In this paper, I'm going to demonstrate the influence of dark childhood fairy tales on Ernst
and show how he influenced the narrative wing of surrealism
by conducting a case study on one work by him.
Du Zongfon, son menace, pa un rassignol, two children are threatened by a nightingale, of 1924.
For the rest of the paper, I'll abbreviate it to Du Zongfon.
It seems curious, and perhaps significant, that the title of this piece was painted onto the work in French.
As the fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes claims,
quote, to talk about Hansel and Gretel, and to talk about any of the Grimm's fairy tales for that matter,
is first and foremost to talk about translation, end quote.
Though I will argue that Du Zongfon is rooted in the visual culture of Ernst's childhood Germany,
it appears to have been self-consciously displaced in a French context.
The meeting of German and French cultural traditions, namely the Grimm's debt to the literary salons of the 17th century Charles Perrault,
perhaps finds its parallel in the art historical rendezvous of German Dada and French surrealism.
It's important to begin with them two biographical notes.
First, that Ernst was born into a bourgeois family in the small town of Brühl during the Wilhelminian era.
And second, that Ernst was highly educated and studied art history, philosophy and psychology at the University of Bonn in 1909-1910.
His roundland childhood and subsequent academic background support an understanding of Ernst as a very scholarly, surrealist artist
who was able to build coded literary references into his work.
However, I'm concerned that these references tend to be skimmed over.
So here I propose that we reread his influences through Du Zongfon.
This key narrative work by Max Ernst usually dated and agreed to be contemporaneous with the Surrealist Movement's conception in 1924,
though one which I suspect was actually made a few months prior to the publication of André Breton's first manifesto of surrealism,
before Ernst's departure to Saigon that same year.
It seems significant that this visual narrative should slightly predate the publication of the first manifesto rather than the other way around,
a visual tool perhaps influencing Breton's ideas rather than Ernst visualizing the predominantly literary first manifesto.
In one of the earliest full-length commentaries on this piece, the American gallerist Sidney Janis described it as,
quote, a manifesto in paint, end quote.
I do not think it would be too much of an exaggeration to claim that Ernst Du Zongfon can be thought of as one of the principal visual Surrealist works,
which spawned the narrative wing of Surrealist visual art alongside the more automatic experimentations, which we heard about from Ezra.
Janis reads Du Zongfon through the influence of work by the Surrealist precursor Georgiad Kirikou,
and reminds us that Ernst's piece was later visually quoted by Salvador Dali in Nostalgic Echo of 1935,
and this is another quote from Janis.
The play of ideas in the two pictures is like a Surrealist game in which one participant carries on where the other leaves off, end quote.
Both Ernst and Dali's paintings exhibit the influence of Du Kirikou in terms of their architectural compositions,
primary color schemes, and inclusion of the figure of a young girl in the foreground.
Ernst Du Zongfon, therefore, looks back as well as looking forward.
Though Ernst himself stated that Du Zongfon was the last in a series of psychoanalytically influenced works,
it is, I would argue, one of the first examples of a Surrealist visual narrative, and as Janis suggests, prophetic of what was to come.
This narrative echo can be extended into the work of two other Surrealist-associated artists and writers,
his partners, Leonhard Carrington, and later Dorothea Tanning, who both saw Du Zongfon the same year, 1936.
Carrington, who read Herbert Reed's book Surrealism, and Tanning, who saw this piece at the Fantastic Art Dadaan Surrealism Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Both Carrington and Tanning cite Ernst's piece as the revelation which brought them to Surrealism.
But here I want to consider the work itself and the influences on it, i.e. the proto-Surrealist precursors,
by considering the importance of Ernst's childhood in the form of select fairy tales.
The Grimm's Brothers, Hansel and Gretel, 1812, Heinrich Hochmann's Drool Ruppeater, 1845, and a fairy tale poem by Goethe,
entitled Earl Koenig, or Earl King, 1782.
Indeed, I would argue that Du Zongfon is likely to be a conflation of many tales, Ernst's childhood references,
as well as those scholarly readings that have already been told.
Much has been made of this enigmatic and highly suggestive work, but I believe there is still a provocative, nagging aspect to it,
begging to be reread through the fairy tale.
The art historian Elizabeth Legg has produced a highly convincing psychoanalytic reading of this work through Sigmund Freud's Dora analysis.
Legg relates Du Zongfon to Dora's second dream, in which the house is burning down and Dora's mother wants to save her jewellery box,
but is prevented from doing so by Dora's father.
Legg also builds what she describes as a, quote, constellation of correspondent images, end quote,
which further link Du Zongfon to Ovid's Metamorphoses, particularly the classical tale of the rape of Philomel, who turned into a nightingale,
and to the tragic classicism of the figure's drapery, like those found in paintings by Poussin and Claude.
Because Legg has already thoroughly dealt with the influence of psychoanalytic literature on Ernst,
here I will add to her analysis by considering the impact and influence of 19th century fairy tales in Ernst's Rheideland childhood.
Du Zongfon certainly appears to have an appropriated or artificially aged 19th century toy-like aesthetic, which lends weight to this argument.
There is a curious, awkward perspective.
All the action predominantly sits on the lower half, a typically childlike method of pictorial construction.
This seems to further underline its belonging to the domain of childhood.
There is also a rudimentary craft-based appearance, which aids this narrative reading.
The work seems to have been hammered together in a rather charming, faux-naive manner.
Charlotte Stokes highlights the, quote, bits of dollhouse sculpture, end quote,
while Ernst biographer John Russell says that it speaks the language of the toy shop,
and claims it to be an attack on the, this is a quote, on the established aesthetic of European painting, end quote.
As an accomplished artist, Ernst appears to have adopted this naivety in order to create something which a child might bring home from school or craft during playtime.
But it is in this very charm, in this enchantment, where the sophisticated surrealist strategy comes into play.
Though this may at first appear innocent and childlike, even aesthetically cute,
on closer inspection, darker themes quickly emerge.
Susan A. Berth briefly notes its, quote, subtly violent narrative undertone, end quote.
But I think this idea can be extended further.
The knife, the gate, and the doorknob would stand as strong props,
supporting a reading of darker undercurrents and serving as visual metaphors for unrest.
The girl holding the knife has been molded out of thickly applied oil paint,
and the three dimensions actually appear to merge out of the two dimensions, like toys coming to life,
or illustrations walking up a storybook.
Even though the viewer cannot physically interact with the work through the glass plane, it yearns to be played with visually.
In order to apply a bit of background to this piece, I think it's worth quoting Ernst's pseudo-autobiographical notes about his childhood at length.
This is an extended quote.
Little Mac's first contact with painting occurred in 1894,
when he saw his father at work on a small watercolour entitled Solitude,
which represented a hermit sitting in a beach forest and reading a book.
There was a terrifying, quiet atmosphere in this solitude, and in the manner in which it was treated.
Every one of those thousand beach leaves was scrupulously and minutely executed.
Every one of them had its individual solitary life.
The monk was terrifically absorbed by the content of his book,
so that he represented something living outside the world.
Even the sound of the word hermit exercised a shuddering magic power on the child's mind.
The same thing happened to him, this time by the sound of the words charcoal monk pater and rumpled salt skin.
Mac's never forgot the enchantment and terror he felt,
when a few days later his father conducted him for the first time into the forest.
One may find echo of this feeling in many of Mac's Ernst forests and jungles.
Ernst's recollection of his dual fascination and phobia of the forest
are indeed documented in such foray paintings.
I would suggest that the thick paint application and the gratage technique of layering and scratching
can be metaphorically or metonymically linked to the multilayering of narratives
these paintings seem to reference.
The forest itself is full of stories.
In his catalogue essay on the German forest,
Colin J. Bailey comes closest to juxtaposing Ernst and the Grimm's within this terrain,
though in his essay they never actually meet directly.
The forest is a domain of anxiety and the setting for many a fairy tale,
including Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel,
as well as a representation of the romantic German landscape.
As Bailey goes on to say, this is a quote,
In the mind of every child, the forest is invariably a frightening and hostile environment, end quote.
And this certainly seems to square with little Mac's feelings of enchantment and terror.
Ernst further refers to the importance of wood,
and here I'm moving from the forest, the collective forest, to the material of wood,
as a synecdoche in English.
In another childhood experience, Ernst recollects his, quote,
First contact with hallucination, measles,
a fever vision provoked by an imitation mahogany panel opposite his bed,
the grooves of the wood taking suggestively, successively,
the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird's head and a menacing nightingale.
Possibly, two children threatened by a nightingale has some connection with this fever vision of 1897, end quote.
Dus Enfants incorporates many wooden elements and is encased in a heavy wooden frame.
Elsewhere, Ernst used wood for his rubbings, most notably a portfolio of, um,
fortages of two years later entitled Histoire natural.
The origin of the clock is represented as a bird-like form reminiscent of a cuckoo clock,
which again might link it back to Ernst's German childhood.
In his discussion of the German forest, Bailey mentions Goethe's poem, Erlkönig, in passing,
but neglects to related to Ernst's Dus Enfants, where I believe it may serve as a reference.
And I'll just read the first and last stanza of Deutsch so you can hear it.
Ernst cited Goethe as one of his many favorite writers.
This poem may well explain the presence of the paternal figure on the roof with a swaddled finger in its arms in Dus Enfants.
Though Legg and Stokes have, um, retraced the source material for Dus Enfants to an illustration of a fireman
rescuing a child from a burning house in the 19th century journal Lana Tour,
there may be further visual precedence.
Albert Stirner's charcoal drawing of Erlkönig, 1910, for instance,
seems to capture the same embrace of a child in the arms of its father,
as well as a dark, menacing atmosphere.
If we turn to the children's book illustrations for a Hansel and Gretel,
then more visual precedence reveal themselves.
While contemporaneous with Ernst's childhood in 1894,
Hermann Vogel's illustration of Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods is compositionally very similar to Ernst's Dus Enfants.
You can see the triangulation of the bird and then the two children below.
Though in this instance the bird is an owl rather than a nightingale,
the owl is used in this illustration to represent nighttime and the menace of the forest to these young children.
Furthermore, the illustrator's surname, Vogel, meaning bird,
may have made this illustration doubly interesting to Ernst,
who would later adopt a bird figure as his alter ego, Lop-Lop, a very childlike sounding name.
Birds make regular appearances throughout the tales of the brothers Grimm,
often as menacing beings, as well as representations for certain characters.
In Hansel and Gretel, the Grims write,
quote, like a bird fleeing its cage, Hansel flew out the door, end quote.
Around 1926, 1927, Ernst sent to work on a series of Gortage foray paintings
with tiny white birds trapped at the center, such as Cage, Forest and Black Sun, 1927.
Again, the woods change from landscape to material as the bird is caged,
a loaded image which symbolically seems to represent the captivity of a bourgeois childhood,
or working class Hansel held prisoner by the witch.
The same idea is later rehearsed in Ernst's collage novel, The Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, 1930,
in which we see a femme en femme imprisoned in a zotrope,
a philosophical toy of the 19th century bourgeois nursery.
The bird is, of course, a pervasive but ambivalent motif in the work of Ernst.
It can often be interpreted as his aforementioned alter ego,
though perhaps not in the case of Doussaint Fons, which was made a few years before the lop-lop character
became a regular feature in Ernst's work.
If the threat is the nightingale in Doussaint Fons, then Ernst is surely identifying with these two children on this occasion.
Though it would not be entirely far-fetched at this point to position Ernst and one of his sisters
as the two children, like the brother and sister, Hansel and Gretel.
The number of children certainly seems significant.
Two children regularly appear in the fairy tale, most often as siblings.
Legge, who we know compared this work to the Durer analysis,
has declared Doussaint Fons to be, quote,
an unsentimental monument to Ernst's lost sister Maria, end quote, who sadly died in childhood.
But I think it could also be a reference to his little sister Lonnie.
The birth of this little sister clearly made a deep impression on Ernst,
and he recounts the experience in another autobiographic anti-merkin, quote.
One of his best friends, a most intelligent and affectionate pink cockatoo, died in the night, January the 5th.
It was an awful shock to Max when he found the corpse in the morning,
and when at the same moment his father announced to him the birth of his sister Lonnie,
the perturbation of youth was so enormous that he fainted.
In this imagination he connected both events and charged the baby with the extinction of the bird's life.
A dangerous confusion between birds and humans became encrusted in his mind, end quote.
Another potential literary reference is to the imagery in Heinrich Hofmann's Strouvelpeter,
which was first published in 1845 and would still have been popular
around the time of Ernst's childhood in the 1890s.
In this collection of cautionary nursery rhymes, the little girls light matches and burn to death,
and little boys who suck their thumbs get them hacked off by giant scissors.
Two images in particular seem striking when compared to Ernst du Zongfon.
In this example we see a boy called Little Johnny Head in the Air,
distracted by the flight of some swallows as he walks into all sorts of obstacles.
And in another, a boy called Cruel Frederick kills some birds,
which appear very similar to the swaddle figure of a bird or child on the ground in Ernst's piece.
In the narrative of the title, two children are threatened by a nightingale,
seems to share the tone of the cautionary tale,
but as a herald of surrealism, perhaps deliberately twists any fairy tale resolution beyond comprehension.
The little house in the corner is also ambiguous, making it associatively rich.
Visually and physically, it is a diminutive dollhouse within a dollhouse,
with something menacing at its core.
Read through the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, it becomes the gingerbread house,
nice on the outside, but nasty on the inside, metaphorically hinted at by the carving knife,
a suggestive moralistic punishment for the children's sweet-toothed greed.
By this logic, the nightingale might be a representation of the witch,
though this is more dubious, seeing as the witch and Hansel and Gretel do not fly, as others do.
It is more probable that the nightingale would stand for the ravens,
which in the story eat the breadcrumbs, thus complicit with, or at least implicated in, the evil plans of the witch.
The precarious breadcrumb trail quickly disrupts the linear path of the straight and narrow.
The narrative is crumbled from the start, and leads the children to their dark, menacing encounter.
As the path is concealed, their fate is revealed, as is the underlying surrealistic anti-tale.
To conclude, Max Ernst du Zamphon is likely to be a conflation, an intertextual conflation, of many tales.
Various narratives can be pieced together out of such references, but the moral of the story is ultimately left untold.
Based on the characters and motifs which are represented, Ernst seems to use these fairy tales,
particularly his vernacular grims, Hoffman and Goethe, as a way of re-accessing and reassessing his childhood.
The title is also suggestively narrative, and helps us read the boxed imagery.
Had I had more time, I would have looked at Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Nightingale,
but I'll leave Andersen to Paul, who's coming up next, and how this piece might have offered another re-reading of Ernst's piece.
I would also have looked further at the influence of du Zamphon on Dorothea Tanning.
Instead, I will finish with a quotation from her, which contrasts her American childhood with her husband Ernst's German one.
Quote, when it was my turn to talk, what could I tell?
What was there in my childhood to compare with storybook Rhineland, and little Max and his 90,
looking for the railroad tracks and falling in with a procession of fanatics, who called him the Baby Jesus?
How could Galesburg, Illinois, in the 1910s to 20s, a place where you sat on the Davenport and waited to grow up,
compare with Cologne, its mighty cathedral, its stained-glass lambencies, that fell about children's shoulders like jewel capes,
and turned them into princes and poets?
Thank you.