Irony.. Myth.. and Structure...

The oeuvre of Max Ernst exists and continues to unfold as one definitely individual achievement. It does so outside of or, better yet, beyond all "isms", manifestos, artist groups, which have long fulfilled their function as protests or signs of new artistic methods. If we were to glance back on to what is truly essential in Max Ernst the artist, we would find first his unwavering and prophetic rejection of "Material reality", which once seemed so permanently secure, but now has become increasingly questionable in our day. Second, we would find his continuously adventurous journeys through the realm of the psyche. Like a magician, he seems to have constantly searched for testimonials and images, rites and symbols, putting into visual questions those mysterious forces, those daemonic tensions within our co-native drives, as well as the hovering world of our deepest dreams.

To him anxiety and aggressiveness emerge as stigmata of the modern psyche; yet there is the radiant revelation of Nature (as a field for the exploration of the "miracle par excellence"), which lies bare and is penetrated in her most minute and microscopic structures. All boundaries are gone; everything exists only in permanent metamorphosis: plant, stone, man, animals, as well as the world of dead things which still remain very alive for Ernst.

If Max Ernst could ever change into an animal, he would certainly emerge as a bird--possibly a bird of dream and prey--with a characteristic sharp, hooked beak: a bird of bizarre beauty. The heraldic bird in his escutcheon, his totem, must also be winged. as a matter of fact, his private phantom, called Loplop, is such a grand seigneural bird, his alter ego, which turns up in his book of dreams and horrors "La Femme 100 têtes", the one with a hundred heads without a head (as he entitles the book ambiguously, phonetically). 

It is the Loplop which occupies a dominating position also in his later works and illustrations, ruling over everything.

Max Ernst,

Illustration 120 in the book "La Femme 100 Tetes", Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, 1929.

Max Ernst,

Illustration 118 in the book "La Femme 100 Tetes", Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1929.

**(http://art.famsf.org/max-ernst/illustration-120-book-la-femme-100-tetes-2002172120)

*Giedion-Welcker, Carola, and Ernst Scheyer. 

"Max Ernst: Irony-Myth-Structure." Critisism, No. 2, 1964: 105-113.

Collage as Joke-work: Freud's theories about Ernst's Collages and a discussion on "Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold"

It is hardly a new thought that a surrealist artist was influenced by the psychological studies of Freud and others. Usually that influence has been described in terms of strange dream-like images, which 

are seen as symbolic representations of emotional states. Indeed, this is often psychology's main legacy to Surrealist art. But for artists such as Max Ernst (1891-1976), the debt to psychological study is on a more fundamental level, for psychology was able to provide not only a subject but a method of structuring it.

Sometime around the time Ernst was going to college at the University of Bonn (post-WWI), when his knowledge and use of psychology rapidly growing, he worked in a mental hospital. Because Bonn was an intellectually active city at the time, Ernst learned not only the more conventional psychological theories of the day, but also Freud's theories and writings through a friend, Karl Otten, who had been a student of Freud's in Vienna.   

Shortly after the completion of his military service, Ernst reentered the art world, he did not return to the Expressionist group however, several of whose key members had been killed in the war. Instead, he developed with Hans Arp and Johannes Theodor Baargeld the Dada movement in Cologne, and began to explore the possibilities of collage as an expressive medium. He cut apart and combined fragments of engravings from popular 19th century books, photographs, and even his own drawings. Ernst's Dada collages and paintings and then his Surrealist works were interpretations of the inner life in a modern and irreverent medium replacing the freely painted and more traditional emotional expressions of his college years.

In these later works Ernst concerned himself with their almost-literary significance rather than their formal beauty. Ernst't choices of visual symbols and the way in which they were combined were of central significance to his work. Ironically, this meant that form was of greater importance than subject. The form in question here is what Freud refers to in his book "Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious" when he writes that humor resides in the form of the joke rather than in the subject. For example, people have sexual feelings--true, but not funny nor very profound. But this idea couched in an apt set of words, or juxtaposed to another idea, or associated with a specific individual might be either funny or indeed profound. Form in this context is the configuration in which the parts of the idea have assembled. 

How efficiently a joke is communicated, how appropriately stated, and how cleverly worded are the gauges of its success. Ernst's importance as a Surrealist artist lied in the fact that he used Freud's discussion of verbal mechanisms such as puns as the basis of organization in his collages, which like sentences, are made up of preexisting units that take on new meaning from their interrelationships with other units. Besides forming visual ideas, the devices described by Freud in Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious also frame or encapsulate them in order to present them to a public. This effective packaging of an idea is, as Freud points out, important because communication to a second person or a selected public is a necessary part of joke-work. Another important source of ideas and symbolism would have been The Interpretation of Dreams, but because dreams are both personal and vague in form, it would never have been as helpful as the former in providing Ernst with structural models.

Among Ernst's works that demonstrate the artist's reliance on many of Freud's writings is the painting 'Oedipus Rex' (1922), made according to the collage method of combining images from apparently disparate sources. Each image preserves its own scale, shadow, and perspective. The title of the painting links it to Freud's theory of the relationship between parents and their children.

Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold

An Important Surrealist collage by Max Ernst, Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold or Le Jeune Prince (The Young Prince), has recently been acquired by The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Museum's recently acquired collage is one of four from an unrealized series called Morceaux Chiosis de l'histoire de France (Morsels [minor events] Chosen from the History of France). The other collages in this group are titled: (The Spirit of Locarno), (Nostradamus, Blanche of Castile, and the Little Saint Louis), and (The Religion of the State).
The images in the original engraving include a young man in Renaissance costume exploding upward out of a wooden bucket floating in a body of water before a castle. A full moon illuminates a flock of distant birds in the night sky. To what is apparently an illustration for a fairy tale. Ernst added the inverted image of what seems to be a dolphin or large fish over the head and upper torso of the prince, thus giving him a monstrous bird-like appearance. The female figure in the wooden bucket and the beetle on the surface of the water are also elements supplied by Ernst.
The bucket, it seems, was cut close around the edges and the woman figure inserted behind it, and the cut sections pasted back down. The beetle, however, covers the signature of the original illustrator, its legs and feeler being formed by parts of the letters left exposes from underneath. By placing a light behind this area and using an infra-red viewer, one will discern the following letters in ink: Montegut.
It seems likely that Louis Montégut (born 1855), a French illustrator who did designs for La Chronique Parisienne, was the author of the illustration used by Ernst as the basis for this collage. Thus, an illustration, possibly for a fairy tale, has been transformed into a fantastic scene with a title referring to an obscure incident from French history.

Charles the Bold (1433-1477) was the last reigning duke of Burgundy. He came into opposition with Louis XI of France when he attempted to conquer Alsace, Loraine, and other French territories in order to re-establish the kingdom of Lotharingia. In the battle for Beauvais, on 27 Jun 1472, as the Burgundian forces were about to overwhelm the 300 French defenders, a young woman, Jeanne (whose surname was Laisné or Fourquet) entered the battle armed with an axe. She hurled a Burgundian man-at-arms from the battlements, and tore down the Burgundian banner. Her act rallied the French garrison who repelled the invaders. Thus, she is known to history as Jeanne Hatchette (Jean Hatchet).
This event, still commemorated yearly in Beauvais, was obscure enough to qualify as on of Ernst's 'Morsels'.


Max Ernst,
Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold, 1929, Cleveland Museum of Art.
*(http://clevelandart.org/art/1982.39)

*Stokes, Charlotte.

 "Collage as Jokework: Freud's Theories of Wit as the foundation for the Collages of Max Ernst." Leonardo, No. 3, 1982: 199-204.

*Henning, Edward B. 

"Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold a Surrealist Collage by Max Ernst." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, No. 8, 1982: 273-278.

Max Ernst's Scientific Methods and Inspirations from La Nature

Science seems to have been an all-pervasive influence on twentieth-century life and ideas. Whatever their opinions of science, modern artists cannot but reflect to some degree the methods, ideas, and subjects of scientific study in their works of art. Some artists attempt a "photographic" objectivity in their works. Others explore -- to the exclusion of all other trends -- one narrow artistic problem mirroring the narrowing of topic demanded of modern scientific method. Still some others react in more subtle ways.

Max Ernst was drawn to science not for it objectivity or narrow approach, but rather for the subjects open to the scientist that were traditionally closed to the fine artist. In this search for fresh subjects, Ernst joined many modern artists who found traditional landscapes, academic nudes, and, especially, religious subjects powerless to move the members of an industrialized and fast-changing society. In the early twentieth century, artists like Ernst also looked to drawings by children and the sculptures of Africa as non-traditional sources of inspiration. Scientific subjects, however, provided sophisticated European and American artists with obviously Western, complex , and modern visual prototypes.

For example, in The Large Glass or La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibratairs, même (1915-1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Marcel Duchamp pictures human courting and sexual rituals in what can be seen as an elaborate parody of the research scientist's chemical and mechanical procedures. And Paul Klee's  Analysis of Various Perversities (1922, Collection of Heinz Berggruen, Paris) is an inventive "child's" drawing of an anatomy study complete with fanciful laboratory apparatus. Scientific subjects were seen by these and many other twentieth century artists as rich sources of visual ideas that could be developed in highly individualized ways.

Ernst's approach to science was also highly personal. He saw in scientific illustrations a visual form relatively free from the meanings conventional in artistic images. he also found in the diagrams and photographs not aspects of external reality or of absolute truth, but, rather, tantalizing associations with his own values and emotional states. He was not concerned with the abstractions of science -- with mathematical formulas or graphs. He turned instead to the images that revealed scientific processes and investigations: how scientists visualized what was previously invisible. (Many of Ernst's choices come from articles on the use of photography in scientific investigations.) Ernst found in scientific images a fresh way of seeing, and he used them to help make visualizations of the invisible within himself.

 

Marcel Duchamp, 

The Large Glass, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1887-1968.

*(http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/54149.html#) 

Max Ernst,

Historie Naturelle, Kunst Museum; Bonn, Germany, 1926.

*(http://www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de/en/sammlungen/max-ernst/)

*Stokes, Charlotte.

 "The Scientific Methods of Max Ernst: His use of Scientific Subjects from La Nature." The Art Bulletin, No.3 (College Art Association), 1980: 453-465.

Who Is Loplop?

All surrealist art is to some degree autobiographical: it is an avowed codification not only of how artists see the world but of how they see themselves. To make the personal nature of their art explicit, surrealists and other artists like Duchamp with he Rrose Sélavy have created individual personas that are incorporated into their works. Although some of these artists simply repeat images of themselves, others create personas of great complexity. By using techniques borrowed from psychology and anthropology they search their own pasts and their own personalities to find a unique combination of visual symbols, such a persona in the form of Loplop, superior of birds, was created by the surrealist artist Max Ernst in the 1920's.

Loplop, however, is not only the artist's personal symbol, but the presenter of Ernst's interpretations of his own world. 

With the Loplop series (done in the early 1930's) the artist produced his first autonomous collages, intended for exhibition and sale as individual works. In part the result of an appraisal of the Cubist's papier collés, they amounted to a kind of visual autobiography 'written' in the third person. In an allegory of the artist and his easel, Ernst presented a variety of compositions and combinations, pasting in references to motifs and techniques found in his paintings of the period.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that through the persona the artist totally exposes himself-- that he is an artistic flasher. Rather, the persona is an aesthetic device created and controlled by the artist's mask. Like the mask of the classical actor _ from which the term "persona" comes - the persona defines the artist for the public, while concealing the "real" person. The skillful manipulation of the persona often becomes a game of concealing oneself behind an elaborate public face of one's own invention. This is not to say that the persona is a pose, but rather that the artist has gone to the subject he or she supposedly knows best in order to find more potent truths and myths.

Using Freud's methods Max Ernst sensitized himself to his dreams, cultivated automatic responses and free associations and, contemplated memories of his childhood, never ignoring the symbols and traditions from the German culture into which he was born. By analyzing the symbolism of his dreams and other unguarded thoughts, he discovered that for him birds had a personal as well as a general significance. Bird imagery became an important part of Ernst's paintings and collages beginning as early as his participation in the Dada movement in Cologne before 1920. from a general concern with imagery of birds he evolved an image associated with himself, a persona called Loplop, who may be a bird or a man with the head or wings of a bird. Loplop first figures in the 1928 painting Loplop, superior of birds. From this introduction he appears in Ernst's works for the rest of the artist's life and is associated with Ernst in the artist's writings and in those of other surrealists.

In the series of paintings and collages, whose titles begin with Loplop introduces..., Loplop is part easel and part human figure with a birds head. he is holding a picture of the thing or the person being presented. The bird-headed easel is Ernst's stand-in, but it has many more associations. Because Ernst may show him as a human figure with bird attributes, Loplop can take on the supernatural power of winged creatures-angels, cupids, and Lucifer himself. 

Although bird-headed figures are found less frequently, they are probably the oldest representation of the shaman who controls magical power. More than a touch of irony enters in these bird-men if we note that from the 1930's Ernst owned a manual on bird-trapping methods, and that cages and caged birds dominated his later works, including his notorious Cage-bed with screen (1973).

Loplop, the bird man, who is Ernst's personal emblem, takes on the qualities of another supernatural being, the totem. Ernst's persona is in a figurative and poetic sense like the totem in the tribal setting: the creature who is the spiritual father, the god-like protector, the identifying clan symbol, and even the residence of the soul of the believer. In Ernst's art and writing Loplop slips from one function to another, sometimes embodying all of them at once, which is also very much like a tribal totem or totem pole.


Max Ernst,
Loplop introduces members of the Surrealist group, 1931.
*(http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=35777)


Max Ernst,
birdhead ( in English), 1934-35.
*(nrw-museum.de/en/#/nc/en/searchresults/searchwords/loplop)

*Stokes, Charlotte.

 "Surrealist persona: Max Ernst's Lolop, superior of the birds."

Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, No. 3/4, 1983: 225-234.

*Maur, Karin von, Sigrid Metken, Uwe M. Schneede, Sarah Wilson, and Werner Spies.

Max Ernst: A Retrospective. Verlag, Munich: Prestel publications, 1991.

Expressionism and Early Works

Max Ernst is especially known for his Surreal style paintings and collages, but what many people don't know, is that he actually started out painting in the Expressionist style. 

It has been said that "there simply was not a Dada movement at work in Cologne until the fall of 1919"-certainly not in the visual arts, as is evident in Ernst's own works. All of Ernst's paintings and drawings that can be documented or attributed to 1918-mid-1919 are essentially Expressionist in style. These include ink drawings of 1818 reproduced in Der Strom and illustrations for Consolamini, a volume of poetry by his friend Kühlemann, published in 1919 by Kairos-Verlag. 

These are disturbing drawings, primarily composed of human body parts, but fragmented and mutated almost beyond recognition, and meshed in configurations of physical strife. A recently published drawing from this period (fig.1) is particularly noteworthy insofar as it reflects both Ernst's stylistic references to the work of Chagall (fig.2) and his rare comments on contemporary political conditions. 

This drawing (fig.1) is inscribed with its title, Diskussion (Discussion), and the words "Freie Wirtschaft" ("free enterprise) coming out from the mouth of the figure with the huge head and comically small hat. The figure has been identified as President Ebert employing promises of "free enterprise" to court middle-class burghers fearful of more radical socialism. This interpretation of the drawing is basically convincing for both burghers - described as claw-fingered and willing to trample over themselves, and for Ebert - the smiling, dancing trickster, with a clown face on his collar, eyes in the back of his head, talons for fingers, a waist twisted with about-faces, and a three-legged stool inadequate to support him.

He made quite a few more attributions to the style and movement, this is just one strong example; many of his other paintings were reproduced in Der Strom, as well as, exhibited in the "Der Strom" Exhibit in Cologne and other museums, like the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

 (fig.1) Max Ernst: Discussion, 1919.

Watercolor and ink on paper, Fick-Eggert Collection, Ontario.

*(See page 50 (fig.21) of Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism by William A. Camfield) 

           

  

                    (fig.2) Marc Chagall, Self-Portrait with Goat, 1922-23.

                                              *http://www.moma.org/collection/ object.php?object_id=64743

*Camfield, William A.

Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism. Verlag, Munich, Houston: Prestel, the Menil Collection, 1993 (page 50-51)

"What is Surrealism?"

What is Surrealism? Is it a mythology?, Is it a dream?, or Is it just the fairy-tale of artistic creativity?

To find out, you might want to ask one the most well known surrealists in history: Max Ernst.

In an article for an exhibition by the same name ('Was ist Surrealismus?') written in Zurich, during October-November 1934, he tries to explain. He writes:

As a viewer like anyone else, the 'author' can witness the emergence of the work, follow the unfolding phases of its development with indifference or passion. Just as the poet listens to the automatic processes of thought and jots down their results, so too the painter projects what his optical inspiration suggests to him directly onto paper and canvas.

As we all know, every 'normal' person, and not just the artist, possesses an inexhaustible store of buried images within the unconscious. All that is required is courage and a liberating method (like automatic writing), a voyage of discovery into the unconscious that will unearth found objects in an unfalsified state (uncontaminated by conscious control). The concatenation of these objects can be interpreted as a kind of irrational knowledge or poetic objectivity in accordance with Paul Eluard's definition: 'Poetic Objectivity is nothing but the concatenation of all subjective elements of which the poet is temporarily the slave, and not the master.' It follows from this that the 'artist' simply falsifies matters.

Automatic writing, as well as, other similar methods are adequate for their own techniques of potential expression and can ensure the required poetic objectivity, i.e. the exclusion of reason, taste, and conscious intention from the productive process of the work of art.

Theoretical process, however could not assist them here, but only practical experiments (those known as Cadavre exquis ['Exquisite Corpse'] for example) have proved the feasibility of this approach. It transpired that the more arbitrary the conjunction of elements was, the more surely and ineluctably the ensuing spark of poetic inspiration was capable of effecting a partial or total transformation of things.

The delight we feel in every such successful metamorphosis derives not from the wretched aesthetic desire for distraction, but from an ancient and vital need of the intellect: for liberation from the tedious and deceiving paradise of hardened memories and for the exploration of a new and infinitely broader realm of experience.

If the surrealists are widely recalled as painters of a constantly mutating dream world, this should not imply that they reproduce their dreams in painting (this would simply be a descriptive and naive realism), or that each artist uses the elements of dreams to construct a little private world in which to play out some benevolent or malevolent role (this would simply be a 'fight from the time'). It means rather that these artists move freely, boldly and confidently at the borderline between the inner and the outer world, a borderline that is physically and psychologically entirely real ('surreal') even if it has not yet been adequately defined and determined, that they undertake to register precisely what they see and experience there, and that they intervene wherever their revolutionary instincts suggest they should.

So, finally...

What is Surrealism? Any attempt to answer this question with a definition will inevitably be disappointed until such time at the movement has come to a decisive end.

All I can do now is refer the reader to A. Breton's 'Surrealist Manifestos' and 'Les Vases communicants'. The fact that contradictions appear, and continue to reappear, within the changing positions successfully adopted by the Surrealists proves only that the movement is properly in flux. 

By overthrowing the established relationships between what counted as 'realities', Surrealism has thus inevitably played its part in accelerating the general crisis in the consciousness and conscience of our time.

*Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul

"Max Ernst (1891-1976)- What is Surrealism?" Art in Theory 1900-     2000. Malden, MA: 

Blackwell Publishing, 1993 (page 491-493).

  

The Technique and Conquest of collage

One of the things that Ernst is really known for, is his gift of making collages with pictures of different sources and making them look like they all belong in one unified, surreal, and sometimes comical scene. He talks about the enjoyment of making collages as well as the difficulties in a portion of his book, Beyond Painting when he asks himself the question: 

What is the most noble conquest of collage?

He talked about the irrational and the magisterial eruption of the irrational in all domains of art, of poetry, of science, in the private life of individuals, in the public life of peoples. He said, "He who speaks of collage speaks of the irrational. Collage has crept slyly into our common objects. We have acclaimed its appearance in the realist films (I am thinking of The Golden Age of Bunuel and Dali: the cow in the bed, the bishop and the giraffe flung through the window, the chariot crossing the salon of the governor, the minister of the Interior glued to the ceiling after his suicide, etc.). 

In assembling collages one after another, without choice; he says, we have been surprised by the clarity of the irrational action that resulted in works such as: The Hundred-Headed Woman (Woman Without a Head), the Dream of a Little Girl Who Wished to Enter Carmel, the Week of Kindness. 

He also goes to mention, "Do not forget this other conquest of collage: Surrealist Painting, in at least one of its multiple aspects, that which, between 1921 and 1924, I was the only one to develop and in which, later, while I advanced alone, feeling my way, into the yet unexplored forests of frottage, others continue their researches (Magritte, for example, whose pictures are collages entirely painted by hand, and Dali)."

What exactly is the technique of collage?

He answers, first, with an analogy: If it is the plumes that make the plumage it is not the glue that makes the gluing.

Then he goes to say, that one day during the summer of 1929, a man (a fellow painter) asked him: "What are you doing these days? Are you working?" He replied: "Yes, I'm making gluings. I'm preparing a book that will be called La Femme 100 Tetes." Then the man whispered in his ear: "And what sort of glue do you use?"Max explains that With that modest air that his contemporaries admired in him he was obliged to confess to the fellow painter that in most collages there wasn't any glue at all. And also that he's wasn't responsible for the term "collage"; that of the fifty-six titles in the catalogue of my exhibition of collages in Paris in 1920, an exhibition which, according to Aragon: ". . . is perhaps the first showing which allows one a glimpse of the resources and the thousand means of an entirely new art -- in this city where Picasso has never had the opportunity of exhibiting his constructions in steel wool, cardboard, bits of cloth, etc."

Aragon once said, "the place to catch hold of the thought of Max Ernst is where with a bit of color, some crayon, he attempts to acclimate the phantom which his is about to plunge into a strange landscape."

He was right, because it was at this point that the bright bridge was flung between those two procedures which prompted the inspiration;  frottage and collage.


Max Ernst, Untitled (Unpublished collage for 'Une Semaine de Bonté'), 1934.
     (http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/E/3237/artist_name/Max%20Ernst/record_id/18867)

Ernst, Max. 

Beyond Painting. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1948.

Early Public Establishment and becoming Known

Ernst started painting at fairly young age and continued to do so even in throughout high school college, but it wasn't until after he dropped out of college and during the collapse of the German government (around 1918/19) that he started to seriously delve into creating his own art professionally. During this post-war time, he discovered activism towards the government collapse and how different expressionist groups were contributing to it.

It just so happens that Ernst participated in two of these groups, the Gesellschaft der künste (Society of Arts) and the collaborators on a short-lived magazine entitled Der Ventilator (The Fan). In one basic respect, you could say that the purpose of these groups as Die Rheinischen Expressionisten, was namely the conviction that art was an agent for the betterment of society. What made these groups so distinctive was their radical politicization and aggressive approach/participation in public affairs.
The artists that were associated with these two organizations included Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Otto Freudlich, Franz Seiwert, Heinrich and Angelika Hoerle, Anton Räderscheidt, Johannes Theodor Kühlemann, and Hans Hansen.
Some of them had once before belonged to the Gereon club, and were know to Ernst before the war. Most of the people in those organizations had served in the war and had become involved with anti-war activities. They were often more inclined than Ernst was to place their art at the service of social and revolutionary goals. For about a year Ernst was to associated with these other artists in the Gesellschaft der Künste, and organization founded in November 1918 by Karl Nierendorf.
This society also included a smaller group called Der Strom (The River), with a magazine by the same name which was printed by Nierendorf's publishing house, Kairos Verlag. The public announcement of the Gesellschaft der Künst in Cologne newspapers reflects a new-age-coming fervor that was common immediately after the war - and not altogether alien to the lofty spiritual ideals characteristic of Expressionist circles before the war. Here is and excerpt from that proclamation:

"We stand at the beginning. All ideas about the spirituality of our common world have been proven false. All leaders of this spirituality have proven to be impostors.... We have had enough speeches and promises ... We want action... Youth is rising up,...."

(disclaimer: I personally do not necessarily fully agree with or condone the statements of this excerpt, from the public announcement for the Gesellschaft der Künste)

This proclamation also announced the smaller independent association Der Strom, and its magazine.
At the same time Max Ernst was establishing a reputation for himself in activities of Gesellschaft der Künste, he was stretching his luck with collaboration on Der Ventilator. 
Although Der Ventilator has also been described as a proto-Dadaist venture, there is little - if anything at all- about it that qualifies as Dadaist, and Ernst's part in the publication is not easily assessed.

**Camfield, William A.

Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism. Verlag, Munich, Houston: Prestel, the Menil Collection, 1993 (page 47-49)

Childhood events & Incidents

When talking in terms of his personal life, Ernst described his childhood as "not particularly unhappy", but marked by some fairly traumatic incidents. These incidents, beginning as young as three years old, involved art, life, death, hallucinations, and magical powers. Writing in the third person, as Ernst often did, he said:

"Little Max's first contact with painting occurred in 1894 when he saw his father at work on a small water color entitled 'Solitude' which represented a hermit sitting in a beech-forest and reading a book. There was a terrifying, quiet atmosphere in this 'Solitude' and the manner it was treated. Every one of them had its individual solitary life . . . Max never forgot the enchantment and terror he felt, when a few days later his father conducted him for the first time into the forest."

The painting being cited by Ernst, which is also known as The Monk of Heisterbach; recent information has established that Philipp Ernst copied it with painstaking precision after a lithograph by Eugen Krüger (1832-76). Two aspects of Ernst's text merit emphasis: the father's practice of making copies after reproductions of art works and the perception of "individual solitary life" in each leaf. The concept of an animated nature has a long tradition in the history of art, but the young max Ernst claims to have encountered it firsthand in the local forest and in his father's painting of The Monk of Heisterback.

Another interesting, yet innocent event of Ernst's childhood, was when he ran away from home when he was only five years old. As told by Ernst, he joined a passing pilgrim procession. Apparently, the pilgrims were fascinated and enchanted by "Little Jesus Christ", who was just wearing a red nightshirt and carrying a toy whip. However, Max didn't stay with the pilgrims long; he dropped out after about a mile or so, so that he could take a ride on a train. The next day Max was picked up by a policeman a taken home; he appeased his father's fury by announcing that "he was sure he was little Jesus Christ".
This comment inspired his father (Phillip Ernst) to make a portrait of his son as a little Jesus-child, still dressed in the red nightshirt, but blessing the world with his right hand and bearing a cross (in place of the whip) in his left hand.

                                                                                                                            **Camfield, William A.

Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism. Verlag, Munich, Houston: Prestel, the Menil Collection, 1993 (page 32)

Family Background

Within the diverse viewpoints and sources of information about Ernst available, perhaps some of the most profound bits of information, can be found in the autobiographical texts, which Ernst Began in 1927 and continued throughout most, of the rest, of his life. These texts are, what some might call: products of a self-conscious adult constructing or reconstructing childhood memories, and sometimes responding to those conditions/memories he encountered, in the work he creates.

Max Ernst's parents came from the region of Aachen, in Germany. His father, Philipp Joseph Ernst (1862-1942), was born in Jülich, Grew up in Aachen, and returned back Aachen in order to teach in a nearby rural district in 1883 after graduating from the Teachers' college in Kornelmünster. There he met Louise kopp (1865-1949), whom he married in 1889 after having taken a position as a teaching assistant in 1887 at the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Brühl, a town along the Rhine six miles south of Cologne. They acquired a house on Schloßstrasse, just across the street from an 18th-century Catholic church, where the family worshiped and eventually presented eight children to be baptized.

Max was born on April 2, 1891, he was the third child and oldest surviving son of the family. The marriage of Philipp and Louise Ernst has been described as an overall happy one, with the kind and good-natured Louise always complementing Philipp, who could be a bit stubborn, insistent on his privacy, and difficult to know or understand. Philipp, was often characterized as a man strongly bonded to the Catholic church, with a love of fatherland, and the skill as a self-taught amateur artist with a love for nature.  

Each of those traits and values of his father, apparently made a mark on Max in one way or another.

One of Ernst's first comments on his childhood memories appeared in 1927. He described the atmospheres and events of his (early) personal life as very significant elements in the focus of his work.

*Camfield, William A.

Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism. Verlag, Munich, Houston: Prestel, the Menil Collection, 1993 (page 31-32)