7.

Max Ernst’s Surrealist Collages

Breton’s group of Parisian Dadaists daringly exhibit the work of German painter Max Ernst, thereby introducing into the Parisian art scene the first, highly provocative surrealist collages. Cocteau takes over a bar (the Gaya, predecessor to Le Bœuf sur le Toit) and fills it with friends and jazz musicians. In Vienna, Breton visits Sigmund Freud; in Cologne, Paul and Gala Éluard visit Max Ernst. Man Ray arrives in Paris and creates his first Dada object in France.

Breton had been putting all his energies into planning the first exhibition of work by Max Ernst in Paris. With a few months to go before the show, the artist’s work began arriving from Germany, one piece at a time. When they unwrapped them, Breton and his group were stunned. Ernst had sent multimedia collages in paint, gouache, pencil and of photographs depicting all kinds of figures and subjects, superimposed on startlingly incongruous grounds. Each work was astonishing. In The Song of the Flesh, or The Dog Who Shits (1920) a decapitated dog, eyes in the stump of its neck, a fan in one paw, flies through the air; beneath it a woman’s arm emerges from a ball like a maggot from a fruit while two other dogs race across the scene, one jumping through (or encased in) a wide metal band. Ernst’s description, etched around the frame, reads, ‘The dog who shits the dog with a nice hair-do despite the difficulties of the terrain caused by copious/plentiful snow [cocaine?] the woman with the beautiful chest the song of the flesh/Max Ernst’. In other works, human body parts lie in abandoned landscapes, juxtaposed with outsized vegetation against damaged skies, large lumps of metal strewn across the scene. Disembowelled, metallic animals stand stiffly about, or seem suspended; birds fly at ground level, fish are propelled through the air; boats move across the sky. There are headless women and an ‘upside-down violin’ with legs and feet. Untitled, or Deadly Aeroplane (1920) is a photocollage of part aircraft, part woman (composed only of two immense arms, her hands posed as if playing a non-existent harp), a massive semi-human construction, free-standing, in the sky above two men carrying a third between them, his arm in a sling. A woman lies on a couch, her chest, one shin, one knee, an arm and her head all padded, the wires affixed to two of the pads leading only to a couple of empty glass vessels. Mysterious shapes have become ‘real’ simply by virtue of having been photographed. Nothing could have been more conducive to Breton’s emerging (soon to be surrealist) agenda.

While Ernst’s methods seemed to Breton and friends marvellously compatible with and even to extend the range of Dadaist iconoclasm, Ernst himself was concerned primarily with challenging the limits of painting. If the goals of Dada were to demoralize and destroy, the point of surrealism was not destruction but transformation; within the surrealist agenda, monsters became marvels. Ernst’s work was the first manifestation of this. Initially, particularly exciting to Breton and his group was that Ernst’s aesthetic explorations had enabled him to find ways of making ordinary objects haunting or shocking. Lifting things out of their habitual contexts enabled him to endow them with new, startling implications, the resulting visions of displacement chiming with their own explorations in poetry. Of the fifty-two works to be exhibited only twelve were purely collages. In others Ernst had superimposed painted or drawn elements on to photographs or parts of photographs. As Aragon pointed out, the important thing was not the method but the result: Ernst had found ways to reveal the hidden functions of images. Enchanted by the poetry of Ernst’s work, Aragon saw in it ‘strange flowers made out of wheels … a master embroiderer becomes a bookmaker; a collection of hats becomes a convoy’, as in Ernst’s The Hat Makes the Man (1920), in which a milliner’s window display seems to have turned into a semi-mechanical structure composed of bright red, blue, orange, green and yellow rods and bolts. Despite the apparent diagrammatic intricacy, the structure is not functional; on close inspection the rods and bolts are not bolted or capable of suspending the hats, which balance on them precariously, subsumed – pointlessly – into the overall structure of black and bright-coloured shapes in pencil, ink and watercolour against a chalk-white ground. In the bottom-right-hand corner Ernst has written, ‘!Umpressnerven! (c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme) (le style c’est le tailleur)’ (‘Umbilical nerves! (it’s the hat that makes the man) (style is form)’. Into his uncanny landscapes, as Aragon also noted, Ernst seemed to be introducing strange ghosts. As Ernst himself later described it, in his collages he had created ‘the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane, or, to use a shorter term, the culture of systematic displacement and its effects’ – both useful working definitions of surrealism.

Tantalizingly, though Breton had been corresponding with Ernst since 1919, still neither he nor any of his group had met him; his avant-garde activities had been keeping him in Cologne. The war had hidden him from view for four years; as he later described the experience, ‘Max Ernst died on the 1st of August 1914. He resuscitated the 11th of November 1918.’ Ernst said little about his experiences of the war, only that towards the middle of 1917 he had obtained permission to move to the army’s maps department, designing and drawing them; his main problem seems to have been isolation. He had lost contact with his good friend Hans Arp and had no idea Arp was involved with Dadaist activities in Zurich, nor even that his friend was still alive. Ernst was still mobilized when in 1918 he married Louise (Lou) Straus, a fellow student from before the war. (Their son Ulrich (Jimmy Ernst) was born in 1920.) Though supported by her father, a wealthy milliner, Lou worked at the Musée Wallraf-Richartz. She was Jewish, Ernst was Catholic; her father remained unpersuaded by his daughter’s choice of husband.

Two decades later Ernst assisted his biographer Patrick Waldberg by supplying a few childhood memories that seemed to be linked to the development of his work; they also bear the imprint of Freud’s writings, which by that time Ernst had read. His mother had been kind and pretty, he obligingly recalled, ‘white as snow, red as blood, black as the Black Sea’, and a good storyteller. His father, who taught at a school for the deaf and dumb, was a dedicated painter. As a child, Ernst had watched him at work on a watercolour, a ‘peaceful, yet disquieting, forest scene’. Engrossed in his meticulous work, painting in his book, his father had looked like a monk. ‘Absorbed so deeply that he is scarcely there at all, so to speak. Little Max is overwhelmed.’ Visiting the actual forest for the first time, aged three, Max experienced conflicting emotions, ‘both rapture and oppression’, he remembered, the wonderful pleasure of breathing freely in the vast space but also the anguish of being a captive in the prison made by the trees all around him. In one of his strangest childhood memories, the birth of his sister Apollonia (the sixth Ernst child) coincided with the death of his beloved pet parrot, thus provoking ‘a sort of delirium of interpretation’, as though baby Apollonia had somehow taken for herself ‘the vital energy, of his beloved bird’. All his life he remained fascinated by the forms, movement and general uncanniness of birds; they appear throughout his œuvre.

Another, more bizarre memory has the child Max seated on a train watching the telegraph wires through the window, transfixed by the way they moved and stopped moving. When the train was in motion, they swung heavily; when it stopped, so did the telegraph wires; their mysterious up-and-down motion mesmerized him. In Ernst’s own words, ‘in an attempt to penetrate their secret, Max escaped from the house one afternoon’, arousing the attention of a group of Kevelaer pilgrims who happened to be passing, stopped in their tracks by the fair-haired, blue-eyed child, barefoot in his nightshirt, brandishing a whip (actually a broomstick with a piece of string). ‘ “Et Kriskink!” [the Christ child], they whispered, full of respect. The boy believed them …’ It was an aura he somehow managed to retain; nobody ever messed with Ernst. In a memory with a quite different texture, on another occasion he lay in bed with measles, watching in his delirium as from his imitation-mahogany wardrobe emerged ‘the rough outlines of organic forms’. All these were, as he put it, ‘quite normal hallucinations, quickly swallowed up and quickly forgotten’; he apparently recalled them only almost thirty years later when asked about the sources of his work.

Ernst’s own encounter with Dada had come about just after the end of the war. Browsing in a Munich bookshop one day in 1919, he found a mention of Hans Arp in a Dadaist magazine – his first indication that Arp was still alive. At the same time, he turned up an issue of Valori plastici which covered contemporary exhibitions in Paris dedicated to de Chirico’s work, which Ernst had never seen before. He was struck by the artist’s strange landscapes, by the tenuous connections between objects in his work and by the ominous quality of the shadows cast by statues in his nocturnal scenes. For the next six or so years his work remained Ernst’s strongest influence. His idea for the collages had come about during the summer of that year, during a trip to the borders of the Rhine. In a strange almost-repetition of his childhood delirium, confined to his lodgings by the rain one day he had amused himself by leafing through an illustrated catalogue of objects for use in demonstrations of every kind – anthropological, microscopic, psychological, mineralogical, palaeontological. It struck him that, seen as a whole, they made a peculiar collection; as he studied the juxtapositions of such arbitrarily related objects the act of looking at them began to seem almost hallucinatory. He cut some of them out and began placing them one against another, then added painted or drawn elements to create scenes the objects now suggested to him – strange skies and deserted landscapes, which in turn began to seem like scenes of unexpressed desire.

In another chance encounter a few months later in 1920, at home in Cologne one day he had answered the door of his studio to Austrian painter and graphic artist Kurt Schwitters, who stood on the doorstep with two suitcases, which he emptied on to Ernst’s floor. Out of one fell a cascade of compositions and reliefs made of gold and silver paper, feathers and bits of straw, imprinted with fragments of all kinds – marvellous collages created in a unique, distinctive style. Ernst was particularly taken with Schwitters’ reliefs: rectangular overlapping boards and juxtapositions of pieces of wood in all shapes and sizes, their sources indiscernible, some painted, others ornamented with metallic or other elements and each construction arranged in a definite compositional order. Ernst liked the subtle, edgy cohesion of these unusual sui generis works. The other suitcase contained books, drawings, paintings and watercolours. Schwitters told Ernst he was travelling door to door; the point of the two suitcases was that, if the case of collages upset anyone, he could simply open the other one.

In Cologne in April, together with Arp and another friend, Johannes Baargeld, Ernst had mounted an exhibition they called the Dada Ausstellung, Dada-Vorfrühling, a show of paintings, sculptures and diverse objects held in the glassed-in courtyard of a café in the centre of the city. At the entrance a young girl dressed for her First Communion recited obscene poems; visitors were directed beyond her to the urinals. At the centre of the courtyard stood an object by Ernst, something like a butcher’s block, from which an axe hung by a chain. The public were invited to attempt to destroy the object with the axe. In one corner stood Baargeld’s fluidoskeptrik (a meaningless word), an aquarium with water coloured red to resemble blood. At the bottom could be made out an alarm clock; on the surface floated a woman’s (head of) hair. The glass walls were hung with scandalous and sacrilegious collages. The show caused a public outcry; the place was ransacked several times and the works were trampled on before the authorities closed the exhibition. Ernst’s next encounter had even more unfortunate consequences. In spring 1921 The Young King, a militarist, monarchist play intended to keep alive the wartime spirit of honour and glory, was playing at the Municipal Theatre of Cologne. Though Ernst was not an anarchist, he was acquainted with the local anarchist group, who invited him and Baargeld to join them in storming the theatre. Somehow it was a photograph of Ernst (blond, with a delicate, striking facial bone structure; irresistibly photogenic) that hit the front pages of the press the next day. He was called a Bolshevik and sent threatening anonymous letters, whereupon his ‘disgraced’ family threatened to disown him. By the time his work was shown in Paris in May he had already decided that from now on he would avoid political causes.

In Paris, Breton and Simone, Aragon and others spent entire nights in Breton’s room in the Hôtel des Écoles, framing Ernst’s canvases for the exhibition. The opening was scheduled for 3 May at the Galerie au sans Pareil. Invitations read, ‘EXPOSITION DADA MAX ERNST: dessins mecanoplastiques plato-plastiques peinto-peintures anaplastiques anatomiques antizymiques aerographiques antiphonaires arrosables et republicains. ENTRÉE LIBRE SORTIE FACIILE mains dans les poches tableau sous le bras AU-DELÀ DE LA PEINTURE’ (MAX ERNST DADA EXHIBITION (intentionally incomprehensible details of media) FREE ENTRY, EASY EXIT, hands in pockets, picture under arm BEYOND PAINTING.)

Following the scandal of the Cologne exhibition, Ernst’s application for a visa was denied; thus the first exhibition of his work in Paris on 2 May 1921 went ahead in his absence. On the opening night visitors were welcomed instead by Breton and his group, in white gloves but no ties, ‘uttering bestial cries’. Breton stood ‘solemn and priestly’ in his pretentious, clear-lensed glasses, sucking on matches. In the cellar Aragon impersonated the kangaroo (as promised in an invitation to ‘un petit’) while Tzara and Soupault played hide-and-seek. From time to time a trap door opened to release ‘a diabolical red light and a flood of nonsensical words’. The exhibition went more or less ignored, dismissed by the few notices as yet another Dadaist prank. In the years immediately following the war, any deviation from the rhetoric of honour and glory was still regarded as heresy; the language of war remained prescribed, the glorification of war prevailed. Those who hoped for progress looked to the wonders of science, not to the artistic avant-garde. The war still effectively only just over, the real act of daring was the introduction into the Parisian art scene of the work of a German artist; at that time any German was still indisputably the enemy. (Three years later the Olympic Games were held in Paris. The forty-four countries invited to participate did not include Germany.) The art press pointedly ignored the introduction of a German artist on to the Parisian scene; reviewers concerned themselves, instead, with Cocteau’s avant-garde ballets.

The Eiffel Tower had become a telephone operator – at least, in Cocteau’s latest creation. Cocteau was working on a new ballet, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, due to open on 21 June. (The first broadcast from the actual Eiffel Tower took place on 22 June.) The work had been commissioned this time not by Diaghilev but by Rolf de Maré, a rich Swedish balletomane visiting Paris that winter who was already making plans to upstage Diaghilev. His ballet, Cocteau explained, was to be a tragi-comédie. He had begun meeting friends at the Gaya, a little bar on the rue Duphot, in the 8th arrondissement run by Louis Moysès, a bartender from Charleville whose father owned the place. Cocteau came to hear of it through Satie’s friend Milhaud, who knew the regular pianist Jean Wiener; before long, he had more or less taken it over as his new headquarters. Delighted by his new patrons, Moysès decorated the walls with coloured posters bearing their names and word quickly spread that the place had been taken over by Cocteau and his friends, who dined to Wiener’s syncopated jazz piano music, which he played with ‘ethereal ease’, accompanied by black American Vance Lowry on banjo and saxophone.

The mood at the Gaya was upbeat; everybody, said Cocteau, ‘was enthusiastic about everybody’. Tzara wandered in one evening and was soon mixing cocktails behind the bar. A rumour was circulating that Cocteau had finally found his true niche – as a nightclub manager – which was neither true nor remotely likely to upset Cocteau, who relished the light-hearted mood at the Gaya; he had begun to fear, or so he said, that with the publication of Le Coq et l’arlequin he had started to be taken too seriously. (With the Gaya bar, ‘nous étions sauvés!’ (‘we were saved!’).) The first reading of the new ballet, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, took place in the Hugos’ apartment (Jean Hugo and Valentine Gross had now married) on 23 February, where the assembled company found the script hilarious. It concerned the antics of a petit-bourgeois wedding party one 14 July, Bastille Day, in the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower, the controversial construction that fascinated Cocteau; he had written about it before in articles for the Mercure and Le Coq. Back in the day, the tower had been ‘Queen of the Machines’ (the extraordinary steel construction had caused huge controversy when erected in 1889) but these days the queen (her first music broadcast scheduled for the following day) was no better than a telegraph operator.

Breton and his group continued their own activities, now extended to include mock-trials of figures they considered treacherous, including Maurice Barrès and Cocteau – which Breton may or may not have known. Barrès was ‘brought to trial’ by Breton and his group for having abandoned his earlier belief in personal freedom (inspiring a whole generation of young readers with his novels, Un Homme libre and L’Ennemie des lois) to join forces with superpatriots and right-wing radicals. When Barrès sent word that he was unable to appear in person, a shop dummy stood trial in his place. Dressed in formal evening wear and sporting Barrès’ distinctive moustache, it was seated before the jury, who were got up in smocks to simulate judicial attire (red for the prosecution, black for the defence). Tzara gave a long nonsensical testimony followed by a Dada song. Spectators in the courtroom remained mystified or simply bored, until one of Breton’s newest recruits (Benjamin Péret) entered as the Unknown Soldier. Dressed in German uniform and gas mask, he ‘came onstage, barked a few lines in schoolboy German, and goose-stepped off again’, while the hall erupted in protest, some breaking into La Marseillaise. Intermittently that spring and summer the group staged other events – irritable gatherings, rained-off walks – none of which did much to improve Breton’s mood; by June he was already thinking of writing ‘an article bidding farewell to Dada’. Nevertheless, ten days later he was back in Paris, in time to disrupt Cocteau’s new ballet.

The gala performance of Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel took place on 18 June. The five ballerinas danced their ‘dance of the telegrams’ to a commentary spoken by two voices (one Cocteau’s, at some performances) projected through large horns like gramophone (or phonograph) horns.

First Phonograph:	She’s the Queen of Paris.
Second Phonograph:	She was the Queen of Paris. Now she’s a telegraph operator.
First Phonograph:	One must live, as they say.
Second Phonograph:	Don’t move. Smile. Look at the lens. Watch the birdie …

As the wedding party obediently watched, a bird flew out of the camera and carried off first the bridegroom then the bathing beauty, an ostrich, a huge baby, a lion and, finally, a dove of peace – a succession of marvels in motion. At this point there was mayhem in the auditorium as Breton, Tzara and friends stormed the hall. In fact, they were angry not merely with Cocteau but also with the manager of the theatre. For the past few weeks they had been holding a ‘Salon Dada’ in a small room above the auditorium which they had renamed the Galerie Montaigne and filled with readymades, sculptures and paintings, including works by Ernst, Arp and others. The night before Cocteau’s gala, the theatre had been rented by Futurist painters for a concert bruitiste. When the Dadaists staged a demonstration the management locked them out of their own exhibition space upstairs. Still furious, on the night of the 18th they again stormed the theatre, jumping up and down throughout the performance, yelling, ‘Vive Dada!’ In the event, despite causing chaos on the night, they had little effect on the show’s reception. Though the critics were unable to see or hear enough to write proper reviews, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel was successful, running until 25 June. Picasso attended one of the performances (accompanied, because Olga was pregnant, by Coco Chanel, who, while not oblivious to Picasso’s charms, was in love, by then, with Pierre Reverdy). Diaghilev also saw Les Mariés … and admired the music. Then, on 27 June, Cocteau left for the south of France with Radiguet, who spent the summer (under Cocteau’s direction) writing his first novel, soon to become the next succès de scandale.

Paris enjoyed an influx of Americans that summer. With post-war inflation soaring and the value of the American dollar at its height, Americans in Paris were discovering the cafés, the parties, the nightlife – and enjoying the release from Prohibition. They had money to spend and their mood was upbeat. In Montparnasse the sunny terraces of the cafés filled up with animated crowds of visitors. Duchamp, having discovered that temporary repatriation was easier to arrange than renewing his American visa, returned that June. He remarked that strolling through the streets of Paris was like walking through Greenwich Village. He attended various events organized by Breton and friends, though without much enthusiasm. From a distance, he wrote to his friends in New York, ‘these things … are enhanced with a charm which they don’t have in close proximity’. Apollinaire’s old friend Francis Picabia had been to the Certa, bringing a picture called L’Oeil cac0dylate (an untranslatable mock-pun) which he asked fifty or so friends to sign. Duchamp added an extended pun on the word arroser (to water, sprinkle or spray), which gave him the idea of adding an extra ‘r’ to Rose’s name. From now on she became Rrose Sélavy – though she had still not been spotted in Paris, where, according to Duchamp, there was nothing much happening anyway – until the afternoon of 22 July, when Man Ray arrived from New York.

Like many artists, Man Ray had dreamed of Paris since childhood. Helped by one of Stieglitz’s associates, who advanced him five hundred dollars in exchange for everything he painted during the coming year, and by his sister Dora, who generously gave him five, Man Ray arrived in the city shortly after Duchamp, speaking no French at all. He found the city still on holiday following Bastille Day. He just missed Tristan Tzara, who had temporarily left Paris, vacating a hotel room in Passy. Duchamp reserved the room for Man Ray, then went to meet him at the Gare Saint-Lazare. They left his trunk at the station (told to return for customs clearance a few days later) then stopped off at the hotel, where Man Ray thought the hotel sign, Hôtel Meublé, seemed very distinguished – despite the prevailing scent of urine and disinfectant in the hotel itself. During the next few days he was surprised to see a number of hotels all displaying the same sign – it meant ‘Furnished Rooms’. Then they went to Café Certa, where Man Ray met Breton and others, including Paul and Gala Éluard. Breton seemed to dominate, ‘carrying his imposing head like a chip on his shoulder’. Éluard reminded Man Ray of a portrait of Baudelaire he had seen in a book; Gala seemed to speak some English, so he talked mainly to her. Soupault was ‘like an impish schoolboy … ready for some mischief’. Man Ray was surprised by one thing – that there were no painters in the group. After dinner in a nearby Hindu restaurant with plenty of wine they went up to Montmartre, where there was a fair on. The sounds of trumpets and accordions floated across the hillside from a bandstand strung with tricoloured bunting; couples were waltzing in the lamplight. Soupault embraced a lamp post, then shimmied up it, reciting Dadaist poetry. Back on the ground, he knocked at the door of a concierge’s lodge and asked if Philippe Soupault lived there. All along the boulevard an amusement park had been set up, with elaborate merry-go-rounds, miniature railways, steam swings, dodgem cars, booths and sideshows. Here, his new friends ‘rushed from one attraction to another like children, enjoying themselves to the utmost, ending up by angling with fishing poles with rings on the ends for bottles of wine, or cheap champagne. I looked on, bewildered by the playfulness and the abandon of all dignity by these people who otherwise took themselves so seriously.’

The jour de fête over, Man Ray returned to the station to clear his luggage; it comprised a collection of incongruous marvels (as he himself later claimed, he was actually a pre-surrealist, since he had been making surrealist works before Breton – or anybody – thought to invent it). First his largest case was opened, containing half a dozen canvases. ‘Cubist,’ pronounced the inspector knowingly, and nodded them through. He then unwrapped a long narrow box beneath glass, containing wire, coloured strips and a zinc washboard, with a title at the base, Catherine Barometer. An interpreter was called. Reluctant to enter into any discussion of what constituted a Dadaist object, Man Ray explained that he ‘used it as a guide for my colour combinations. It was passed.’ Next came the trunk. Once the inspector had been assured the contents were intended for neither duplication nor commercial exploitation, they in turn were passed. He then picked up a jar of steel bearings in oil with a label which read, ‘NEW YORK 1920’. This Man Ray dealt with by explaining that as an artist he often found himself with very little to eat; with the jar to look at he could pretend there was food in the house. Another object, made of odd pieces of wood and cork, he explained, was a primitive idol made by American Indians. ‘Far West, remarked the interpreter, proud of his English.’ Man Ray was then dismissed and went to find a taxi. He climbed up beside the cab driver and they rode off to the hotel, the driver keeping up a monologue incomprehensible to Man Ray but for the odd word (such as Américain), to which he responded with ‘Oui.’ The cab driver sped through the streets ‘like a cowboy on a bronco … honking his horn at crossings, bawling out pedestrians’. Eventually they reached the hotel and with the help of a porter heaved everything into Man Ray’s room.

For the first few weeks he wandered through the streets of Paris, fascinated by the look of the French capital, its boulevards lined with trees, each surrounded by grillework at the base; he felt tall, after moving among the skyscrapers of New York, here, where no buildings were higher than eight floors. He wondered if he should perhaps enrol in a school to learn French. He would probably learn it faster, said Duchamp, by finding himself a French girl. Meanwhile, Duchamp explained, the key to speaking French was not grammar but pronunciation; Man Ray would be understood if he always emphasized the last syllable, which ‘worked like magic’, at least in the cafés. Duchamp was already planning to return to the States. There was an unoccupied room in his apartment building in the rue de la Condamine (a few paces from the place de Clichy), he told May Ray, who moved into it (a ‘maid’s room’ on the sixth floor) a month later, when he could no longer afford his Passy hotel room. During his first few weeks in Paris he did no work, the better to concentrate on the challenging process of getting used to everything. He looked for a gallery to represent him, without success. Soupault said he thought he could arrange for him to exhibit in the gallery run by his wife ‘Mick’ (Suzanne, née Verneuil) in the Librairie Six, but so far nothing had come of that suggestion. Man Ray approached Léonce Rosenberg, but he was still primarily interested in cubism and not particularly taken with anything Man Ray showed him.

Duchamp went out of his way to help him, and finally succeeded in getting him some photographic assignments. Within a few months of his arrival Francis Picabia had engaged him to photograph his art collection, and soon Paul Poiret would provide Man Ray with his introduction into the world of fashion photography. Meanwhile he was entirely dependent on Duchamp. At the Duchamp-Villons’ house in Puteaux the two of them worked together on a second short film, which they made with spiral patterns inscribed on circular discs and mounted on a bicycle wheel; as the discs revolved, the spirals seemed to advance or retreat. Other than this, Duchamp seemed to be doing no work either. In fact, during the seven months in Paris that coincided with Man Ray’s arrival he produced only one new readymade, La Bagarre d’Austerlitz (The Brawl at Austerlitz), another miniature French window, this one set into a wall of imitation bricks, the glass panes defaced with white glazier’s smears. He could happily have gone on making windows, Duchamp said, each one based on a different idea; they would become his windows ‘the way you say, “my etchings” ’. But even that seemed too much trouble, so indifferent had he become (at least, so he insisted) to anything to do with the Parisian art scene. To his friends in New York, he wrote that he looked forward to being back. Man Ray, on the other hand, had no desire to leave Paris.

Tzara was on his way to the Tyrol to meet Max Ernst. Granted permission to travel for the first time since the war, Ernst and Lou had arranged to meet Arp and his wife in the village of Tarrenz-bei-Imst for a summer vacation and had taken the opportunity of sending postcards extending the invitation to all the Paris Dadaists, including the Éluards, who by the end of August were still trying to decide whether or not the weather would be suitable for them. Since part of the plan was to prepare the latest issue of Tzara’s Dada magazine for publication, Breton and Simone, who married in Paris on 15 September, decided to join the group as part of their honeymoon. Towards the end of September Breton duly arrived, ‘like a hair in the soup’, insisting on reading aloud passages from the interminable Maldoror, a particularly irritating experience for Ernst, since the book was not even in his native language. By this point the magazine was ready for the printer and the others were about to leave – only the Bretons were still there – and Breton decided that, since there was nothing keeping them in the Tyrol, the four of them should go to Vienna, where he planned to realize his long-held ambition of meeting Sigmund Freud – his other honeymoon treat.

Believing that The Magnetic Fields (Breton’s and Soupault’s collection of automatic writings) owed much to the work of Freud, Breton had sent Freud (by now elderly, and suffering from cancer of the jaw) a flatteringly inscribed copy of the book and expected to be appreciatively received. In the first week of October the two couples arrived in Vienna. For the first few days Breton was unable to summon the courage to make his visit. He was finally received by Freud at his home at Berggasse 19 at three o’clock on 10 October. Simone waited in a nearby café. When he emerged, Breton was so disappointed he was unable to speak. Far from being received as Freud’s equal in matters of psychiatry, Breton was shown into the waiting room with the patients, and when he did meet Freud the professor had little to say to him. He said he saw Breton as a poet rather than a scientist; in Freud’s view, psychiatry was not a form of artistic expression but a means to a therapeutic end. Breton did his best to impress by dropping the names of currently influential psychiatrists, but Freud remained impassive. Back in Paris, Breton got his revenge by publishing an article entitled ‘Interview with Doctor Freud’, in which he described Freud as ‘a little old man with no style who receives clients in a shabby office worthy of the neighbourhood GP’, and who, despite concerted efforts by Breton to engage him in a meaningful conversation, seemed to have little to say beyond generalities.

Having missed Ernst in the Tyrol, the Éluards decided to track him down in Cologne. On 4 November they arrived at his studio at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring 14. Among Breton’s group, Éluard had been the most enthusiastic admirer of Ernst’s collages. On first meeting he was equally impressed by Ernst’s athleticism and good looks; he thought Ernst looked more like a tennis player than a painter. As for Ernst’s impressions of the Éluards, he saw a man with an aristocratic-looking face and the gaze of someone in a trance, accompanied by a riveting dark-eyed woman. Gala was undeniably striking-looking, with black eyes that arched upwards towards her temples, an imperial nose, a small mouth, lips closed as if she knew how to keep a secret; her pure oval face gave her a mysterious Byzantine look and she was clearly someone used to taking charge. The attraction was instant – between Éluard and Ernst; and between Ernst and Gala.

On the walls of Ernst’s bedroom hung two of his most recent works, Oedipus Rex (a collage-like depiction of a walnut pierced by an arrow juxtaposed with a bull’s eye, a bird’s eye and part of a hand emerging through a trap door, the index finger pierced with a steel implement); and Elephant Celebes, a painting of a bulbous, monumental figure which Éluard admired so much he bought it on the spot. The figure in the picture has been left stranded in the desert against a stormy sky through which green fish are flying; beside him/it is an apparently unrelated headless woman behind whom stands a tall articulated object similar to ones Ernst had already introduced into his collages. Half cooking pot, half unexploded shell, with the head of a bull, a trunk like a stove pipe, the elephant itself has been described by one critic as ‘an armoured, strangely ventilated, cuffed and gauntleted human figure, with a length of thick piping in place of a left arm, a turret for a head, standing either on stumps or with its legs sunk deep into the earth’. The elephant seems both oddly rooted and pointless, the headless woman incidental, the tall object apparently unconnected to either. Ernst may have been inspired by the German nursery rhyme which begins, ‘The elephant from Celebes has sticky, yellow grease on his bottom.’ The Éluards loved it; it was the first example they had seen (with Oedipus Rex) of Ernst’s painting.

Writing about Ernst’s work in 1937, Éluard noted that from 1919 onwards Ernst had decided to consign the ‘sad monsters’ of the war to the past. The ‘rational thinking’ that had powered the war had caused such disorder and disturbance that he had been determined from then on to explore the imagery of a liberated universe, striving to invigorate the world in the form of a new kind of art. It was not far from the nature of man to that of man’s imaginary world. Faced with the poetry of Ernst’s painting, Éluard wrote, ‘Think flower, fruit and the heart of a tree, since they wear your [human] colours.’ From their earliest meeting they unreservedly admired each other’s work. Éluard was in the process of putting poems together for a new volume, Répétitions, to include the prose poem ‘Nul (2)’: ‘Il pose un oiseau sur la table et ferme les volets. Il se coiffe, ses cheveux dans ses mains sont plus doux qu’un oiseau …’ (‘He puts a bird on the table and closes the shutters. He combs his hair, his hair in his hands softer than a bird …’) and now he added a new poem, with which he opened the volume: ‘Max Ernst’. Éluard saw Ernst as a fellow poet; more than a decade later he wrote that he still knew of no other poet who penetrated more deeply into the truths of humanity. As an artist, Ernst mingled with what he painted, and showed his viewers, above all, that ‘nothing is incomprehensible’. Ernst, furthermore, turned out to be a stimulating companion, funnier and more charming, the Éluards thought, than most of their friends at home. Before leaving on 10 November they chose eleven of his collages to illustrate Répétitions. Both Éluards returned to Paris enthralled.

On 3 December Man Ray’s first one-man show in Paris opened, as promised, at Mick Soupault’s gallery in the Librairie Six bookshop. On a wet, blustery day visitors arrived to find the space littered with red balloons, popped one by one throughout the afternoon with lit cigarettes. The exhibition brochure (leaving nothing to chance) featured a map showing the exact location of the bookshop; it also included short statements by Man Ray and others, including Aragon, Éluard, Tzara, Arp and Soupault, whose read, ‘Light resembles Man Ray’s paintings like a hat to a swallow, a coffee cup to a lace-seller, a letter to the mail.’ Man Ray’s statement consisted of a Dadaist fish recipe (carve up a carpe de Seine) and a mock-survey of how 281 artists had been fed as babies. During the afternoon Man Ray was approached by a ‘strange voluble little man in his fifties’ who seemed out of place in the predominantly young gathering, with his little white beard, old-fashioned pince-nez, black bowler hat, black overcoat and umbrella; Man Ray thought he looked like an undertaker or a banker. It was Erik Satie, who led Man Ray over to one of his own paintings. When Man Ray mentioned he was cold Satie replied in English, then took him off to a café for a couple of hot grogs. When he said he spoke no French, Satie said that didn’t matter. After a couple more drinks they made their way somewhat light-headedly back to the gallery, on the way passing a hardware store, where they picked up a flat iron and, with Satie’s help as interpreter, a box of tacks and a tube of glue. Back at the gallery Man Ray glued fourteen tacks to the base of the iron, gave the piece a title – Le Cadeau (The Gift) – and added it to the exhibition: ‘That was my first Dada object in France.’ It was also effectively one of the last, since the scene was already being set for the creation of work that would soon be being designated surrealist. Anger would give way to a more playful exploration of the anti-rational, the incongruous; the marvellous; the truly surreal.