ARTISANAL FINESSE AND PANIC TERROR

Max Ernst, A Week of Kindness

The Ernstian collage is not the only incongruous encounter one expects to see. This is moreover what makes its extreme singularity. It is no more the subtle bouquet of a Schwitters's collages (the "nidifications" of strands and collected refuse to use Jean-Christophe Bailly's formula). It is an implacable machination, up to the example of the "Lion of Belfort" series of hypnotic fixity and formidable authority.

In A Week of Kindness, whose original collages could be contemplated at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris throughout the summer of 2009, the intensity of the surrealists' objective chance translates into the strong authority of the news item that Max Ernst takes as the source of his inspiration in popular novels, starting point of his arrangements, news item itself converted into fixity of the unconscious. As if the fact of the dream were this fixity by which the ductile melody of the everyday is rendered impossible, frozen in impatient terror, exacerbated by the volutes and contortions, the levitations and electric arcs, the scales, the carapaces, the railways, the confined salons, the walls and doors, the operating tables, the ornaments, all the novelistic machinery of the 19th century.

The affinities and circulations of fright put in place for this theater of cruelty result from arrangements of great artisanal finesse. The graphic propositions of "A Week of Kindness" also give to savor the sensuality of detail, of texture. A tactile softness seems to compensate for the panic desire to carry oneself into the scene where operates, assailing the sight, a condensation, a venomous and vehement shortcut. The gaze, at the same time as an imminent anxiety lays it bare, unties itself and diverts itself to minutiae, attaches itself to being curious in the sense not of the strange, but in the ancient sense of care brought, of application. Probably Ernst's generosity resides in this flavor and this knowledge of tracings and textures of which each collage constitutes the offering. And certainly, one is seduced by the great finesse of these assemblages, of a meticulous acuity, all romantic, literary.

But the dominant of the work soon recalls under its rule the spirit that delighted in iconographic finesse. Placed under the authority of a single beacon, and this term "authority" comes to us so recurrently, thus naming, in contact with this sequence the very fact of the unconscious, we are beyond subverted narration, its various episodes, their classification into days and elements, experimenting the invariant tenor, the fixed idea of a lighthouse in us.

Each of the suites carries us towards the unnamed imperative. Without reviewing them all, let us alert about "The Rooster's Laughter", this sequence (the terrible fifth notebook) which stands, if one can say, "at the crest" of the event of the discovery of "A Week of Kindness", event which concentrates an energy, for which the qualifier of impatient terror is again imposed, with insistence. For such is in our opinion the core of the work. My contemplation of "The Rooster's Laughter" is horrified by the memory of a passage from the Talmud evoking the fontanelle of a nursing infant broken by the impact of a rooster's paw. But also from the terror of the aviary, I retain the posture of suddenness of the imperious bird-man ("Oedipus"), his "raptive" threat, his tenor of imminence.

From the surrealists' objective chance, "A Week of Kindness" is one of the most galvanizing expressions, of this galvanism dear to Germany of the first quarter of the 19th century.