Volume 52, Number 9 · May 26, 2005
Beyond Real
By John Updike
Max Ernst: A Retrospective
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald
An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 7–July 10, 2005
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press,301 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper)
Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle
by Robert McNab, with a preface by Werner Spies
Yale University Press, 266 pp., $40.00
Surrealism USA
Catalog of the exhibitionedited by Isabelle Dervaux
An exhibition at the National Academy of Design Museum,New York, February 17–May 8, 2005, and the Phoenix Art Museum, June 5–September 25, 2005
National Academy of Design Museum/Hatje Cantz,192 pp., $40.00
Not only is Max Ernst the subject of an extensive and eye-challenging retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is winning retrospective publicity as a romantic principal in a shameless, artistically high-powered ménage à trois in the early 1920s, lyrically and speculatively described by the documentary filmmaker Robert McNab in his Ghost Ships. The known facts are not numerous: Ernst, born in the town of Brühl, Germany, near the Rhine between Bonn and Cologne, into a large, middle-class, Catholic family, whose father was a teacher of deaf and mute children and an amateur painter, studied philosophy and abnormal psychology at the University of Bonn. At the age of twenty he decided to become a painter and joined August Macke's Rhine Expressionist group. In 1919, having served four years in the Kaiser's army and risen to the rank of lieutenant, he helped found, with Johannes Theodor Baargeld, the Cologne Dada movement. Increasingly well-known in art circles, and acquainted with such prominent German-speaking artists as Paul Klee, Hans Arp, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Otto Dix, he experimented with collage.
Review, 3904 words
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