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.