that offers a
summation of earlier experiences and styles.
In 1953 Ernst and Tanning moved to France, living first in Paris and then set-
tling in the south of France. Ernst died in Paris in 1976, one night before his eighty-
fifth birthday. What accounted for the artist’s fierce sensibility, ferocious imagination,
wicked wit, and sense of fantasy? Impossible to fathom despite the vast literature
devoted to him. The artist’s literary friends André Breton, Louis Aragon, Joé Bosquet,
and Patrick Waldberg were the first to write about him, followed in the English-
speaking world by the critics John Russell and Lucy Lippard. Ernst found his true
champion in the German scholar and critic Werner Spies, who, collaborating with
Helmut Leppien on the prints and with Ginter and Sigrid Metken on the paintings,
works on paper, and sculptures, published the catalogue raisonné in six thick volumes
between 1975 and 1998. This monumental work allowed the first overview of Ernst’s
large and complex oeuvre in its many media. A pioneering effort, it spawned innumer-
able monographs, studies, exhibition catalogues, and essays, many penned by Spies him-
self, exploring Ernst and his relationship to every imaginable topic. As for biographical
information, the artist was the first to provide it, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek poetic yarn
that he spun into Biographical Notes — Tissue of Truth and Tissue of Lies. Begun in 1962, and
revised and expanded by him over the years as a work-in-progress, it is filled with whim-
sical tales, anecdotes, facts, poems, and photographs both documentary and amusing.
In a tribute to Ernst’s complexity, the essays that Spies has assembled for this
catalogue shed light on still-unexplored aspects of the artist’s oeuvre. In one of his
two essays Spies interprets Vox Angelica as an evocation or summation of the artist’s
past history. Ludger Derenthal, Director of the Museum fiir Fotographie, Berlin,
focuses on Ernst’s involvement with politics and his contacts with other German
exiles in Paris during the 1930s. Thomas Gaehtgens, Professor of art history and
Director of the Forum fiir Kunstgeschichte, Centre Allemande d’Histoire de |’Art,
Paris, discusses the artist’s connection with the old masters. In a highly personal text,
Robert Storr, Rosalie Solow Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University, describes his response to the artist’s collage novels. Pepe Karmel, Associate
Professor at New York University, illuminates surprising affinities between Ernst’s
work and that of contemporary artists. May this volume and the present retrospective,
realized some thirty years after Max Ernst’s death, deepen his relevance to artists, stu-
dents, scholarly specialists, and the public at large. QIiVM3I¥Y IJNIGVS
XVII

All| a iii
UA AANA
uth
| | | i \) NERY ‘ S soe
HY | ARAN aes Ligeia nt H
hy i l f | \ \ iH a3:
int i! | Naty) i ol
/
foot
NaN ~S ans
SO ROSSI
\ ᤀ
RNAS AS
Se \\\ \ SN
oe \ \ XN ASS
i oe =
v7 “ga g i
; - 4 ts : ue oo 24, Wah CG os
Mts | ies : set Q 1] y i
=; 7 J oe
S i VY fone WAG 4,
ae Se 1, 4 4 Gt fh eS “y 2 Ye, <
; : 4) tf Cal po 4 f 2 Ns ”, f oo ‘i.
4 ; : SY WT) MY fl LEE EE
$ i X\ Ly a ae Y
es eee
i
ee |
Rr enna
eee |
eine
. $

Stee ie
Bae gos
sre Fis

LRT LES TN OL:

Werner Spies
Max Ernst, The Painters Daughters, 1940
Oil on canvas
Private collection
sM 2359
Nightmare and Deliverance
OVERVIEW
This retrospective exhibition of Max Ernst’s work, the first held in the United States
in thirty years, provides a glimpse of the artist’s tremendous productivity. In it we see
pictures that represent what historical painting of the twentieth century, filled with
signs of terror and destruction, has to offer. Pictures Ernst produced shortly after
Hitler’s seizure of power, reminiscent of Goya’s Caprichos and Desastres de la guerra,
are clear references to that event. But mixed in with them again and again we find
more harmonious, lighter works in which melancholy and horror give way to an almost
cosmic serenity. The two moods are intimately related in this pictorial world, so inti-
mately in fact that at any moment night can turn to day, paralysis to exhilaration:
Ernst gives us both nightmare and deliverance.
Encountering Max Ernst’s work, we soon realize that it is impossible to catego-
rize his extremely diverse oeuvre in terms of style. Yet we find in everything he did a
single overriding artistic concept: that of the collage. Ernst took inspiration from the
bewildering glut of available images in reproduction. Illustrations of objects and
processes that he discovered in publications from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries provided material he could recycle in the form of collages. He began experi-
menting in this direction early on. Starting in 1919 he gradually felt his way into a
»
realm he characterized as “au-dela de la peinture,” or “beyond painting.” Among these
efforts created immediately after his return from service in World War I are mono-
types, photomontages, paintings that combine Cubist and grotesque elements, and
canvases featuring overpainting on printed matter. These were followed in early 1921
by deliberately shocking monumental, unfathomable pictures—the puzzle pictures of
the century. Their incomprehensibility was intentional; they were meant to foil all at-
tempts at reasonable interpretation. Years later the first American critics noted their
frustration. Thus, in the special issue of View devoted to the artist in 1942, Nicolas
Calas wrote: “Reader, when you cross the threshold of Max Ernst’s world, abandon all
hope of receiving help from the outside. . . you will have to walk alone.”
It would be difficult to think of another pictorial world that so clearly parallels
the world of Franz Kafka. Here, as there, we enter a terrain filled with what Freud
called “manifest dream content.” Indeed, the obsessions and compulsions Kafka and Max
Ernst explored are comparable to the material that concerned Freud in his interpretation
of dreams. Yet unlike Freud, the two artists were not interested in explaining the incom-
prehensible. Rather, they were intent on describing a strangeness beyond comprehension.

NIGHTMARE AND DELIVERANCE
Fig. 1
Max Ernst, Making Lime from Bones, 1921
Collage
Private collection
sm 435
In pictures such as Oedipus Rex (cat.no. 36) and Making Lime from Bones (fig. 1), we
search in vain for some key that might help to explain them. And in so doing we get
no closer to their meaning than the bearer of Kafka’s “imperial message” to its in-
tended reader.? It is important to recognize that even precise knowledge of the sources
Ernst made use of for his collages and paintings does not help us understand them,
for he cut away and obscured the meaning of the original image in the course of mak-
ing his own work. In fact, knowledge of his sources only blinds us to the poetry of the
final image. Ernst liked to refer to a passage in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen that
argues against the destruction of dream content: “But, dear father, why are you so op-
posed to dreams... ? To me the dream is a defense against the routine and ordinari-
ness of life, a chance for the imagination to break free of restrictions, to tumble together
all of life’s images in childlike play as an escape from the wearying earnestness of adult-
hood.”* On principle Ernst favored the mystery of the dream over analysis. And, so it is
untenable to equate his collage work with Freud’s dreamwork. Ernst employed his
knowledge of Freud with irony. It is telling that he failed to include the inventor of
psychoanalysis in his group portrait of major cultural figures Rendezvous of Friends
(fig. 2), though he did find room for Dostoyevsky, another explorer of the soul.
Here it should be noted that already in his Dada years in Cologne, Ernst was
making paintings, drawings, and collages that foretold Surrealist concerns in their de-
piction of the world of the subconscious. The shocking quality of the images from
these early years also offered a premonition of Surrealist content. For example, Oedipus
Rex, whose jarring image alludes to Nietzsche’s nutcracker of the soul, prefigures Sur-
realism’s objets désagréables such as Giacometti’s Endangered Hand, 1932 (Kunsthaus
Ziirich, Alberto Giacometti Stiftung) and Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup Odject,
1936 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Products of the cult of objects pursued by
the Surrealists in the 1930s, works of this kind gain historical resonance when they
are considered in the context of Ernst’s early experiments.

Fig. 2
Max Ernst, Rendezvous of Friends, 1922
Oil on canvas
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
sm 505
From the second half of the 1920s, following upon such shocking pictures
as Celebes (cat.no. 33), Oedipus Rex, Castor and Pollution (cat.no. 44), Saint Cecilia
(cat.no. 45), The Wavering Woman (cat.no. 46), and Ubu Imperator (cat.no. 47), came
works that rely on semiautomatic techniques for their effect. Frottage, or rubbing, and
its offshoot grattage, which covers the picture surface with relieflike pigment, led to
the development of new subject matter. Portrayals of Birds, Wind Brides, Forests,
and Shell Flowers are filled with fanciful images and are highly varied in color and
composition. They are ecstatic in feeling, and it is this mood that dominates what
William Rubin has called “the heroic epoch of Surrealist painting.”” Repeatedly in
this period, Ernst interrupted his painting to produce collage novels. La femme 100
tétes (cat.no. 167), Réve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (cat.no. 169), Une
semaine de bonté (cat.no. 172), and other examples of the form present narrative cycles
that provided Surrealism, no less than did Louis Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris and André
Breton’s Nadja, with a visual subconscious.
The romantic fantasies and apocalyptic visions of Ernst’s paintings and collage
novels culminated a few years later in jungle pictures filled with imagery of prehistoric
fauna that introduced the theme of a world in decay: his Monument to the Birds (see
cat.nos. 70, 72) and Garden Aeroplane Trap (see cat. nos. 110-113) series, and the most
extreme embodiment of the subject, the Entire City paintings (see cat.no. 115), all of
which echo with recollections of a trip Ernst took to Singapore, Indochina, Angkor
Wat, and the jungles of Southeast Asia in 1924. Increasingly in this period he relied
ona highly detailed, veristic style, and in his pictures of decaying jungles on the use of
grattage. In the later 1930s Ernst began to employ decalcomania, a refinement of the
monotype process. Justinus Kerner, George Sand, and Victor Hugo had used the
S3Al1dS YINYIM

NIGHTMARE AND DELIVERANCE
Fig. 3 Fig. 4
Max Ernst, Chemical Nuptuals, 1948 Max Ernst, 4n Anxious Friend, 1944
Oil on canvas Plaster
Private collection Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Diisseldorf
sm 2594
technique in the nineteenth century, associating the resulting images with pictures
produced by the unconscious. In the 1920s the Surrealists adopted decalcomania along
with automatic writing, recording dreams, and playing cadavre exquis, activities that
allowed the expression of the unconscious and helped to bond the writers and painters
of the group together. Ernst developed what had served dilettantes as an amusing ex-
periment and perfected it for use in his art, turning the procedure into a comprehensive
system he could strictly control. Transferring decalcomania to large-scale canvases
such as Totem and Taboo (cat.no. 133) and wielding his brush to elaborate the forms
that resulted from the process, Ernst made the technique uniquely his own.
During the years he spent in the United States after World War II, in paintings
such as Chemical Nuptuals (fig. 3), Dream and Revolution (cat.no. 149), and Design in
Nature (cat.no. 150), Ernst gradually returned to the use of precise outlines. These
crisp outlines unmistakably parallel the clean contours and stereometric shapes of
sculpture he was producing at the same time, for example King Playing with the Queen
(cat.no. 145) and An Anxious Friend (fig. 4).
VERSATILITY
Even in this brief glance at the evolution of Ernst’s work, which can easily be traced in
this exhibition, we are confronted with an astonishing variety-of techniques and subject
matter. Ernst repeatedly defended his quest for innovation and refused to codify a style,
maintaining, for example: “A painter may know what he doesn’t want. But woe be to him
if he desires to know what he wants. A painter is lost if he finds himself. Max Ernst
considers his sole virtue to be that he has managed not to find himself.” What mat-
tered was participating in a critical, creative process, not achieving a recognizable style.
For this same reason we find no signs of an attempt on the part of any of the
Surrealists to achieve a common style. All the Surrealists were bent on putting their
origins and tastes, their own pasts, behind them. All concentrated on inspiration, the
initial leap, and all thrived on dealing with inexplicable strangeness, with imaginative
excess, on the juxtaposing of disparate elements. Thus they surrounded themselves
with non-European art; they filled their ateliers and their journals with magical objects,
they resisted social and political constraints—tastes and behavior that left deep traces
in their work. In their autobiographical writings they all claim to have made astonish-
ing personal discoveries.
EARLY YEARS
Ernst continually reworked his “Biographical Notes,” which he gave the subtitle
“Wahrheitsgewebe und Liigengewebe” (Net of truth and net of lies), an obvious allu-
sion to Goethe’s autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and truth). Reading
Ernst’s notes we find behind the often laconic narrative of his life precise references
and clues that help establish a chronology for his ceuvre and facilitate study of his
techniques and subject matter. The earliest surviving works date from before World
War I. At that time Ernst was studying at Bonn University.’ His main interests were
art history, philosophy, German literature, and—unusual at that time—psychoanalysis.

Fig. 5 Fig. 6
Max Ernst, Justinia, 1919 Max Ernst, Souvenir de Dieu, 1923
Oil on cardboard Oil on canvas
Private collection, Cologne Location unknown
sm 293 sM 632
In his narrative there is no mention of any formal training as an artist. He
learned the essential techniques of picture making by watching his father
Philipp, a teacher at an institute for the deaf and dumb and a highly accom-
plished amateur painter. He later stressed the fact that he became a painter
largely as a dilettante rather than as a professional choice. In a questionnaire he
filled out in the United States in 1948 we read under the heading “Education
and studies in painting with place and date” the following: “Studies in painting:
none. He learned to express himself by means of art in the same way as the
child learns to talk. No teaching is needed for the one who is born an artist and
even the expression ‘self-taught’ is a phony, he thinks.”® Crucial for his develop-
ment was his familiarity with the art of mental patients, to which he was intro-
duced in psychology department seminars in Bonn’s psychiatric clinic. He came
back to the subject again and again and for a time even planned to publish a
book on it.? But then Hans Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei der Geisteskranken—Ein
Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung (Berlin and Heidelberg,
1922) appeared. When Ernst moved to Paris in 1922, he brought a copy of this
standard study to his new friends Paul Eluard, André Breton, Louis Aragon,
and Tristan Tzara.
Ernst summed up what he had experienced and learned in his early years
in the Rhineland with the phrase: “A delightful chaos in a restless brain.” !? We
can elaborate and identify a few important friendships and encounters that in-
fluenced him in the years before World War I. The encouragement he received
from August Macke and his contact with Robert Delaunay, who had come to
the Rhineland with Guillaume Apollinaire and sought out Macke and his circle,
left their traces in several works. Significant also was the famous Sonderbund
exhibition of 1912 in Cologne, which provided a comprehensive survey of the
avant-garde art movements of the time. When we examine Ernst’s own work of
the period before World War I, however, we are tempted to speak of a lack of
appetite for the offerings of the avant-garde. These early efforts do not so much
break with the history of art as with the smugness of modern art, whose propo-
nents saw the new styles as a new beginning: for in the first works he drew on
his knowledge of art-historical topoi, regularly quoting artists of the past rather
than his contemporaries. This starting point was extremely important for him,
even in his later collages he made reference to Lochner, Diirer, Leonardo, and
Michelangelo. Skepticism is everywhere, anachronisms abound, as incongruous
styles and subjects are joined together. We may find Cubist and Futurist ele-
ments mixed in with Romantic forest scenes, cityscapes in an Impressionist
style, and sometimes deliberate pictorial blasphemy, as in Resurrection of the Flesh,
1919 (sm 295), Justinia (fig. 5), and Souvenir de Dieu (fig. 6). In all of this his ap-
proach to modern movements was similar to that of Francis Picabia and Marcel
Duchamp. His study of art history, his interpretive habit, his fondness for dis-
secting sources became fundamental to his aesthetic, which from 1919 on-can be
summed up by the word collage. S3J!1dS YINYIM

NIGHTMARE AND DELIVERANCE
Fig. 7
Max Ernst, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1920
Collage of photographs with pastel, watercolor,
and ink
The Art Institute of Chicago
sM 391
RETURN FROM THE WAR
World War I was a momentous interruption in the artist’s life and career. In his auto-
biography he writes: “Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914. He resuscitated the
11th of November 1918 as a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find
the myth of his time.”!! He abandoned his studies, against his father’s wishes, and
with Johannes Theodor Baargeld and Hans Arp began organizing Dadaist exhibitions
and demonstrations in Cologne. Things developed very quickly. In the first works of
Ernst’s Dadaist phase we see certain features—most notably the scaffoldlike, lacy
structures of his compositions—that recall watercolors he painted in the trenches during
the war. Allusions to mechanization, a mixture of telluric and machinelike forms, images
of sky and fighter planes evoke the apocalyptic events of the war and his experiences
at the Front. Even drawings that at first glance appear to be idyllic, on closer inspec-
tion reveal more ominous content, references to fatality. Illustrations of fighter planes
and bombs taken from military publications find their way into photocollages. The
occasional work—for example, The Massacre of the Innocents (fig. 7)—treats a blood-
thirsty event from the immediate past. Titles such as Promptly Identified Attack Plans of
the Assimilant Threads on the Fortress DADA also refer to the trauma of war.
But it is not merely the content and titles of Ernst’s works that testify to the
horrors of war and modern life. The medium of collage itself, its fragmentation and
displacement of images, evokes the catastrophe. The bankruptcy of the concept of
historical progress is expressed in an approach that no longer relies on whole forms
but instead is based on ruins and fragments, with its use of cutting and scissors and
their association with amputation. Collage symbolizes the postwar attitude Walter
Benjamin captured when he wrote: “The concept of progress must be founded on the
idea of catastrophe. That things go ‘on like this’ is the catastrophe.”
The technical definition of collage is a picture composed of cut-up scraps pasted

together, but this does not adequately explain Ernst’s method. He himself insisted
that beyond these bare essentials lay a whole range of operations that had nothing to
do with cutting and pasting. To suggest his departure from conventional methods, he
made use of a bit of verse that emphasizes the conceptual side of the process: “Si ce sont
les plumes qui font le plumage, ce n’est pas la colle qui fait le collage.”!° Indeed, Ernst’s
method can be compared to procedures employed by some of the twentieth century’s
leading intellectuals, including Claude Lévi-Strauss. In the essay “Une peinture médita-
tive” Lévi-Strauss writes of the links between his method and the method at work in
Ernst’s collages: “Is there not an unquestionable analogy between what I have attempted,
long after him [Ernst], in my books, and the stature he has always assigned to painting?
Like the paintings and collages of Max Ernst, my study of mythology evolved with
the assistance of outside borrowings, in this case from the myths themselves.”
NONARTISTIC SOURCES
In 1919 Ernst began to depend upon sources outside the realm of art and culture for
his work. His discovery of these sources, namely botanical, zoological, anatomical,
and technical illustrations, is comparable to the contemporary discovery of non-Euro-
pean art in the ateliers of Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and the members of Die Briicke.
In one well-known passage that is tinged with the melancholy associated with the
postwar period, Ernst provides a commentary on the origin of his fascination with
these sources and an insight into his method:
One rainy day in 1919, finding myself in a village on the Rhine, I was struck by the obses-
sion which held under my gaze the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects de-
signed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, and paleontologic
demonstration. There I found brought together elements of figuration so remote that the
sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties
in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple, and
multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are pecu-
liar to love memories and visions of half-sleep.
These visions called themselves new planes, because of their meeting in a new un-
known (the plane of non-agreement). It was enough at that time to embellish these cata-
logue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw
itself in me, a color, a pencil mark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert,
a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon.!5
We know exactly what it was that fell into Ernst’s hands that day in 1919 as well
as how his interpretation of the “illusive succession of contradictory images” he found
in it led him to produce the works of the Cologne years. It was a catalogue issued by a
company selling educational tools,!° the pages of which are laid out systematically to
present the hardware of teaching: instructional devices, classroom furniture, and other
school supplies. Nowhere in the artist’s description of his find does he speak of any
particular artistry in the illustrations; they were ordinary pictures that challenged him
to rework them, serving simply as raw material to which he added his own interpreta-
tions and corrections. The resulting pictures from these early years are characterized Sdi1dS YINYIM

NIGHTMARE AND DELIVERANCE
10
by an amalgam of the exalted and the commonplace, with imagery often colored by
irony inspired by his favorite writers—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Jean Paul, Wilhelm
Schlegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Heine, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and
Lewis Carroll.
The portfolio Fiat modes (cat.no. 162) can stand as a true manifesto for this sort
of early work. Its lithographs are filled with images thatembody just the kind of colli-
sion of different worlds that Ernst described: found elements—technical elevations,
perspective studies, diagrams—reworked and rearranged in characteristic fashion.
The lithographs powerfully reflect Ernst’s encounter with the metaphysical works of
Giorgio de Chirico; in fact, Ernst described Fiat modes as an homage to the Italian
artist. His discovery of de Chirico took place in September 1919, during a trip to
Munich that Ernst made to meet Paul Klee. Needless to say, this contact with Klee
was also important, for Klee’s small-format watercolors and his focus on a vegetal
microcosm significantly influenced Ernst’s early drawings. However, the decisive in-
spiration for the Fiat modes came from a series of reproductions of de Chirico’s work
that Ernst found in the special April-May 1919 issue of Valori plastici while he was in
Munich during the summer of 1919. Ernst made specific reference to de Chirico’s
imagery in Fiat modes with his version of a faceless tailor’s dummy, suggesting the
anonymity of modern life and the way individuals can be manipulated in the modern
world. But de Chirico’s impact was also more general. Ernst writes of de Chirico’s
metaphysical works: “Looking at them I had the sense of rediscovering something I
had always known, just as when some event already seen opens up to us a whole realm
of our own dream world, one that we have failed to see or comprehend owing to a
kind of censorship.” !7
Soon, however, an unmistakably personal aesthetic came to the fore, an evolu-
tion the artist described in the following terms: “After having been impressed in his
youth by the French from Manet and Seurat to van Gogh and Matisse, and after hav-
ing been influenced for a short time by Chirico in 1919, he liberated himself from all
these influences and departed for an absolutely new experience in painting based on
the disruption and transvaluation of all known relations between the object and its
environment, and since then has never stopped in his advance in exploring his newly
discovered world.” !8 The combining of found elements occupied him more and more.
A number of prints make use of stereotypical designs he discovered while putting to-
gether publications for the Cologne Dada group in the Hertz printing shop. He also
incorporated rubbings of large wood letters and then made overpaintings on printed
matter, usually placed on backgrounds supplied by a planetary diagram. As a rule, he
first inverted a borrowed motif to free it from its original context and then reworked it
with gouache and pencil to further alter its meaning. He eliminated written instruc-
tions and anything else explanatory, replacing them with fantastic visions dominated
by landscapes complete with atmospheric perspective and mountains. He quickly
adopted specific strategies to ensure that heterogeneous motifs would coalesce into
unified pictures. In the early months of the Dada movement, for example, he relied on
machinelike forms to bind his imagery together.

THE DADA EXHIBITIONS IN COLOGNE
Ernst showed works of this kind at the Kunstverein in 1919, in the first Dada ex-
hibition in Cologne, which he coorganized. The second and last Dada exhibition in
Cologne, Dada Vorfriihling, was held in the courtyard of the Brauhaus Winter in 1920.
A more radical setting than the Kunstverein, the space was chosen when the Arbeits-
gemeinschaft Kélner Kiinstler refused to allow the Dadaists to participate in the
spring exhibition in the courtyard of the Kunstgewerbemuseum. Virtually nothing
shown has survived. But from the reviews and from the titles listed in the catalogue, it
appears that there was plenty to shock visitors. This is confirmed by Georges Hugnet
in a piece written in 1932 about the show and the Dada spirit: “The search for exhibi-
tion space was undertaken with care. It had been decided to have it in the center of
Cologne, so that it could be easily reached by all and also so as to be able to profit
from all the abuse. Dada wished to offend, and to that end they rented a space next to
a café, a small, glass-roofed courtyard that could only be reached by passing by the toi-
lets.... Whether visitors or victims you can decide for yourself: a girl at the age of first
communion stands at the entrance and suddenly begins to recite obscene poems. On
the blue posters Ernst had hung up was a parade of ordinary doves and adorable cows.
He had torn these out of books of visual instruction.”!? The contrast between the ap-
pearance of the young girl and the poster images on the one hand and the shocking
objects exhibited on the other indicates that even the staging of the show was based
on the collage principle.
FROM DADA TO SURREALISM
When did Surrealism get its start? How does it relate to Dada? When Surrealism
emerged in 1924, for Breton, Aragon, and Ernst this beginning was something unfor-
gettable, uncalculated, and fleeting, for the style thrived on the spontaneous and the
ephemeral. Dada took an antiart stance, avoiding repetition and therefore the cre-
ation of a style. Although it did not seek a common style, Surrealism, however, had
none of the nihilism of the earlier movement but was concerned with a redefinition of
painting, with transgression rather than proscription. It sought sensual effects, not only
conceptual ones. This is not to say that its use of materials, techniques, and freedom of
execution were not dependent on the conquests of Dada.
Ernst played a prominent role in the Surrealist circle from the start. The encounter
with his collages in 1921 at his exhibition in the Paris gallery Au Sans Pareil was one of
the pivotal experiences for the writers and artists gathered around Breton. Looking
back, Breton asserted that in those works the postulates of Surrealist painting were
“already fully developed,” adding: “In fact, Surrealism found immediate confirmation in
his collages from 1920, which reflect a completely new concept of visual organization.”
In November 1922, in Barcelona, Breton issued a scathing judgment on what he
called the inadequacy of Dadaism, The stars he introduced to remedy the situation
were Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray,
and Max Ernst. To establish a canon of Surrealist art, Breton had to lay down the law:
for at the very start of the movement there was dissension. In the early 1920s a major S3ldS YINYIM

NIGHTMARE AND DELIVERANCE
12
dispute raged within the ranks of the Surrealist circle over the relative value of paint-
ing and sculpture. Several members tried to deny the legitimacy of Surrealist painting.
Max Morise, for example, postulated that only a plastique surréaliste, or Surrealist
sculpture, not painting or photographs, could achieve for art what ériture surréaliste,
or Surrealist writing, already claimed to have contributed to literature. Breton, on the
other hand, argued that the contributions of painters were fully equal to the accom-
plishments of the other members of the group: in 1925; when he took over the direc-
tion of the journal La révolution surréaliste, he published long articles that definitively
accorded the painters equal status. In his first manifesto, of 1924, and in his essay “Le
surréalisme et la peinture,” published in his journal from 1925-27, he conclusively laid
to rest the arguments voiced against Surrealist painting.
In place of Dada pictures that ironically deconstruct the world, with the emer-
gence of Surrealism we begin to see paintings presenting an ecstatic, hallucinatory ex-
perience of it. In this respect, Ernst’s contribution is a brilliant embodiment of the
Surrealist aesthetic, offering a visionary cosmos made up of spaces and creatures that
fascinate with their oscillation between fantasy and reality. He presented a world of
the almost-possible, in paintings that make the sudden leap from the ordinary to the
other, the unexpected, that Breton’s circle cherished.
FROTTAGE, GRATTAGE, AND DECALCOMANIA
Among the most important innovations effected by the Surrealists in their explo-
rations au-dela de la peinture, or beyond painting, was the use of semiautomatic tech-
niques, among them frottage, or rubbing. Frottage is a precise process. Everything we
see on the frottage surface is produced indirectly, by rubbing shapes and textures
placed beneath the sheet of paper with crayon, pencil, or the like. It is a perfectly simple,
familiar procedure, used to transfer the design of a coin or some other object in low relief
into a shaded, two-dimensional image and, as routinely employed by archaeologists, to
translate reliefs into drawings.
One rainy day in 1925 Ernst was first inspired to explore the possibilities of frottage
by the look of the grooves in the well-scrubbed floor of his hotel room at the seashore
in Pornic.?! Attracted by the open structure of the grain, he rubbed it, using paper
and pencil, and then reinterpreted the results. As he developed the procedure, he used
a variety of new elements to start with—stale bread crumbs, grained leather, striated
glassware, a straw hat, twine—always transforming the results so that whatever lay
beneath his paper experienced a metamorphosis. The characteristics of these objects
got lost in the process. Unrefined textures turned into more precise shapes. The grain
of wood became the tossing surface of the sea, the scaly pattern of the weave of a
straw hat became a cypress tree, the texture of twine became another kind of grain or
even a horse. At first Ernst carried out his rubbings with paper and pencil. Soon, how-
ever, in 1927, he began to explore new effects obtained by pursuing grattage, a variant
of frottage executed in the medium of painting. In grattage, objects are placed beneath
a surface covered with a thin layer of pigment, which the artist scrapes away with
a spatula or palette knife. Ernst used grattage in almost all the pictures he produced

Fig. 8
Max Ernst, Encounter of Two Smiles (Illustration from
Les malheurs des immortels), 1922
Collage
Private collection
sM 477
between 1925 and 1929. These works are sensual and tactile, with images of rubbed
objects that appear as ghostly traces of form. Again and again in his Hordes and Bride
of the Wind paintings he manipulated twine in various thicknesses, arranging and re-
arranging it beneath the canvas subjected to grattage so that the lines of the resulting
image suggest vibration and earthquake, evoking a sense of violence and epitomizing
what Breton called “deauté convulsive.”??
The use of frottage and grattage completely changed the appearance of
Ernst’s pictures. Paintings such as Oedipus Rex (cat.no. 36), Making Lime from
Bones (fig. 1), Castor and Pollution (cat.no. 44), and The Wavering Woman (cat.no. 46)
feature forms with clear sharp contours and as such have the look of the Neue
Sachlichkeit style; they are related as well to his pasted pictures. Indeed the collages
illustrating Répétitions (cat.no. 163) and Les malheurs des immortels (cat.no. 164, fig. 8)
might almost be designs for paintings, and small collage sketches did in fact serve
again and again as the starting point for many of Ernst’s paintings. Moreover the
color in the earlier paintings also reflects his experience with collage, for it is applied
additively and thus evokes the process of transformation inherent in collage making.
The transition to the new style of painting that surfaces in the grattage pictures is
foretold in pictures such as Woman, Old Man and Flower (cat. no. 48), in which the
latticelike texturing of the surface evokes cross sections of tissues and quotations from
his collages. After 1925, thanks to the introduction of frottage and then grattage,
such textural elements were borrowed directly from reality, transferred from the sur-
faces of objects through rubbing.
Then came his adoption of the decalcomania technique, which involves the
spreading of paint on a sheet, laying a second sheet on top of the first, pressing it in
places, and then lifting it up to leave suggestive images. In the pictures incorporating
decalcomania smeared forms predominate, calling to mind mineral life and hybrid
creatures composed of birds, women, plumage, and fur. Axial support is provided by a
few basic vertical elements—figures in Alice in 1939 (sM 2338) and Woman Changing into
a Bird, 1939 (sm 2339), trees in The Poplars, 1939 (sm 2334), The Cypress, ca. 1939
(sm 2335), and Totem and Taboo (cat.no. 133)—but in general the images are fluid.
They represent no known world but rather seem to devour one another and evolve in an SdaidS YINYIM

NIGHTMARE AND DELIVERANCE
Fig. 9
Max Ernst, The Stolen Mirror, 1941
Oil on canvas
Courtesy Dallas Ernst
sM 2376
endless metamorphosis, evoking some vegetal or cosmic process, to find spectacular
expression in such paintings as Napoleon in the Wilderness (cat.no. 134), Europe after
the Rain (cat.no. 135), and The Stolen Mirror (fig. 9). Ernst’s picture-poem First Memo-
rable Conversation with the Chimera, published in the initial issue of the journal VVV,
illuminates the process of metamorphosis that informs these works: “I saw a shady
forest, and therein a crowd of nightingales. The nightingales as to their breasts were
rough and hairy, and as to their feet some were like calves, some like panthers, and
some like wolves, and they had beast’s claws instead of toes.”?3 Here we should point
out that the form of this poem reflects Ernst’s rejection of any clear interpretation of
his subject matter, for the lines of the handwritten text repeatedly disappear behind
the sections of drawing.
WAR AND EMIGRATION
With the help of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, Ernst was able
to escape to the United States in 1941. He joined the Surrealist colony in New York,
which included André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Breton, Duchamp, and many other Euro-
pean artists in exile. Americans quickly took notice of the new arrivals,2* and the
repercussions of the transfer of European artists to New York were extraordinary. David
Hare, for example, noted that with the massive presence of Europeans “art became a
respectable profession in America between 1943 and 1949.”* There was lively, even
enthusiastic interest in Surrealist art.
Already in the 1930s American newspapers and magazines had been filled with
reports of the mystifying picture world of Max Ernst. In his 1935 book After Picasso,
James Thrall Soby emphasized Ernst’s significance: “Of the artists who have long been
officially associated with the Surrealist movement, Max Ernst is perhaps the most im-
portant.”76 And on the occasion of the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism,

Fig. 10
Max Ernst, The Bewildered Planet, 1942
Oil on canvas
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art
sm 2426
held at the Museum of Modern Art the following year, Time magazine reported: “A
leader of the dadaists, later to be one of the most important surrealists, was a young
German painter named Max Ernst.”27
Shortly after Ernst’s arrival in America, New Yorkers had an opportunity to see
the artist’s newest work along with pictures from the preceding four years at the Curt
Valentin Gallery, in a show held from March 2 to April 11, 1946. Almost all of the
thirty-one works exhibited prominently feature the decalcomania technique. Probably
in the spring of 1942, however, Ernst painted The Bewildered Planet (fig. 10), a dip-
tych that marks a distinct break with the technique of these paintings and the intro-
duction of a new procedure. Here the focus is on gravitation and its disorganization.
The path of the planet is inscribed on the right side of the picture, like a network of
clearly drawn condensation trails, against an inflamed, suppurating sky. The left side
shows a more controlled, peaceful blue sky. The menacing sky is clearly a commentary
on recent world events and recalls the feeling of Castor and Pollution (cat.no. 44), in
which bad temper is conveyed in the prominent bluish-black veins of the foreheads
and cheeks of the two heads that are portrayed.
Ernst had explored the possibilities of replacing homogeneous planes of color
and areas of texture with networks of lines long before 1942. However, he developed
a new technique to execute The Bewildered Planet and related paintings from his first
years in New York. Ernst tied three strings to a tin can?® with a tiny hole in its bottom
and containing a very liquid pigment. Then he swung the can and allowed the pig-
ment to drip onto the canvas through the hole. At first Ernst moved only his arm, but
he gradually involved his whole body in the motion. He used several different cans,
each with a different color and spread his canvas out on the floor or a table rather than
placing it on an easel. Sometimes he tilted the canvas, changing the angle at which
the falling pigment struck the surface, leaving traces of its flow in lines that cut across
one another to produce a graphic network.
S3ldS YINYIM

NIGHTMARE AND DELIVERANCE
16
DESIGN IN NATURE
Fig. 11 Fig. 12
Max Ernst, Design for cover of VVV, no. 1, 1942 Page from Design in Nature (London and New
Collage York: Longman Green and Co., 1909)
Private collection The Menil Collection, Houston
sm 2423
In the weeks and months that saw Ernst developing his new painting technique,
he was also exploiting a whole new stock of images for his collages. The books that
had supplied him with material for twenty years had been left behind in France when
he escaped, and he needed a new source. We can now identify this source thanks to
his design for the cover of the June 1942 issue of the magazine VVV, which includes
images taken from it: J. Bell Pettigrew’s three-volume Design in Nature (fig. 11),
which came into Ernst’s possession soon after he arrived in New York.”? Pettigrew’s
book is filled with greatly magnified illustrations of microscopic structures from the
natural sciences. This is a realm Ernst had long explored: his early fascination with
things that could be seen only with the aid of a microscope, things routinely over-
looked, such as Radiolaria, Infusoria, and other minute organisms, details of botan-
ical life, and cross sections of living tissue, is revealed, for example, in Landscape with
Sea, 1922 (sm 503), Long Live Love or Charming Countryside (cat.no. 43), and Woman,
Old Man and Flower (cat.no. 48). As this subject matter continued to absorb the artist
(see fig.11), Pettigrew’s work not only would become the most important com-
pendium of material for the collages from Ernst’s American years but also would sup-
ply images for drawings, collages, and prints executed after his return to Paris.
Ernst’s study of the illustrations of microscopic botanical and zoological struc-
tures and the varied inventory of textures provided by Design in Nature encouraged a
change in his style. Abstract forms predominate as recognizable figurative elements
withdraw into the background. Certain formal configurations based on the micro-
structures Ernst found in Pettigrew’s volumes resemble effects produced sponta-
neously by the practitioners of contemporary Art Informel. It is interesting to compare
Ernst’s pictures with biological imagery to contemporary works with similar forms by
Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Newman’s Gaea, 1945 (The Art Institute of
Chicago), Pagan Void, 1946 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and Genesis -The
Break, 1946 (Dia Center for the Arts, New York), for example, suggest biological phe-
nomena and amorphous growth processes, while Rothko’s S/ow Swirl at the Edge of the
Sea, 1944 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Omen, 1946 (Collection Ulla and
Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin), and Vessels of Magic, 1946 (Brooklyn Museum of Art) are
concerned with smeary biological shapes that call to mind primeval plant forms and cell
division. The related images notwithstanding, the images of both Americans seem
to be vague evocations of the subject matter rather than forms based on specific sci-
entific sources.
Pettigrew’s chapter “Human and Animal Locomotion” provides telling examples
of specific illustrations Ernst incorporated in his work. One collage in the March 1943
issue of VVV uses the image captioned “Nude woman walking on her hands and feet”
taken from this chapter. The chapter also contains motion studies of both humans and
animals, among them diagrams tracing the beating wings of birds and insects. The
diagrams are made up of repetitions, some large, some small, of a single basic curving
shape, which according to Pettigrew describe the “oscillating” of the creature’s wings.>?
These arcs parallel the arcs of the paint skeins produced by Ernst’s swinging can of
paint as he pursued his new technique, which, not coincidentally, he called “oscillation.”

Fig. 13
Max Ernst, Dancer under the Sky (The Nocturnal), 1942
Oil on paper mounted on cardboard
Private collection, Madrid
sm 499
q
}
Ne
The novelty of this new technique was noted immediately—Sidney Janis referred
to it in his 1944 publication Abstract and Surrealist Art in America as the “new technique
of chance”?! —and credited to Ernst. One of the several procedures Ernst developed
beginning as early as 1919, oscillation represented an attempt on the part of Surrealists
to create a graphic automatism and to link painting with action. And indeed, in paint-
ings such as The Bewildered Planet and Surrealism and Painting (cat. no. 139) executed
in 1942, soon after he arrived in New York, Ernst did produce just such a graphic
automatism, and his painting became the trace of action. But these phenomena were
not unprecedented in Ernst’s art: painting was quite literally the trace of action ina
work from his Dada period, as the artist recalled;>? in 1920 he and Johannes Baargeld
had decorated the stage curtain for a British Occupation Force’s cabaret in Cologne
by dipping their feet in paint and walking like living brushes back and forth across the
large canvas.
American Action Painting, or Abstract Expressionism, by definition also links
painting with action. Moreover, both Abstract Expressionism and Ernst’s procedures
pointed au-dela de la peinture in providing an alternative to traditional methods. Yet in
most respects Abstract Expressionism has nothing to do with Ernst’s intentions as a
Surrealist. The American movement’s raw expressiveness and its negation of objec-
tive meaning set it apart from Ernst’s work. And as Dore Ashton puts it in an essay
about Jackson Pollock, the extremely physical aspect of the Americans’ art places it in
the realm of “‘real’ work,” with associations of “wood-chopping, sweating, pioneer
spirit,”>3 which accorded well with the Abstract Expressionists’ repeated boast that
they came from the working class. The kind of possession, the trancelike state in
which Pollock, for example, physically attacked his canvas, was entirely absent from
Ernst’s approach. The decisive difference, however, is that of content: for oscillation,
which developed out of the automatic techniques Ernst used in his earlier work, de-
pends on objective subject matter. This subject matter includes not only human and
animal locomotion but also the romance of the starry sky, a theme he had pursued
early on, for example in Dancer under the Sky (The Nocturnal) (fig. 13), a picture intended SJidS YINYIM
7

NIGHTMARE AND DELIVERANCE
18
Fig. 14
Max Ernst, Page from Maximiliana: Leexercise illégal
de l'astronomie (Paris: Imprimerie Union, 1964)
Aquatint
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Gift of
Dorothea Tanning
si 95
as the design for a stage set and one of the first works that featured the motif.54 In
executing the design for the poster for the Surrealism show held at the Whitelaw
Reid Mansion in New York in 1942 (sm 2429), he used the dripping technique to
suggest two aspects of the sky, as he had done in The Bewildered Planet. His monu-
mental Surrealism and Painting (cat.no. 139), which was included in this show, also
features delicate, rhythmic lines suggesting automatic writing that were made possible
by the dripping technique. The setting for the show was equally innovative:
Duchamp strung more than two thousand yards of twine back and forth across the
exhibition space, forcing guests to move about in and study the pictures through what
amounted to a monumental spiderweb. Breton had tried to make automatism a focus
of Surrealism in Paris in the late 1930s. Now Ernst’s pictures and Duchamp’s spec-
tacular setting thrust automatic writing into the foreground to finally achieve Breton’s
goal in America.
RETURN TO EUROPE
One of the few European artists who continued to produce innovative work in his
late years, Ernst continued to experiment with many of the themes that had preoccu-
pied him in America after his return to France, in 1953. He had no interest in Non-
objective art and Art Informel, both popular trends at that time, professing a “total
rejection of living like a tachist.”3> Still committed to objective content, he concerned
himself with interpreting the natural sciences and the romance of outer space. His
preoccupation with the life and discoveries of the nineteenth-century astronomer
Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, for example, led him to produce the book Maxi-
miliana (cat.no. 174; fig. 14), a kind of intellectual testament of the Surrealist view
expressed in unique illustrations. Maximiliana focuses on the last twenty years of
Tempel’s life, when he traveled through Europe seeking an observatory in which he
could pursue his work, looking into the vast realm of interstellar space in a time domi-
nated by narrow minds. His was a life and a quest marked by war, flight, and exile, a
life and a quest whose parallels with Ernst’s own are obvious and strong. These paral-
lels offered Ernst an opportunity to create a biography that was also an autobiography.
In the spirals and mists of Tempel’s nebulae, he discerned the Surrealists’ romantic
worldview expressed in Breton’s term “explosante-fixe.” In his homage to Tempel,
Ernst drew together and united the threads of Dada protest and the Surrealists’ tri-
umph over violence.

NOTES
1. This phrase was used as a subtitle on the announcement for Ernst’s exhi-
bition in Paris, Exposition Dada Max Ernst (Paris: Galerie Au Sans Pareil,
May 3-June 3, 1921).
2. Nicolas Calas, “And Her Body Became Enormous Luminous and Splen-
did,” View (New York), ser. 2, no. 1 (April 1942), p. 20.
3. For the connection between Max Ernst and Kafka, see Werner Spies, “Der
Leib wird zum Lapsus: Max Ernst und Kafka,” in Werner Spies, Kunst-
geschichten von Bildern und Kiinstlern im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 1, pp. 214ff.
(Cologne: DuMont, 1998). Ernst was one of the first artists to illustrate texts
by Kafka, producing drawings for them in the 1930s.
4. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in Novalis, Werke und Briefe, ed. A. Kelletat
(Munich: Winkler, 1961), p. 148.
5. William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (New York: Abrams, 1968),
p- 149.
6. “Lebensdaten,” in Max Ernst: Ausstellung mit Olbildern, Collagen und Zeich-
nungen, exh. cat. (Munich: Galerie Stangl, 1967), quoted in Werner Spies,
“Aggressivitit und Erhebung,” in Max Ernst: Retrospektive 1979, ed. Werner
Spies, exh. cat. (Munich: Haus der Kunst Miinchen; Prestel-Verlag, 1979), p. 9.
7. See Eduard Trier, “Was Max Ernst studiert hat,” in Spies, Max Ernst, Ret-
rospektive 1979, pp. 31ff.
8. ycat Mss 101, Katherine S. Dreier Papers box 102, folder 2507, Ernst,
Max, 1926-48, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection
of American Literature, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
9. Max Ernst in conversation with the author, Seillans, 1966.
10. Max Ernst, “Notes pour une biographie,” in Max Ernst, Ecritures (Paris:
Le Point Cardinal, 1970), p. 18.
11. Max Ernst, “Some Data on the Youth of M. E. as Told by Himself,” in
Max Ernst: Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, ed.
Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborn, Schulz, 1948), p. 29.
12. Walter Benjamin, “Zentralpark,” in Walter Benjamin, I//uminationen:
Ausgewéhite Schriften, 2d ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 246.
13. “Au-dela de la peinture,” in Max Ernst, Oeuvres de 1919 a 1936 (Paris:
Editions “Cahiers d’Art,” 1937), p. 31.
14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Une peinture méditative,” in Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Le régard éloigné (Paris: Plon, 1983), p. 328.
15. Max Ernst, “Beyond Painting,” trans. Dorothea Tanning, in Max Ernst:
Beyond Painting, p. 14.
16. See Pepe Karmel, “Terrors of the Encyclopedia: Max Ernst and Contem-
porary Art,” this publication, pp. 81-105 and notes 7, 8.
17. Ernst, “Notes pour une biographie, pp. 30-31.
18. ycau Mss 101, Katherine S. Dreier Papers box 102, folder 2507, Ernst,
Max, 1926-48, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
19. Georges Hugnet, “Lesprit Dada dans la peinture, II,” Cahters d'Art
(Paris) 7, nos. 8-10 (1932), p. 361.
20. André Breton, “Genése et perspective artistique du surréalisme” (1941), in
Le Surréalisme et la peinture, rev. ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 64.
21. Ernst, “Beyond Painting,” p. 7.
22. André Breton, Nadja, new ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 21.
23. Max Ernst, “First Memorable Conversation with the Chimera,” VVV
(New York). no. 1 (June 1942), p. 17.
24. See Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York
School (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), p. vi: “When ten artist members
of the group, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Stanley William
Hayter, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang
Paalen, Kurt Seligmann, and Yves Tanguy, along with its poet-spokesman,
André Breton, took refuge in the United States during the war against fascism,
two significant artistic developments ensued. The first of these developments
involves the displaced. ... The second development arises from the impact of
the displaced on the milieu into which they were injected.”
25. David Hare, “Dialogue entre Maitre istoire de l’art et Maitre idio savant,”
in Paris—New York, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National
d’Art Moderne, 1977), p. 85.
26. James Thrall Soby, After Picasso (Hartford: E. V. Mitchell; New York:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1935), p. 87.
27. “Marvelous and Fantastic,” Time, December 14, 1936, pp. 60-62.
28. “The era of full mechanization is identical with the era of the tin can.”
Sigfried Giedion, Die Herrschaft der Mechanisierung: Ein Beitrag zur anonymen
Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Europ. Verl.-Anst., 1982), p. 63.
29. J. Bell Pettigrew, Design in Nature. Illustrated by Spiral and Other Arrange-
ments in the Inorganic and Organic Kingdoms as Exemplified in Matter, Force, Life,
Growth, Rhythms, &c., especially in Crystals, Plants, and Animals. With Examples
Selected from the Reproductive, Alimentary, Respiratory, Circulatory, Nervous,
Muscular, Osseous, Locomotory, and Other Systems of Animals, 3 vols. (London
and New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1908).
30. Ibid., p. 1235.
31. Sidney Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (New York: Reynal and
Hitchcock, 1944), pp. 124-25.
32. Max Ernst in conversation with the author, Paris, 1967.
33. Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Harmondsworth
and New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 8.
34. Max Ernst in conversation with the author, Paris, 1969.
35. Ernst in conversation with Edouard Roditi, cited in Edouard Roditi, Chagall,
Ernst, Miro: Propos sur art recueillis (Paris: Sedimo, 1967).
SJldS YINYIM
19

tid ALLEL,
Ae bh
Fa Hi bd dy } i Wi
LAMM fy,
/} /) Wi)
l
Wi Y H i) a
f
AM
are
| ;
\\ Wi)
Ss :
y
LAL MY Wd yl
LN AGINS
//
ill
/
l
I
/

Ludger Derenthal
Max Ernst, The Lion of Belfort I (Illustration from
Une semaine de bonté, 1934)
Reproduction of collage
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
sm 1904
Max Ernst and Politics
LIKE MOST OTHER ARTISTS OF THE SURREALIST GROUP, Max Ernst was not espe-
cially active politically, and unlike many of the Surrealist writers he only rarely engaged
in discussion of current political issues. Yet he never left any doubt about his belief in
artistic and social freedom, the goals of the Surrealist revolution. Only during two
periods did he become more politically involved: the first months after World War I
and the late 1930s.
In the months after the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany, Ernst first
recognized the need to become active in the political sphere. His close ties to leftist
art circles in Berlin, already established during World War I, doubtless helped to moti-
vate him. In January 1916 Ernst, who was serving in the German army, had been
granted a furlough so that he could attend the opening of his exhibition, shared with
the future Bauhaus master Georg Muche, at Herwarth Walden’s Berlin gallery, Der
Sturm. In the course of that stay Ernst had met the future protagonists of Berlin
Dada, George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde. And during the last months of the war
his fiancée, Luise Straus, had sent several issues of pre-Dada Berlin magazines to him
at the front. On Grand Place in Brussels he had heard Carl Einstein, then active on a
soldiers’ revolutionary council, speak on “Spartacus, Lenin, and Trotsky.”! Herzfelde
had been present when Max Ernst and Luise Straus were married, on October 7,
1918, in Cologne. Their honeymoon had taken them once again to Berlin, where
they signed Walden’s guest book for the last time.? Only a few weeks later Walden
was denounced by leftist artists, who would continue to make him a favorite target for
attack during the Dada period.
Both before and after the outbreak of the German Revolution, the leftist Berlin
avant-garde served as a model for provincial activists in the Rhine area. Living in
Cologne, Max and Luise Ernst were involved in the Gesellschaft der Kiinste, which
its members considered a Rhenish offshoot of the Berliner Arbeitsrat fiir Kunst,
founded by Adolf Behne, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and others. Luise Straus-
Ernst served as secretary to the Cologne group, and the first announcements of its
magazine, Der Strom, listed the Ernsts’ apartment as a mailing address. The stated goals
of their association were far from modest: “The Gesellschaft der Kiinste in Cologne
hopes to restore to art its ethical force in society, to the human community its right to
art as the visible expression of the people’s will. It hopes to unite all those involved in art
in a cooperative effort to implement a radical art-political program, the goals of which
21

MAX ERNST AND POLITICS
22
read: vital interaction between the art world and the people, and artistic freedom for
those who create.” Particularly noteworthy is the call for collaborative effort on the
part of artists, borrowing from a topos frequently invoked during this revolutionary
period, namely, the notion that politics, life, and art should be one and the same.
Ernst soon saw the need to break with Walden, his first Berlin dealer. This is
clear in a letter he wrote at the time on Gesellschaft der Kiinste stationary to John
Schikowski, features editor of the Social Democratic Party’s newspaper Vorwéirts and
cosigner of the initial proclamation of the Arbeitsrat fiir Kunst, in which he placed
the work of his artists’ association at the service of the political revolution:
I have been told by Herwarth Walden that a// the Sturm artists with the exception of
Stuckenberg have joined the Internationale Gruppe der Expressionisten, Kubisten und
Futuristen, which he has established. From Stuckenberg (by way of Herr Vrings) I have
learned that the majority of the Sturm artists have disengaged themselves from Walden’s
capitalistic dictatorship. Since these two bits of information contradict each other, I beg
you to explain to me what the situation really is. From the enclosed program of the
Gesellschaft der Kiinste you will see that I take issue with any organization that appeals
to the bourgeoisie (which would automatically be the case under Walden’s leadership).
The Gesellschaft der Kiinste is directed exclusively to the proletariat. We are working
together with the unions and the socialist party organizations.4
Yet only in a few letters from the months immediately after the war do we find
Ernst espousing socialist views. His friend Johannes Theodor Baargeld was much more
radically engaged with politics. He uncompromisingly championed the Soviet system
and Communism and was a leading member of the leftist Independent Socialist
Party (uspD) in the Rhineland.> With Der Ventilator, the satirical weekly he published
in February and March 1919, when it was banned by the British Occupation authori-
ties, Baargeld caused a considerable stir in Cologne. Ernst collaborated on at least the
first few issues, but it is not possible to determine the extent of his involvement, since
contributions were published anonymously. Whereas in the following months
Baargeld continued to be active not only artistically but also politically in the uspp,
Ernst turned his full attention to attacking the hated bourgeois culture at its aesthetic
roots with his Dadaist works. In Cologne, Dada was highly provocative, capable of
producing numerous scandals, but inactive politically.
SOON AFTER HE SETTLED IN PARIS, Ernst found himself part of the group around
André Breton; he moved in Surrealist circles, occasionally putting his name to their
declarations and manifestos. Though he did not follow his friends into the Commu-
nist Party, he did become a member of artists’ groups, such as the Association des
Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AFAR), set up by the Communists in March
1932; in fact, along with a number of other Surrealists, he was present at this group’s
initial meeting. During the first years of his stay in Paris, at least, any more visible political
involvement would have been highly dangerous, for he was living in France without
papers. Thus he was forced to flee from the city after the quarrels at the banquet given
on July 2, 1925, for the poet Saint-Pol Roux, during which the “femme de lettres”

Rachilde spoke out against Germany and the Surrealists came to the defense of their
German friend. Because of the Surrealists’ protests against the war taking place in Mo-
rocco and because Ernst had signed their manifesto “La révolution d’abord et toujours,”
the police already had their eye on him. He therefore withdrew to Pornic, in Brittany. It
was an escape of some consequence for Surrealist art, for it was in a hotel there on
August 10 that he discovered the potential of the frottage technique for his work.®
How to cohere as a group and the determination of the relationship between in-
dividual and collective action, that is, what the individual artist’s share in the creation
of a given work ought to be, were among the major issues facing the Surrealists. It
was not by chance that even in the pre-Surrealist period the Surrealists-to-be had
staged séances and that the group later experimented repeatedly with collective explo-
rations of the subconscious, ranging from the cadavre exquis to the truth game, as a
means of producing works of art and literary texts. In his own writing Ernst also dealt
with the “fairy tale of the artist’s creativity,” emphasizing the “purely passive role of
the ‘author’ in the mechanics of poetic inspiration.”” The Surrealists believed this
subject could not be discussed without reference to social realities, without an eye to
unified political action. Ernst shared in this thinking, though in a 1929 statement re-
garding the possibility of revolutionary action he expressed reservations about the
necessary mechanics: “I think a minimum of organization highly useful. In principle,
I am ready to carry out a joint action with all the individuals in the questionnaire... .
I consider continuing the acts of terrorism carried out by the Surrealists to be of the
greatest importance.”®
Even in the 1930s, with the rise of National Socialism and as the ideological
struggles between Fascists and Communists became more and more radical, Ernst did
not by any means sign every Surrealist manifesto. He was particularly hesitant to take a
stand on domestic political crises in France. Nevertheless, he emphatically supported
the agar’s call for protest in March 1933, in the wake of the Reichstag fire in Berlin
and the subsequent persecution of German artists and intellectuals. In the following
years Ernst increasingly considered himself to be an artist in exile. At first he had
stayed in Paris for personal and artistic reasons, but in the later 1930s he lived there
because he was a politically persecuted artist, a status his involvement in the organiza-
tions of émigré German cultural figures reflected.
Once the French Communists, Socialists, and leftist radicals formed a people’s
front and when, in mid-1935, the Comintern called for the integration of Communist
and Social-Democratic parties and organizations in exile, political activity among the
German immigrants increased. Writers, theater people, and artists set up organiza-
tions in an attempt to effectively combat Fascism.
Ernst’s involvement in émigré circles clearly reflects the ever-worsening fragmen-
tation of the Surrealist group during this period. Many writers and artists in Breton’s
group were searching for new areas of cultural and political action because they had
broken with the Communists following disputes that took place at the International
Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture in the summer of 1935 ” Breton himself,
for example, forged an alliance with his old adversary Georges Bataille and founded IWHILNIYIG ¥3I9NaNI

MAX ERNST AND POLITICS
24
the group Contre-Attaque, which was meant to take up the struggle against Fascism
and save the revolution from an extreme leftist position. Yet as early as the end of
March 1936, before the people’s front had been voted into power, this totally isolated
intellectual circle—in which Ernst had not been involved, interestingly enough—broke
apart owing to irreconcilable differences between Breton and Bataille. Breton subse-
quently worked on the side of the Trotskyites, issuing appeals for the truth about the
Moscow show trials. In April 1936 Breton’s unconditional opposition to Stalinism
would force Paul Eluard to declare his break with him, accusing him of intolerance
and separatism. To be sure, this break was only effected two years later in October
1938, when Eluard published poems in the Communist magazine Commune, but the
times of their joint action on the political plane were past. |
Max Ernst, on the other hand, more and more sought contact with other émigré
German artists.!9 We see evidence of this in a series of photographs taken in Ernst’s
studio by Josef Breitenbach in the spring of 1936. Breitenbach had emigrated from
Munich to Paris in 1933 (as a participant in Munich’s Raterepublik after World War
I and a Jew, he was doubly threatened by the Nazis). He had opened a studio on rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Montparnasse and managed to make a living of sorts as
a portrait and news photographer and as the director of a small photography school.
He was an active member of the Socialist Workers Party (sap) and worked with the
akar.!! His acquaintance with Ernst can be traced back to May 1935, when he en-
tered the artist’s address in his date book. At this time he also made a first series of
double portraits of Max Ernst and his second wife, Marie-Berthe, in Ernst’s studio.
The best-known photograph from the sequence shows Ernst leaning on a table on
which, among binoculars and a lamp, a tangle of twine, reproductions of paintings, and
letters, stand sculptures, paintings, and other objects (fig. 15). Hanging on the wall are a
number of Ernst’s works, as well as a tapa—painted fabric made of bark—from Lake
Sentani in New Guinea, modern-day Irian Jaya; one of the objects on the table is a
neckrest that also came from New Guinea. Ernst has turned away from his tools and
works of art and gazes out of the picture into a visionary distance, or so it appears.
A second photograph from the series records the visit of the artist Heinz
Lohmar to Ernst’s studio (fig. 16). The two men are standing on the terrace outside
the studio at 26, rue des Plantes in the Quartier Montparnasse. Marie-Berthe Ernst
is visible behind the window. Lohmar, born in Troisdorf near Bonn in 1900, had met
Ernst in 1921, while studying at the school of applied arts in Cologne. He immi-
grated to France in 1933, after he had lived for two years in the artists’ collective
Fontana Martina on Lago Maggiore. Lohmar was an active member of the exile
group of the German Communist Party (kpp) and in November 1935 became the
driving force behind the formation of the Kollektiv Deutscher Kiinstler (KpDxK), a new
association of émigré German artists living in France. The kpk was only a small group,
but it had a number of prominent members. At Lohmar’s request Otto Freundlich served
as chairman, and others who belonged were Horst Strempel, Hanns Kralik, Robert
Liebknecht, and Erwin Oehl, as well as Gert Wollheim, whom Ernst knew, along
with Freundlich, from his Dada years in Cologne and—last but not least—Max Ernst

Fig. 15 Fig. 16
Ernst in his studio, Paris, 1936. Heinz Lohmar and Max Ernst outside Ernst’s stu-
Photograph by Josef Breitenbach dio, Paris, 1936. Photograph by Josef Breitenbach
himself. The group first worked to gain recognition and to that end published a col-
lection of pictures by members titled Die Mappe, which included a reproduction of
Ernst’s Bride of the Wind (cat. no. 65). According to the brief foreword, the portfolio
was meant to demonstrate the survival of “free German art—in spite of and in oppo-
sition to Hitler.” Even more important was the organization of a lecture series for the
winter and spring of 1936. The first presentation was a screening of the film Kzih/e
Wampe with a talk by its director, Slatan Dudow. Freundlich spoke on “German Art
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” Kralik and Lohmar exhibited work, which was dis-
cussed, Carola Giedion-Welcker lectured on abstract art, and a Dr. O. Paul spoke on
art and politics in the United States. On June 24, 1936, only a few weeks after
Lohmar and Breitenbach had visited Ernst, the leading émigré paper, the Pariser
Tageszeitung, announced: “Kollektiv Deutscher Kiinstler. Max Ernst will speak on
‘Surrealism and Revolution.’ Discussion follows. Today, Wednesday, June 24. 8:30 P.M.,
Café Mephisto, 146 Blvd. St.-Germain.” Sadly, nothing more is known about Ernst’s
lecture or any of the other talks, for there is no further mention of them in the German-
exile press.
The Café Mephisto was the venue for lectures and educational events in Paris
organized by the German émigrés. A week after Ernst’s lecture a working group of
the Union for the Protection of German Writers presented responses there to Walter
Benjamin’s essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”
(“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) with the author in at-
tendance. The revolutionary climate of the budding people’s front in which such de-
bates took place was one in which May Day festivities alternated with discussions
about realism and artists’ parties took turns with staged disputes about art.
In August 1936 the kpk took part in the Amsterdam Art Olympiad, a protest IWHLNIYIG YIOGNI

MAX ERNST AND POLITICS
against the German leadership’s misuse of the Olympian idea. Ernst was prominently
represented, with three of his works exhibited.!? Just when the Kx disbanded is un-
known, but to date there is no documention of its activities after February 1937.
It might have been possible for even closer contacts to develop among the émigrés
during these years, as revealed in a letter of May 20, 1935, from Theodor Adorno to
Walter Benjamin. In it he offered to introduce Ernst:to Benjamin, whose Arcades
project Adorno thought had much in common with the goals of the Surrealists: “Do
you happen to know Max Ernst? I have never met him myself, but it would be easy
for me to arrange a meeting through Lotte Lenya, who is a close friend of his. I could
imagine that at the present stage of your work on the Arcades a meeting with the
Surrealist who in my opinion has achieved the most would be most appropriate.” !3
Ernst was indeed close to Lotte Lenya when Adorno wrote this letter, in the winter
of 1935. While working for long weeks in solitude at Roland Penrose’s chateau Le
Pouy near Jegun in Gers, Ernst wrote love letters to Lenya, who was in Paris. These
letters document a missed opportunity to link the Surrealists more closely with the
German émigrés, for they show that Ernst tried to convince her to appear with him at
the Cycle Systématique de Conférences sur les Plus Récentes Positions du Surréal-
isme, planned by Breton for the summer of 1935: “Will you be in Paris in June? And
would it perhaps amuse you to do something with me? I am supposed to give a lecture
or something, with demonstrations, theatrical or otherwise. I have been thinking of
the following. Subject: a few friendly suggestions that I give the audience “To stop
such and such from happening... do this’ with appropriate examples, as you will see.
With these, ‘living pictures’ and other such lovely things. All somewhat in the spirit
of the Semaine de bonté. If you would sing some of the suggestions, for example, could
it not greatly enhance the brilliance and beauty of such a presentation? What do you
say?” 14 In another letter to Lenya, dated February 16, 1935, Ernst expressed his opin-
ion of the political situation in Germany in a veiled comment: “The cat came into the
dining room at lunchtime and threw up a whole mouse. It was most appetizing, and I
was forced to think of Germany.” In Breton’s handwritten draft of the program,
which was decorated with drawings and collages, we find under “Item I” the listing
“CONSEILS D’AMI, par Ernst,” its title surely inspired by the poem of the same name
and the collage from the 1922 book Les malheurs des immortels, produced by Ernst in
collaboration with Eluard. A later, printed program announces only two evenings,
with the title of Ernst’s presentation changed to “Tests mentaux.” For lack of sub-
scriptions the project was ultimately abandoned.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936 gave French in-
tellectuals as well as the émigrés an opportunity to fight National Socialism and Fas-
cism with more than novels, pamphlets, and pictures. We know that both Eluard and
Breton hoped to volunteer for the Republican army. In a television interview of 1967
Ernst related that he too had offered his services, as an artillery instructor. But he was
rejected by André Malraux, who was responsible for the selection of volunteers and
with whom Ernst “enjoyed no great amount of credit.”!© The rejection must have
hurt him deeply, for he had served in the artillery for four long years during World

Fig. 17
Installation view, Entartete Kunst exhibition,
Munich, 1937. Ernst’s Muschelblumen (Shell
Flowers) is visible at center bottom.
War I, ultimately in the rank of lieutenant, and could assume that he had sufficient
knowledge of military matters to recommend him. From La Sarraz in Switzerland,
where he was a guest at the castle of Héléne de Mandrot in August, he wrote in a letter
to Br eton dated the twelfth:
My dear André, I had to first shake off a strange powerful laryngitis (genuine, doubled by
another, nervous? according to the doctor), in order to think once more of leaving for
Spain. Of course, I would be delighted if we could leave together, and I even request that
you try for it, although I am rather pessimistic about the results, after my first failure. We
must, I believe, avoid going through Malraux who (according to information from the
Spanish consulate) has been put in charge by the Spanish government of organizing as-
sistance and taking offers of help from volunteer “technicians.” “Technicians”=people who
can drive cars, care for the wounded, give instructions on how to use machine guns and
pieces of artillery (that’s my case), etc. Monsieur Malraux doesn’t want “intellectuals” nor
individuals who would go to Spain to paint Surrealist pictures (sic!), he has therefore re-
fused me point-blank, as well as Fernandez (the painter), Penrose, who would have driven
us by car, and Zervos who also offered a car as well as himself. I think Fernandez has
tried other démarches and that he could give us advice.!7
Of the Surrealists, only Benjamin Péret managed to get to Spain, writing in letters to
Breton about the mzsére of the Republican troops divided into inimical factions.
So there was nothing for the Surrealist artists to do but continue to fight
using pictures. This same fight was also being waged by the National Socialists,
who capped their campaign against modern art in the summer and fall of 1937
with the Entartete Kunst exhibition (see fig. 17). The inclusion of two of
Ernst’s works—Muschelblumen (Shell Flowers), ca. 1928 (not in sm), and The
Creation of Eve, la belle ardiniére, 1923 (sm 615)—upset him deeply, as we see
from an undated letter to Oskar Kokoschka in which he barely masks his rage
with sarcasm: “And now the unspeakable ones have provided a further example
of their cultural dementia. My Lovely Gardener ... finds herself in the best
company. The Nazis do me a great favor when they cast aspersions on my pic-
tures: for not for all the money in the world would I want to hang in Hitler’s or
Goebbels’s bedroom.”!8
Also in 1937 Ernst painted several versions of the Fireside Angel (L'ange du foyer):
a small preliminary study exhibited at the Paris World’s Fair of that year, the head of
The Fireside Angel, which is probably only a part of a painted exhibition poster, a wider
variation on the motif (cat. no. 124), and finally the largest, culminating work, distin-
guished from the earlier versions by its size (cat. no. 125). In the 1967 television inter-
view
Span
he spoke of his concept of the painting and placed it in the context of the
ish Civil War and his rejection by Malraux:
I couldn’t take on a more active role after that, but I did everything possible to be of help to
the Republicans. In Madrid at that time there was an exhibition of my collages for Semaine
de bonté, and J assumed that all of them had been lost. But during the bombardment they had
all been saved. I found it marvelous that people had the time to trouble about the works
while the bombs were falling. But since events were accelerating, I did not have much time
left, and I had no desire to paint. One picture | painted after the defeat of the Republicans IVHLNIYIG ¥I9NQaNI
27

MAX ERNST AND POLITICS
in Spain was The Fireside Angel. That was of course an ironic title for a kind of galumph-
ing beast that tramples and destroys everything that crosses its path. That was my impres-
sion at the time of what was probably going to happen in the world, and I was right.!?
Many interpretations of The Fireside Angel refer to this passage and set the picture
against the background Ernst suggests, aligning it with allegories of war by Goya,
Bécklin, or Kubin. Yet Ernst’s recollections are not especially precise; in 1937 the
Republicans had not yet lost the Civil War by any means. John Russell was quick to
point this out and placed the picture in the context of Ernst’s Barbarian series.7°
The title L’ange du foyer was in the air in Paris when Ernst painted the picture,
for in 1936 a film of that name by Léon Mathot, based on a play of the same title by
Robert de Flers, had reached the cinemas. It was a light romantic comedy, to be sure,
and had nothing to do with the violent beast Ernst depicted. About 1937-38, in the
magazine Minotaure 10 (winter 1937), another painting by Ernst, now known as The Joy
of Living (sm 2275), was published as L’ange du foyer. Le triomphe du surréalisme was
the name Ernst had originally given to his protest painting The Fireside Angel, and it
was shown with that first title at the Surrealist exhibitions of January 1938 in Paris and
the following April in Amsterdam and listed as such in their catalogues. Since we do
not question the reference to the Spanish Civil War that Ernst makes so explicit, the
title Le triomphe du surréalisme cannot be interpreted as anything but ironic, a reference
to the Surrealists’ not particularly successful support of the Spanish Republicans.
In a conversation with Robert Lebel published in 1969, Ernst related the Fireside
Angel to another picture in which he presented a commentary on the political situation,
the premonitory map of Europe titled Ewrope after the Rain I (fig. 51), painted, as he
remembered, after Hitler Germany’s Anschluss of the territory of the Saar. Here he
characterized The Fireside Angel as an “exterminating angel.”?! Once again Ernst’s
memory deceived him; he had produced that painting in 1933.
The largest version of The Fireside Angel (cat. no. 125) projects a vivid sense of
danger, its total destructiveness. The monster’s violent nature is perfectly clear from
its menacing claws, its fluttering garments in glowing colors, its expansive gestures,
with its raised left hand making some kind of magical sign, and its enraged stomping in
front of a low-lying horizon. The gesture of the trampling beast’s raised arms can be
found elsewhere in Ernst’s oeuvre, albeit with significant variations. It appears for the
first time in 1923 in The Creation of Eve, La belle jardiniére, just then being pilloried in
Munich at the Entartete Kunst exhibition. And in 1938 the gesture was deployed as an
apotropaic symbol for the now-benevolent guardian of his new Palais Idéal in Saint-
Martin d’Ardéche, the house into which he had moved with Leonora Carrington.??
Attached to an arm and a leg of the beast in the painting is a small, no less monstrous
creature that seems more amphibian. In the smaller variant of the Fireside Angel now
housed in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne (cat. no. 124)—which is distinguished
by a heightened “realism’—the trampling beast has been given more space in which
to move about. The gesture of the outstretched arms is more expansive, to be sure, but
does not seem so menacing, inasmuch as it does not threaten to burst the boundaries of
the picture. The beast and its attendant figure are now joined solely by narrative. The

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:

details respecting the part taken by these Sardinian Ministers
in the negotiation.—E.]
333
These Memoirs were published in 1821, with a very able
introduction by the late Lord Holland. A critic, who cannot be
suspected of partiality (Quarterly Review, vol. xxv. p. 413),
pronounces them “a model of this species of writing.” It is to
be regretted that they embrace only four years, and those not
the most interesting, of the reign of George II. Lord
Waldegrave possessed sound sense and respectable abilities.
He was highly esteemed by his contemporaries, and few men
have passed through life, and, above all, public life, with a
character so entirely unblemished.—A masterly critique of Lord
Waldegrave’s Memoirs is given in the seventy-third number of
the Edinburgh Review, from the pen of the late Mr. John Allen.
—E.
334
George Grenville, next brother of Richard Earl Temple. He
married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Windham, and
sister of Charles Earl of Egremont, and of Percy Windham
Obrien, Earl of Thomond.
335
Treasurer of the Navy.
336
Sir Charles Windham, Earl of Egremont, eldest son of the
celebrated orator, Sir William Windham, Chancellor of the
Exchequer in the four last years of Queen Anne, and of Lady
Catherine Seymour, daughter of Charles Duke of Somerset,
the proudest man of his age.
337
Had Lord Egremont been a liar of the “monstrous magnitude”
stated in the text, he certainly would never have had the
opportunity of refusing the offer of being Secretary of State
from a man of such strict honour and integrity as Lord
Waldegrave; an offer, be it observed, which Walpole notices in
his Memoirs of George the Second without censure. It was to
his refusal of that offer, and to his subsequent connection with

Mr. Grenville, that Lord Egremont owed this severe
imputation. He was proud, obstinate, and hot-tempered; but
that he was not without talent is proved by his answer to the
Spanish memorial, a State paper of acknowledged merit.
Bishop Newton, who knew him well, says, “that if he had
entered earlier into business, he might have made as
considerable a figure as his father had. He had seldom
occasion to speak in Parliament, but, when he did, it was with
great clearness, force, and energy; and he was thought to
resemble his father in manner as well as in good matter,
having a little catch and impediment in his voice, as his father
had.”—Newton’s Mem. p. 89.—E.
338
Many interesting anecdotes of Lord Halifax are given in the
Memoirs of Mr. Cumberland, who had been his private
secretary for many years. He describes him thus: “I am
persuaded he was formed to be a good man, he might also
have been a great one: his mind was large, his spirit active,
his ambition honourable; he had a carriage noble and
imposing; his first approach attracted notice; his consequent
address ensured respect. If his talents were not quite so solid
as some, nor altogether so deep as others, yet they were
brilliant, popular, and made to glitter in the eyes of men:
splendour was his passion; his good-fortune threw
opportunities in his way to have supported it; his ill-fortune
blasted all those energies which should have been reserved
for the crisis of his public fame. The first offices of the State,
the highest honours which his Sovereign could bestow, were
showered upon him when the spring of his mind was broken;
and his genius, like a vessel overloaded with treasure, but far
gone in decay, was only precipitated to ruin by the very freight
that, in its better days, would have crowned it with prosperity
and riches.” Vol. i. p. 242. This is a generous portrait,
considering that Cumberland had certainly been unkindly
treated by Lord Halifax; and, had he always felt thus, he

would not have furnished Sheridan with the model of Sir
Fretful Plagiary.—E.
339
The figures 45 became the hieroglyphics of Wilkes’s party.
340
Queen Anne’s speech on the treaty of Utrecht told a similar
lie; so exactly was the parallel maintained throughout. [It was
consequently made one of the subjects of Lord Orford’s
impeachment. Vide fifteenth Article, Journals, vol. xviii. p. 214.
—E.]
341
The following passages are those to which the text refers:
“This week has given the public the most abandoned instance
of official effrontery ever attempted to be imposed on
mankind. The minister’s speech last Tuesday is not to be
paralleled in the annals of this country. I am in doubt whether
the imposition is greater on the Sovereign or on the nation.
Every friend of his country must lament that a Prince of so
many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly
reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his name to
the most odious measures, and to the most unjustifiable
public doctrines, from a Throne ever renowned for truth,
honour, and unsullied virtue. I am sure all foreigners,
especially the King of Prussia, will hold the minister in
contempt and abhorrence. He has made our Sovereign
declare, ‘My expectations have been fully answered by the
happy effects which the several allies of my crown have
derived from the salutary measure of the definitive treaty. The
powers at war with my good brother the King of Prussia have
been induced to agree to such terms of accommodation as
that great Prince has approved, and the success which has
attended my negotiation has necessarily and immediately
diffused the blessings of peace throughout Europe.’ The
infamous fallacy of this whole sentence is apparent to all
mankind; for it is known that the King of Prussia did not
barely approve, but absolutely dictated as conqueror, every
article of the terms of peace. No advantage of any kind has

accrued to that magnanimous Prince from our negotiation; but
he was basely deserted by the Scottish Prime Minister of
England. He was known by every Court in Europe to be
scarcely on better terms here than at Vienna, and he was
betrayed by us in the treaty of peace. What a strain of
insolence, therefore, is it in a minister to lay claim to what he
is conscious his efforts tended to prevent, and meanly to
arrogate to himself a share in the fame and glory of one of
the greatest Princes the world has ever seen!”—E.
342
Robert Wood, author of the accounts of Balbec and Palmyra,
and Under-Secretary of State. He had been so made by Lord
Chatham, but had deserted him. [Mr. Wood was still, and for
some time after, on most friendly terms with Lord Chatham.
Vide his letters of the 3rd and 6th of September, 1763, in the
second volume of the Chatham Correspondence, p. 246.—E.]
343
Philip Carteret Webbe, M.P. for Hazlemere, and Solicitor to the
Treasury. The part he took in the proceedings against Wilkes
savoured too much of the practice at the Old Bailey, and made
him very unpopular. His character was otherwise
unexceptionable. He published various tracts on law and
antiquities, and was a great collector of books and medals. He
died in 1770, aged 70.—E.
344
When Charles King of Naples, on the death of his brother King
Ferdinand, succeeded to the crown of Spain, he set aside his
eldest son as an idiot, made the second Prince of Asturias,
and the third King of Naples.
345
He was appointed King’s Counsel in May, 1757, and Baron of
the Exchequer in Hilary Term, 1762. He resigned in May, 1764.
We cannot find anything more about him. His praise of the
peace seems to have been on his first circuit; probably, while
his surprise and gratitude were fresh. There are no Exchequer
reports of that time. Except on the circuit, a Baron of the
Exchequer was then, and long after, almost a sinecurist.—E.

346
Ralph Allen, of Prior Park, near Bath, Master of the Cross-
posts.
347
Mr. Pitt had openly pronounced the peace inadequate, and it
seemed to be personally levelled at him, that the address
affected to call it adequate. [Bishop Warburton insists on
Allen’s ignorance of Mr. Pitt having applied the term
“inadequate” to the peace, and disclaims any concern in it
himself; though he admits having drawn up, promoted, and
advised a similar address from the clergy of Gloucester, whose
interference, on this occasion, “had the fate,” Mr. Pitt
observed, “not to be imitated by any other episcopal see in
the kingdom.” Allen, who was now an old man, felt Mr. Pitt’s
resentment acutely, and immediately withdrew from this
corporation. He died on the 29th June of the following year,
having bequeathed to Mr. Pitt a legacy of 1000l. Mr. Pitt’s
letter of condolence to his widow shows, that whatever
coolness the address might have produced in their intercourse
was short-lived. The correspondence between Mr. Pitt and
Allen is in the Annual Register for 1763, p. 208; and in the
Chatham Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 256.—E.]
348
Captain Forbes, of Ogilby’s regiment, in the French service. He
was of good family in Scotland, and of some merit in his
profession, as may be inferred from his subsequently attaining
the rank of General in Portugal, where, in common with other
Scotch exiles, he was employed and trusted.—E.
349
Vide Memoirs of the year 1751, [vol. i. p. 15–181. He was at
that time residing at Paris, under the name of Count Murray.
In 1771, he was recalled by letter under the King’s privy seal,
and he died shortly afterwards.—E.]
350
Thomas Osborne, fourth Duke of Leeds.
351
Thomas Villiers, Baron Hyde, brother of William Earl of Jersey.
[He had been Minister at Berlin in the reign of George the

Second, and received various honours from Frederick the
Great, whose preference of him to such men as Mr. Legge and
Mr. Fox, and even to Sir Andrew Mitchell, probably arose from
the same reasons that induced Napoleon to bestow the
warmest praise on such of his enemy’s generals as he most
wished to have as opponents. Lord Hyde was an amiable
nobleman, of very comely person, and graceful deportment;
he married one of the coheiresses of Lord Clarendon, was
elevated to that earldom in 1776, and died in 1786.—E.]
352
Mr. Grenville was deeply offended at this interference of the
Duke of Bedford; and his friends, in consequence, took no
pains to defend the Duke when the current of popular feeling
afterwards turned so strongly against his Grace.—E.
353
Mr. Pitt’s villa at Hayes, near Bromley, in Kent.
354
Walpole is mistaken in this supposition; for the King himself
proposed Lord Temple for the Treasury. (Lord Hardwicke’s
letter to the Duke of Newcastle.) An impartial narrative of this
transaction is given by Mr. Adolphus (vol. i. p. 127), with a
reference to the contemporary authorities, of which the most
important are Lord Hardwicke’s letter, and the letters in the
Chatham Correspondence (vol. ii. p. 242). The “dexterity” and
finesse ascribed in the text to Mr. Pitt hardly belong to his
character, and certainly were not exhibited on this occasion.
His private correspondence proves, as he told the King, that
he felt throughout the impossibility of his making a ministry,
unless it rested “on the great families who had supported the
Revolution Government, and other great persons, of whose
ability and integrity the country had had experience, and who
had weight and credit in the nation.” This would necessarily
have involved greater changes than the King then
contemplated, though not greater than his Majesty
subsequently found inevitable.—E.
355
Henry Arthur Herbert, Earl of Powis.

356
He had been succeeded as Treasurer of the Household by
Lord Powis.
357
His Majesty did not give him up in less than two years on the
next change.
358
Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham.
359
Welbore Ellis, Esq.
360
George Keppel, third Earl of Albemarle.
361
Walpole is in error here. Wood informed Mr. Pitt of the report,
that he had proscribed Lord Gower, Rigby, and others of the
Bedford party; and Mr. Pitt’s reply, though it has not been
preserved, may be inferred, from Wood’s acknowledgment of
it, to have amounted to a positive denial of the charge.
(Chatham Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 250.)—E.
362
Dr. Charles Lyttelton, brother of George Lord Lyttelton. They
were sons of Christian, sister of Richard Lord Cobham,
consequently first cousins of Lord Temple.
363
James Grenville, the third brother.
364
Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, had four sisters, Maria, Hester,
Christian, and Penelope. Maria, widow of Sir John Langham,
offended him by marrying Mr. West, a clergyman, on which he
set her aside, and settled his estate, and obtained his peerage
to be settled, on Hester, the second sister, and her issue, who,
by Mr. Grenville, her husband, were Richard, George, James,
Henry, Thomas, and Hester, the wife of Mr. Pitt. [Mr. West was
the father of Gilbert West, one of the Clerks of the Council,
and better known as the translator of Pindar, and author of
the popular treatise “On the Resurrection.” He was a most
amiable man, and the intimate friend of Pitt.—E.]

365
Henrietta Hobart, sister of the first Earl of Buckinghamshire,
widow of the Earl of Suffolk, and afterwards of George
Berkeley, brother of the Earl of Berkeley, Mistress of the Robes
to Queen Caroline, and mistress of King George the Second.
The author lived in great friendship with her the last years of
her life; her house at Marble Hill, Twickenham, and his at
Strawberry Hill, near the same village, were within a mile of
each other, and he passed three or four evenings every week
with her, when they were in the country. She died July 26,
1767, aged 79, and was remarkable for her strict and minute
veracity and memory, which she retained to the last, as well
as her eyesight, teeth, and the elegance of her person.
366
Leicester House, in Leicester Fields, the residence of the
Sydneys, Earls of Leicester, was hired and inhabited by King
George and Queen Caroline, when Prince and Princess of
Wales, on their quarrel with George the First; as it was
afterwards, on a similar occasion, by Frederick, Prince of
Wales, whose widow, Augusta, also dwelled there till after the
accession of her son to the Crown. George the Third, after his
father’s death, lived at Saville House, the next door to her.
367
The names of four Scotchmen appear in the same Gazette to
appointments, or as Governors in the American Colonies,
Johnstone being one of them. He was the third son of Sir
James Johnstone, of Westerhall; he was of a hot and most
pugnacious temperament, as he showed some years later by
his duel with Lord George Germaine. He died in 1787.—E.
368
Don Richard Wall, of Irish extraction, was Ambassador here
from Spain in the reign of George the Second. He was a most
artful, agreeable man, of much wit, and a great favourite at
this Court. At his return to Madrid, he had been made
Secretary of State in 1754, [upon the downfall of Enseñada.
Sir Benjamin Keene, by his advice and influence, materially
contributed to this event, which proved highly favourable to

the British interests at Madrid. The intrigues in the Spanish
Court, and the financial difficulties of the country, made Wall’s
post a very irksome one. He discharged its duties at least as
ably as either his predecessor or his successor. The King was
unwilling to part with him, and made his retirement
honourable by many marks of distinction. He passed the
remaining years of his life chiefly at Soto de Roma, a royal
castle, in the lovely valley of Grenada, where he maintained a
splendid hospitality. Mr. Swinburne visited him there, and has
given a very agreeable account of him. He died 1778.—E.]
369
Grimaldi was a Genoese. He had been educated for the
church, and always retained the soft and insinuating manners
of an Italian ecclesiastic. It was to his address, rather than to
his talents, that he was indebted for high situations he filled.
In negotiating the celebrated treaty of Paris, he appears to
have been overmatched by Choiseul, and the loss of the
Havannah, and the other misfortunes of the war, were the
immediate fruits of his eagerness for a French alliance. His
administration in Spain was neither popular nor successful. It
ended with the failure of the expedition to Algiers. His chief
merit lay in the encouragement he gave to literature, his
patronage of the arts, his love of justice, and the mildness
and generosity of his disposition. On his resignation, in 1777,
he was created a Duke, and a Grandee of Spain. Having been
allowed to nominate his successor, he was at his own request
appointed Ambassador at Rome. Coxe’s Spain, vol. v. c. 63;
and Memoirs of a Traveller now in Retirement, vol. iv. p. 109.
—E.
370
He had particularly distinguished himself in the command of
his regiment at Fontenoy, where his valour and good fortune
are noticed by Voltaire:—
“Guerchy n’est pas blessé, la vertu peut te plaire.”—E.
371
See an account of him in the notes, infra.—E.

372
This Vergy was a French spy. In 1771, I heard Mr. Phelps,
secretary to Lord Sandwich, relate that Vergy had offered him
to act, too, as a spy on Guerchy, of which Mr. Phelps gave the
ambassador warning. Vergy remained here several years, and
wrote pamphlets and novels for a livelihood.
373
When they talked to D’Eon of a breach of the peace, he
understood English so imperfectly, that he thought Lord
Halifax threatened to break the peace between the two
nations, of which he, D’Eon, had been the messenger, and
that inflamed his madness.
374
Augustus the Third, a weak and unfortunate monarch, whose
reign forms one of the most melancholy epochs in the annals
of Saxony. His incapacity was more remarkable from his being
opposed to Frederick the Great and Catherine the Second. He
died in 1763, and with him ended the independence of Poland
—his successor Stanislaus being merely the nominee of
Russia.—E.
375
Count Bruhl.—[This worthless courtier, who exercised for
many years an arbitrary sway over Saxony and Poland, and
inflicted irreparable injuries on both countries, died in October,
1764.—E.]
376
Rezzonico, Pope by the name of Clement the Thirteenth,
[filled the Papal Chair from 1758 to 1769, when he died, in his
76th year. His life was decent, and his intentions appear to
have been honest, but his policy was unenlightened and
vacillating, and is strikingly contrasted by that of his illustrious
successor.—E.]
377
Sir Hugh Smithson, who assumed the name of Percy on
marrying Lady Elizabeth Seymour, daughter of Algernon Duke
of Somerset, and heiress of the house of Percy by her
grandmother. They were created Earl and Countess of
Northumberland.

378
Thomas Potter—see more of him in the preceding reign.
[Memoirs of George II. vol. i. p. 61. He was the second son of
Archbishop Potter, whose fortune he inherited, owing to his
elder brother having disobliged his father by an imprudent
marriage. In 1748 he had been appointed secretary to the
Prince of Wales, then the patron of all the talent in the House
opposed to the Government, and from that time he took an
active part in the political contests of the day. He was a clever
and impressive speaker, and, with application and steadiness
of conduct, might have become one of the leaders of his
party. Unfortunately, he had contracted, in early life, habits of
dissipation, under which his constitution sunk, just as his
ambitious hopes bade fair to be realized. He died Vice-
Treasurer of Ireland, in June, 1759. Some interesting letters
from him to Mr. Pitt are given in the Chatham
Correspondence, vol. i.—E.]
379
James Douglas, Earl of March and Ruglen, Lord of the
Bedchamber to the King, [afterwards the too well-known Duke
of Queensberry—an appropriate patron of such a divine.—E.]
380
Lord Despencer said, he never heard the devil preach before.
Yet Lord Sandwich had a precedent in a great Reformer of the
Church: “Calvin eut par trahison les feuilles d’un ouvrage que
Servet faisait imprimer secrètement. Il les envoya à Lyon avec
les lettres qu’il avait reçues de lui: action qui servirait pour le
deshonorer à jamais dans la Société. Calvin fit accuser Servet
par un emissaire. Quel rôle pour un Apôtre!”—Voltaire, Essai
sur l’Hist. Générale, chap. 113.
381
A broken wine-merchant, brother of Admiral Cotes, an
intimate of Wilkes.
382
Only son of the Duke of Chandos. [He afterwards succeeded
to the Dukedom, and died in 1789, when his titles became
extinct. His only daughter married the late Duke of
Buckingham.—E.]

383
Mr. Pitt’s speech had the very dubious merit of pleasing his
opponents rather than his friends. Lord Barrington, in a letter
to Sir Andrew Mitchell, says, that if fifty thousand pounds had
been given for it, the sum would have been well expended. It
secures us a quiet session. Chatham Correspondence, vol. ii.
p. 262, and Walpole’s Letters, vol. iv. p. 313.—In fact Mr. Pitt’s
interviews with the King had necessarily blunted the edge of
his opposition, and he found it as difficult to give an
intelligible defence of his proceedings, as all succeeding
ministers, in the same predicament, have experienced since.—
E.
384
The Lords on the same account put off the hearing of Wilkes’s
defence on the Essay on Woman, to the 22nd; and then for a
week longer.
385
Frederick, second son of George the Third.
386
Edward Duke of York, next brother to the King.
387
Frederick Lord North, eldest son of the Earl of Guilford.
388
Mr. Morton, or Moreton, M.P. for Abingdon, a barrister of
eminence, who was appointed Chief Justice of Chester in
1763. His name will hereafter occur in the debates on the
Regency. He must not be confounded with Sir William
Moreton, of Moreton, in Cheshire, Recorder of London, who
died in 1763.—E.
389
Mr. Forester had been originally recommended by Alderman
Beckford to the Duke of Bedford (when the Alderman and his
Grace acted together) for a seat in Parliament, “as a person in
whom steadiness, honour, and elocution were not exceeded
by any man in the country.” (Bedford Correspondence.)—E.
390
Mr. Wilbraham, M.P. for Newton, and Deputy Steward of the
University of Oxford. He was an eminent lawyer, whose
politics, like those of Mr. Fazakerly, prevented his attaining the

honours of his profession.—(Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. iv.
p. 319.)—E.
391
Benjamin Bathurst of Lydney, in Gloucestershire, brother of
the first Lord Bathurst, and father of the late Bishop of
Norwich.—E.
392
Sir John Griffin, an officer of some distinction. He had been
severely wounded at the battle of Campen, when fighting near
the hereditary Prince of Brunswick. In 1786 he succeeded to
the ancient Barony of Howard de Walden; in 1796 he became
a Field Marshal; and he died in 1797, having devised Audley-
End and his other estates to his kinsman, Mr. Aldworth Neville,
who at the same time succeeded to the Barony of Braybrooke,
which had been limited over to him on the death of Lord
Howard de Walden.—E.
393
See infra.
394
General Philip Honeywood, of Marks Hall, Essex, an officer of
distinction. He died without issue in 1785.—E.
395
Sir John Rushout had taken an active part in the debates
against Walpole’s Excise Bill in 1732. He was made a Lord of
the Treasury in 1742, and in the following year Treasurer of
the Navy. He was strongly attached to Pulteney, and had the
sagacity to predict the consequences of that statesman’s
refusal to take office on the resignation of Walpole. He lived to
the great age of 91, and died on the 2nd of March, 1775. His
son was created Lord Northwich.—E.
396
In Ireland.
397
Henly Earl of Northington.
398
Under Lord Chatham’s administration in the war.
399
Thomas Harley, a merchant, and brother of the Earl of Oxford.

400
The tax on cyder.
401
The Duke of Bedford.
402
Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. iv. p. 329.
403
Vide Wilkes v. Wood. State Trials, vol. xix. 1154.—E.
404
Vide Mr. Croker’s note in Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. iv. p.
322.
405
He was the second son of William de Grey, Esq., M.P., and
younger brother of Thomas de Grey of Merton Hall, M.P. for
Norfolk, whose estates he inherited, on the death of the latter
without issue, in 1765.—E.
406
This was one of the most obstinate contests of the day, and
cost Mr. Luther many thousand pounds. He had been the
pupil, and was the intimate friend, of Dr. Watson, the Bishop
of Landaff, to whom he bequeathed a considerable portion of
his fortune. The Bishop describes him correctly as a man of
most upright conduct and honourable principles. He died in
1786. Watson’s Anecdotes, vol. i. p. 235.—E.
407
Philip Yorke, Lord Royston, afterwards second Earl of
Hardwicke.—See infra.
408
General A’Court, M.P. for Heytesbury, was Colonel of the 11th
Dragoons. He did not long remain an object of compassion,
for he recovered his rank and regiment, and afterwards
inherited a large estate and the borough of Heytesbury, from
his uncle, Mr. Ash. He died in 1781. The present Lord
Heytesbury is his grandson and lineal representative.—E.
409
General Henry Seymour Conway, only brother of Francis Earl
of Hertford.
410
Thomas Pitt of Boconnock, only son of Thomas Pitt, elder
brother of the famous William Pitt, by the eldest sister of

George Lord Lyttelton. [He inherited from his father the
borough of Old Sarum, for which he brought himself into
Parliament in 1761. In 1763 he was made a Lord of the
Admiralty. In 1784 created Lord Camelford. He went abroad
for his health in 1787, and died at Florence in 1793. The
letters addressed to him when a student at Cambridge, by
Lord Chatham, have attached an interest to his name beyond
what belongs to his political career; and it is singular that he
should, at the very outset of his public life, have abruptly
separated from one whose opinions up to that time he seems
to have entirely shared. Their connection was not afterwards
resumed, though, as Lord Chatham’s relative, he returned
thanks (rather coldly) to the House for the marks of distinction
conferred on that great man’s memory. He is described by his
son-in-law, Lord Grenville, “as combining a steadiness of
principle and a correctness of judgment with an integrity of
heart, which produced the affectionate attachment from those
who knew him that has followed him beyond the grave.” Many
of his letters during his residence abroad are printed in
Nichols’s Illustrations of Literary History, vol. vi. p. 75; they
show more amiability of disposition than power of mind, and
were scarcely worth being preserved. On the death of his only
son the title became extinct.—E.]
411
Charles Lenox, third Duke of Richmond, had married Lady
Mary Bruce, daughter of the last Earl of Ailesbury by his third
wife, Caroline Campbell, afterwards married to General
Conway.
412
Elizabeth, only daughter of Sir William Windham, a lady highly
respected for her virtues as a wife and mother; and whose
death, not long after, her husband never recovered.—E.
413
Augusta, eldest daughter of Frederick Prince of Wales.
414
Anne, eldest daughter of King George the Second.

415
Mary, fourth daughter of George the Second, married to the
Prince of Hesse; and Louisa, his fifth, married to the King of
Denmark.
416
The Prince visited Mr. Pitt on the 22nd of January, and passed
two hours with him. On the 14th, the Prince had addressed
him a very complimentary letter. Chatham Correspondence,
vol. ii. p. 272, and note.—E.
417
The Prince succeeded to the Dukedom on the death of his
father in 1780, and for some years after resided at Brunswick,
where the Princess, who was throughout life deservedly
esteemed, made his Court very agreeable. In 1787 he
commanded the Prussian forces which took possession of
Amsterdam, and put down the republican party in Holland. His
campaigns against the French republicans were less
successful, and his well-known manifesto rendered his failure
more glaring. He was mortally wounded at Auerstadt, and
expired at Altona on the 10th of November, 1806, leaving
behind him the reputation of a bold and enterprising, rather
than of an able general. His Duchess took refuge in England,
where she died at an advanced age. They were not happy in
their family: of their two daughters, the eldest married the
late King of Wirtemberg, and came to a miserable end in
Russia; the younger was the unfortunate Queen Caroline.
Their eldest son was of a weak understanding, and the
younger, “Brunswick’s fated Chieftain,” a Prince of moderate
abilities but signal courage, fell in middle life at Waterloo.—E.
418
A general officer.
419
Sir William Meredith was elected for Wigan in 1755, and for
Liverpool in 1762. In 1765 he was appointed a Lord of the
Admiralty, an office which he resigned on the dismissal of the
Rockingham Administration. In 1774 he was sworn of the
Privy Council, and made Comptroller of the Household. He
died in 1790.—Cavendish’s Debates, (note,) vol. i. p. 52.—E.

420
This character of Sir George Saville is not less honourable to
his memory than Mr. Burke’s well-known and brilliant
panegyric at the Bristol election in 1780. Few public men
received more respect from their cotemporaries—few,
perhaps, have so well earned it. He devoted his time, his
talents, and his purse almost exclusively to the public service.
Neither the fashionable nor literary circles of London, nor the
pursuits of the country, had any charm for him; he seldom
resided at Rufford, the splendid seat of his ancestors:
business was his passion, and whether in town or country,
constituted his sole occupation; fortunately, he had abilities to
perform it creditably, and his generosity, which was scarcely
bounded by his great estate, had always usefulness for its
object. The same discernment appears in his selection of the
Parliamentary questions with which his name is identified,
such as the Limitation of the Claims of the Crown on Landed
Estates; the Relief of Roman Catholics as well as of Protestant
Dissenters, and the Condemnation of General Warrants, and,
lastly, the Improved Representation of the People: all these he
advocated with an earnestness and singleness of purpose,
and consistency of action, which extorted the admiration even
of his opponents. Though not an impressive speaker, he was
always sensible and very fluent, and he spared no pains to
understand his subject. His speeches, indeed, partook of one
of the characteristics of his mind, which was a simplicity
approaching to austerity, and an exemption from party, or
even popular prejudices. His life in all respects strictly
corresponded with his principles, and was unstained by vice or
even by weakness of any kind; his death was regarded as a
public loss. He died in 1784, unmarried, aged 57, and with
him ended the last line of the illustrious family of Saville. He
was a collateral descendant of the Marquis of Halifax, to
whose estates his father had succeeded.—E.
421
This house, in which James Earl Waldegrave died, has again
become remarkable by a club created there in 1769 by several

ladies of first rank; the first public female club ever known,
and which gave great offence, though the ladies were almost
all of distinguished virtue. Nor, though the age was notorious
for divorces, though most of the female members were of the
greatest beauty, and though most of the young men of
fashion were of the club, did any scandal happen from that
society. Even gaming, which at that time raged to so
enormous a degree, went to no great lengths there. So that
vice and satire, which prevailed so exceedingly, did not always
meet where they deserved to meet. The King and Queen
marked their disapprobation of the club, while Lord
Despenser, Lord Talbot, and Lord Pembroke were in place,
while Lady Berkeley was of the bedchamber to the Princess
Dowager, though her husband, Lord Clare, had disavowed her
last child, and while Miss Chudleigh had remained Maid of
Honour to her, though she had owned her marriage with
Captain Hervey to her Royal Highness, till she openly married
the Duke of Kingston, though Hervey was alive; and was
received by all the Royal Family as Duchess, after having been
publicly kept by the Duke as his mistress. No wonder the
sanctity of the Court passed for hypocrisy.
422
For an account of this debate, see Chatham Correspondence,
vol. ii. p. 281.—E.
423
A graphical description of this Debate is given by the author in
a letter to Lord Hertford, vol. iv. p. 359, of his
Correspondence.—E.
424
For an account of Mr. Grenville’s speech, see James Grenville’s
letter to Mr. Pitt. Chatham Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 285.—E.
425
Sir Anthony Abdy, Baronet, of Chobham Place, Surrey, had
been brought into Parliament by the Duke of Devonshire, for
Knaresborough. He was a King’s Counsel, in great practice,
and likewise a country gentleman of considerable estate,

having inherited the property of his kinsman Gainsford, the
son of Sir Anthony Thomas. He died in 1775.—E.
426
This speech of General Conway’s appears to have made a
great impression on the House. See the letter cited supra.—E.
427
The Right Honourable James Oswald, of Dunnikier, already
mentioned as the adviser and warm partisan of Lord Bute.
This was one of the last questions of great public interest in
which he took part, his health being now on the decline;
indeed he retired from Parliament at the dissolution. He had
been member for Kirkaldy, his native district, for more than
twenty years, and possessed considerable weight in the
House, as a clear, well-informed, sensible, and effective
speaker. His services were rewarded with a large sinecure for
his son, and a bishoprick for his brother. It is due to his
memory to notice his kindness to men of letters; David
Hume’s History and Political Essays were submitted to his
revision before they went to press, and Lord Kaimes and
Adam Smith lay under similar obligations to him. His
criticisms, however, were probably the least valuable fruits of
his friendship. His Correspondence was published some years
ago, under the title of “Memorials of the Right Honourable
James Oswald.” Most of his papers having been burnt, the
book contains nothing remarkable.—E.
428
Afterwards Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and a peer of that
kingdom by the title of Lord Lifford. He filled that office with
great credit. His judgments in the Court of Chancery were
reported by Mr. Freeman, and the work is still one of some
authority. He died in 1769.—E.
429
Charles Lord Viscount Townshend, minister at the Hague, and
afterwards Secretary of State to the Kings George the First
and Second. By his eldest son, Charles, he was grandfather of
General George Townshend, afterwards Viscount, and of the
famous Charles Townshend. His second son, Thomas, was

father of another Thomas, often mentioned in these Memoirs.
William, third son, was father of another Charles Townshend,
called the black or Spanish Charles, from having been
Secretary to the Embassy at Madrid.
430
Robert Wood died in September, 1771; he was writing
Dissertations on Homer, since published.
431
See what is said of them in the Advertisement prefixed to the
first volume of the Anecdotes of Painting.
432
Mr. Bouverie and Mr. Dawkins.
433
Pitt had issued two general warrants during the war.
434
Alluding to the enormous debt contracted by the war.
435
Being dependent on Lord Shelburne, Barré had, under him,
connected himself with Mr. Pitt, whom he had so savagely
attacked not long before, and had been dismissed from the
army.
436
Richard Hussey, Esq., M. P. for East Looe, Attorney-General to
the Queen, Counsel to the Admiralty, and Auditor to the Duchy
of Cornwall and Greenwich Hospital. He died in 1780.
Cavendish’s Debates, vol. i. p. 197, note.—E.
437
Alluding to Mr. Pitt.
438
Wilkes subsequently published a very friendly letter, dated
26th March, 1763, addressed to him by Mr. Legge, inviting him
to meet Dr. Hay at dinner. Indeed the intimacy of Wilkes was a
reproach shared at that time with Dr. Hay by several of the
most eminent persons in the kingdom. And it was not till after
the publication of the forty-fifth number of the North Briton,
on the 23rd of April, 1763, that their eyes were open to the
enormity of his offences.—E.
439
Arthur Onslow, Speaker in the reign of George the Second.

440
Lord Howe was then only an Irish Peer. He had succeeded to
his title on the death of his elder brother at Ticonderago in
1758. His great services raised him to the English Peerage in
1782, as Viscount Howe, and as Earl Howe in 1788. He died in
1799.—E.
441
This debate is described in the author’s letters to Lord
Hertford.—Correspondence, vol. iv. p. 373.—E.
442
This statement is probably much exaggerated. There is no
doubt that Pratt applied to the Court, according to the usual
practice, to appoint a day for Hensey’s execution. Lord
Mansfield desired him to name the day, and on Hensey’s
solicitor asking that it might not be an early day, Pratt said he
was ready to give as long a day as might be proper. At last the
Court agreed that it might be a month.—Burr. Reports, vol. i.
p. 651, R. v. Hensey. The sentimentality imputed to Pratt
certainly formed no part of his character; and as the story is
without question inaccurate, we may fairly doubt whether
Norton was guilty of so curious a piece of brutality. Hensey
was respited on the very morning that he was going to
execution. On the 5th of Sept. 1759, he appeared in Court
and pleaded a full pardon.—E.
443
Hugh Smithson Percy, Earl of Northumberland. His eldest son
married a daughter of Lord Bute. Both the Earl and Brecknock
afterwards, finding their expectations not answered, turned
against the Court. Brecknock was hanged twenty years after
in Ireland, for being accessory to an atrocious murder
perpetrated by Mr. Fitzgerald, who suffered with him.
444
The compliment was not insincere, for the King probably
entertained more enlarged views of constitutional liberty than
Lord Marchmont. His Lordship clung to his Jacobite principles
to the last, though he changed their object.—E.

445
Lord Holland has justly observed, “that wherever that great
magistrate (Lord Hardwicke) is concerned, Lord Orford’s
resentments blind his judgment and disfigure his narrative.”—
Mem. vol. i. p. 139, note. He certainly has in this instance
drawn a caricature, of which there is no merit in the execution
to compensate for the faults of the design. Lord Chesterfield,
though also a political opponent, has done Lord Hardwicke
more justice.—See Miscell. Works, vol. iv. p. 51. Admitting
many of his eminent qualities, he elegantly says of his avarice,
that though it was his ruling passion, he never was in the
least suspected of any kind of corruption; a rare and
meritorious instance of virtue and self-denial, under the
influence of such a craving, insatiable, and increasing passion.
—See also Lord Mahon’s Hist. vol. iii. p. 201. The Editor has
only further to observe, that none but a lawyer who has
practised in the Court where Lord Hardwicke so long presided,
can correctly appreciate his discharge of the duties of that
high office. His judgments maintain their authority to the
present hour, and furnish the earliest and clearest exposition
of the principles of the Equity Jurisdiction of this country. And
whoever may have had the opportunity of examining his
Lordship’s note-books, will see the patient attention and
indefatigable research that distinguished every part of his
judicial career.—E.
446
John Perceval, second Earl of Egmont.
447
In America.
448
All the sums mentioned in this speech must be carefully re-
examined, for I am not sure they are exact; [nor has the
Editor been able to verify them.—E.]
449
A plan, of which the consequences were so little foreseen,
that Walpole does not even notice it in a letter to Lord
Hertford, written two days afterwards. Corresp. vol. iv. p. 386.
—E.

450
Afterwards Sir George Amyand. [He was one of the leading
Directors of the East India Company, and an eminent
merchant in the City. He died in 1766.—E.]
451
It appears to have been Lord Clive himself who made this
observation: “not thinking it strictly honourable to take
advantage of this sudden spirit of generosity, and to carry
merely by his popularity a case which was depending at law,
he rose and requested that they would desist from their liberal
intentions: adding, that from being sensible of the impropriety
of going abroad while so valuable a part of his property
remained in dispute, he would make some proposals to the
Court of Directors, which would, he trusted, end in an
amicable adjustment of this affair.” Malcolm’s Life of Lord
Clive, vol. ii. p. 230.—E.
452
One of the Aldermen, and member for Plympton. He had
married one of the coheiresses of Jacob Tonson, the printer.—
E.
453
The book displays cleverness rather than “great parts.” D’Eon
was an unprincipled coxcomb, bold, ready, and plausible; with
a smattering of literature, and more than common powers of
writing. At the outset of the dispute he was not much in the
wrong, for the difficulties raised to the payment of his
disbursements as Minister were ungenerous, if not unjust; and
M. Guerchy’s lamentations over the guinea per month lavishly
expended in English Gazettes would have put the forbearance
of most men to a severe test. In his passion D’Eon forgot the
laws of decency as well as of honour, and the publication of
his book injured him certainly not less than his enemies. It
had an immense circulation, and the attempts to suppress it
at Paris, of course, served to make it more sought after. Lord
Holland, who happened to be there at that time, used to lend
his copy by the hour. A reply to D’Eon was published, under
the title of “Examen des Lettres, &c. du Chevalier d’Eon, dans

une Lettre à M. N—” and is smart enough. The Critical Review
(1764) treats it as a satisfactory refutation of D’Eon’s charges;
but the public continued to laugh at the French Ambassador
and his Government, and they fell in general estimation fully
to the extent stated in the text.—E.
454
Walpole’s hatred of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke may be traced
in this portrait of his son. Lord Hardwicke was one of the best
informed noblemen of his day. The Athenian Letters which he
wrote, in conjunction with his brother, whilst at the University,
ranks next to the Travels of Anacharsis among works of its
kind. “The Correspondence of Sir Dudley Carleton” is more
curious than interesting; and the editor seems to have
correctly appreciated it, by restricting his first edition to
twenty copies, and his second to fifty. Perhaps there was
some ostentation in terming the next impression a third
edition. He is entitled to more credit for his State Papers,
published in two volumes, quarto,—a work of value, and
which still fully maintains its consideration. Lord Hardwicke’s
health was very delicate, and he neither liked nor shone in
general society, but he did not want decision of character, and
had a strong sense of honour. He was firm in his political
connections, and exemplary in private life. A biographical
account of him is given in Cole’s MSS. in the British Museum,
Donation, 5886.—E.
455
Thomas Pitt, of Boconnock, nephew of Mr. William Pitt, but
attached to Mr. G. Grenville, and by him made a Lord of the
Admiralty.
456
Frederick Montagu, only son of Charles Montagu, of Paplewich
in Northamptonshire, Auditor to the late Prince of Wales.
457
The chief of the Whigs in Opposition.
458
Son of Sir Orlando Bridgman, after whose death he became
Sir Henry; [and having succeeded to the estates of his cousin

Thomas, the last Earl of Bradford, who had died without issue,
was in 1794 created Baron Bradford. He died at an advanced
age in 1800. He was grandfather of the present Earl.—E.]
459
Younger brother of Henry Vernon, of Hilton in Staffordshire;
and married to Lady Evelyn Leveson, Countess Dowager of
Ossory. [Mr. Vernon’s later life was more creditable. He
became a great traveller, and visited the East; and he served
with distinction as a volunteer in the Spanish expedition to
Algiers. He was one of the handsomest men of his day.—E.]
460
Charles Sloane Cadogan, only son of Charles Lord Cadogan,
[afterwards created Earl Cadogan. His second wife was Miss
Churchill, a niece of Horace Walpole. He died in 1807, aged
78.—E.]
461
Dr. Akenside, by some thought a Poet, was of the same
principles with, and an intimate friend of, Dyson, who
obtained his being named Physician to the Queen. To that
mistress and to that friend he made a sacrifice of the word
Liberty, in the last edition of his poem on the Pleasures of the
Imagination. It was uncourtly, a personification to be invoked
by one who felt the pulse of royalty. [The alteration to which
Walpole refers is as follows. In the old editions there is the
passage—
Wilt thou, kind Harmony, descend,
And join the festive train, for with thee comes,
Majestic Truth; and where Truth deigns to come,
Her sister Liberty will not be far.
In the later editions it stands thus—
... for with thee comes
Wise Order; and where Order deigns to come,
Her sister Liberty will not be far.
Nichols’s Liter. Anec. vol. viii. p. 525.

Akenside’s political tergiversation is an unpleasant
commentary on a work so full of elevated thoughts as his
poem. Personal attachment to Dyson probably influenced him.
He died in 1770, in his forty-ninth year.—E.]
462
Mr. Dyson had changed his politics on the King’s accession,
when he became at once a determined Tory, having previously
professed the opposite creed. He afterwards formed one of
the party that went under the name of the King’s friends, a
political section which can hardly be said to have existed in
preceding reigns, and which the personal character of George
the Third rendered very influential on public measures. A
more valuable recruit could not easily have been found. He
was certainly a most able parliamentary lawyer, and the
exactness and precision that characterised his mind, caused
his opinion to be always depended upon. These qualities,
added to his discretion, gave him a moral influence over the
House which could not be the result of his political conduct.
His manners were obliging, and his private life irreproachable.
It is highly to his credit that, when Clerk of the House, he
departed from the example of his predecessors, by making no
profit of his patronage. Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes, vol. viii.
p. 523; Hatsell’s Parliamentary Precedents.—E.
463
Catherine and Charlotte Shorter were daughters of John
Shorter, of Bybrook in Kent. Catherine was first wife of Sir
Robert Walpole, and mother of the author of these Memoirs.
Charlotte was third wife of Francis Seymour, Lord Conway, and
by him mother of Francis Earl of Hertford, and of General
Henry Seymour Conway.
464
I have seen a letter from the King to George Grenville, in
which his Majesty pressed him to turn out Conway.
465
John Fane, Earl of Westmoreland.
466
Sir Richard Temple, Lord Viscount Cobham.

467
This does not mean the vote of a single day, but all the votes
on general warrants considered as one question.
468
General John Campbell, Groom of the Bedchamber to George
the Second, and cousin and successor of John and Archibald
Dukes of Argyle when an old man.
469
Caroline, daughter of the latter Duke John, third wife and
widow of Charles Bruce, last Earl of Ailesbury, by whom she
had an only child, Mary Duchess of Richmond. The Countess
of Ailesbury married secondly General Henry Seymour
Conway, only brother of Francis first Earl of Hertford of that
branch.
470
John Campbell, Marquis of Lorn, married to the famous
beauty Elizabeth Gunning, widow of James Duke of Hamilton.
471
Lord Frederick Campbell had been bred to the law, and
succeeded well there, but quitted the profession on his
father’s attaining the dukedom. [As he was brother in-law to
General Conway, Mr. Walpole seems to have expected him to
have followed Conway’s politics.—Mr. Croker’s note to the
fourth volume of Walpole’s Letters, p. 369. Wraxall says of
him, “Devoid of shining talents, he nevertheless wanted not
either ability or eloquence in a certain degree, both which
were under the control of reason and temper. His figure and
deportment were remarkably graceful.” He married the
Dowager Countess Ferrers, sister of Sir William Meredith, and
died at an advanced age in 1816.—E.]
472
Lord Hertford could not reasonably be expected to court a
share in the consequences of an act of which he disapproved:
and he was of a temperament that too easily disposed him to
shrink from any personal sacrifice. His political principles were
very indefinite. His merit was of a different character. Lord
Chesterfield was sincere when he said of him, in a letter not
intended for publication, “I verily believe he will please as

Viceroy, for he is one of the honestest and most religious men
in the kingdom, and moreover very much of a gentleman in
his behaviour to everybody.”—His administration of Ireland
was respectable, and in general approved of, and it passed
away in almost uniform tranquillity.—Hardy’s Life of Lord
Charlemont, vol. i. p. 224. He filled many high offices, and
was very prosperous throughout life. He was created Marquis
in 1793, and died in the following year, leaving a large family.
—E.
473
Lord Hertford had married Lady Isabella Fitzroy, youngest
daughter of Charles Duke of Grafton, who was succeeded in
the title by his grandson Augustus Henry, of whom much will
be said in some of the following pages.
474
The Duke subsequently gave the best proof of the sincerity of
this offer by bequeathing General Conway a legacy of 5000l.—
E.
475
Conway conducted himself less well than Wolfe at Rochfort,
but far better than the other generals. “Though eminently
distinguished for his gallant and indefatigable behaviour,” says
Walpole, “he never had the happiness of achieving any action
of remarkable éclât, or of performing alone any act of singular
utility to his country. However, he had been engaged in six
regular battles, besides smaller affairs.”—(Counter Address to
the Public on the Dismissal of a late General.) He commanded
a division with credit in the Seven years’ war. An ill-natured
cotemporary critic charges him with being a “martinet,” and
with unnecessarily fatiguing his men, but admits that “he
would have made a very good general if he had not been
spoilt by his education under the Duke of Cumberland.” Life of
Lord Chatham, Ap. vol. iii. p. 262.—E.
476
The Queen’s brother.

Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.
More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge
connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and
personal growth every day!
ebookbell.com

Max Ernst A Retrospective Werner Spies Sabine Rewald Eds

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows

Max Ernst A Retrospective Werner Spies Sabine Rewald Eds

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 5

Slide 6

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 11

Slide 12

Slide 13

Slide 14

Slide 15

Slide 16

Slide 17

Slide 18

Slide 19

Slide 21

Slide 22

Slide 23

Slide 24

Slide 25

Slide 26

Slide 27

Slide 28

Slide 29

Slide 30

Slide 31

Slide 32

Slide 33

Slide 34

Slide 35

Slide 36

Slide 37

Slide 38

Slide 39

Slide 40

Slide 41

Slide 42

Slide 43

Slide 44

Slide 45

Slide 46

Slide 47

Slide 48

Slide 49

Slide 50

Slide 51

Slide 52

Slide 53

Slide 54

Slide 55

Slide 56

Slide 57

Slide 58

Slide 59

Slide 60

Slide 61

Slide 62

Slide 63

Slide 64

Slide 65

Slide 66

Slide 67

Slide 68

Slide 69

Slide 70

Slide 71

Slide 72

Slide 73

Slide 74

Slide 75

Slide 76

Slide 77

Slide 78

Slide 79

Slide 80

Slide 81