Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

This essay analyses the 22:40 minute video Real Estate Astrology (2015) of Maxime Rossi (born in 1980), a contemporary artist's response to the life and work of the German born surrealist Max Ernst. Rossi sets out in this vide, produced in the color filter technique of anaglyph projection, to search for Ernst’s traces in Sedona, Arizona. The surrealist artist lived here in exile together with his wife, the American painter Dorothea Tanning, from 1946 to 1953. Maxime Rossi shows a predilection for historical artists, whose works he uses as a point of departure in his work, in which historical facts and fiction are inextricably overlapping. In Sedona, Rossi goes to the places Max Ernst is said by locals Rossi has met several times to have visited: a hut where the surrealist is said to have spent the night from time to time, a stick that is said to have belonged to him, a cave with prehistoric mural paintings that he is said to have seen. Eventually, Ernst’s horoscope is said to have predestined a particularly fertile time for him in Arizona. But as we will see, all the tracks prove to be intentionally misplaced traces that confront the viewer with a hallucinatory world that mixes the real with the unreal, historical facts with the fictitious. What ultimately results is a hybrid whole that incorporates different sources and materials and oscillates between the banal and the fantastical, and between fiction and reality. And in doing so, he follows surrealist esthetics and strategies of alienation as we find them especially in Ernst’s collage works. A trans-epochal dialogue between the historical conditions of Ernst’s exile on the one hand, and the actual present on the other, runs through Real Estate Astrology, giving us two periods within the unit of the video.

An emperor, a writer and an artist. Even though their stories played out in completely different epochs and under completely disparate conditions, they are united by historical analogy. The trans-epochal cross-fading of their biographies visualizes how Napoleon, Victor Hugo and Max Ernst were forced into exile by the caesuras of history and by the new rulers in their native countries. They experienced this as a kind of wilderness, as être d’ailleurs. In the pictorial understanding of the three protagonists, the crossing of the water as well as the wild rock by the sea, mark their dislodgment from, but also their longing for the lost homeland. They are symbols of dislocation respectively identification. At the center of this narrative we find the painting Napoleon in the Wilderness (1941, MoMA, New York) by Max Ernst, in which the painter comes to terms with a long wait, a dramatic passage, his arrival on foreign soil and his love affairs. His statement that he had already begun with the picture before his departure in France and, after his arrival, came to a new solution of the picture by turning it 180°, metaphorically describes not only the artistic new beginning on the other side of the Ocean, but also marks the turning point in his life.

"Max Ernst and the Aesthetic of Commercial Tourism: Max Among His Favorite Dolls" examines Surrealist artist Max Ernst's practice of collecting Hopi and Zuni kachina figurines. Ernst, like some other European Surrealists, was an avid collector of Native Amercian material culture and ceremonial hardware. Surrealists interest in Indigenous material was part of a larger program to destabilize European privileging of the mind and art as rational constructs.

This paper focuses on James Thrall Soby's 1941 photograph of Ernst surrounded by his collection of kachina figurine, which was first published in the April edition of View Magazine. As Soby's portrait of Ernst has been reproduced many times over course of the past six decades, it has become an emblem of the Surrealists general interest in Native Americana.

In contrast to vanguardism with which Ernst and other Surrealist's collecting practices is usually credited, this paper examines Soby portrait of Ernst's within practices of commercial tourism and the souvenir industry in the Southwest. By the mid 1940s, Hopi and Zuni kachina figurine makers had a well-developed commercial kachina figurine industry that targeted the patronage of visitors to the regions. Evidence levied in the development of Ernst's tourist aesthetic includes his mode of collection, display, and stories that surround Max's assemblage of kachina figurines. This paper further differentiates it from the collecting practices of Surrealist counterparts such as André Breton.

While he was living in Arizona between 1946 and 1951, Max Ernst created at least 70 tiny gouache paintings that he called “microbes.” They range in size from a half-inch on one side to over five inches, with most between one and three inches. Many evoke fantastical landscapes while others appear completely abstract. Ernst’s interest in this series of work was sustained: he made these paintings over a period of five years, and they were exhibited regularly during his own lifetime. Today, however, the microbes are virtually unknown. Because of their relative obscurity within Ernst’s oeuvre, this essay outlines their production and early exhibition and reception, with special attention to Sept microbes vus à travers un tempérament (Seven microbes seen through a temperament). This book, comprised of life-size reproductions of 31 microbes and a poem by Ernst, positions the microbes as a distinctly surrealist, subjective interpretation of the American Southwest. The essay then contextualizes the microbes within the wider contemporary American art world and suggests that Ernst made these diminutive paintings in dialogue with the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists as those artists were rising to prominence in the wake of World War II.

In the mid-1940s, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst left the urbane, avant-garde circles of Manhattan to build a house and studio in the then remote Southwestern outpost of Sedona, Arizona. Many have written of Ernst’s fascination with indigenous artefacts but there was another pop cultural format that emerged concurrently with their time in Sedona: the genre of the Hollywood Western. Indeed, films like John Wayne’s Angel and the Badman (1947) and Johnny Guitar (1954) starring Joan Crawford were filmed in the immediate vicinity, amidst the iconic red rock landscape.

Tanning’s topographical mapping of the desert, as found in paintings such as Self-Portrait (1944), Evening in Sedona (1976), and novella Chasm: A Weekend (2004), feature some of those same scenic locations used as the backdrops in the Sedona Western. Comparisons between the self-presentation of Tanning and the actor Gail Russell are striking especially when one considers Tanning’s own performance in Hans Richter’s film 8 x 8 (1957). Moreover, the feminine, “phosphorus” glow, which Tanning recurrently uses in her painting and writing to describe the appearance of her female characters, matches the typical costuming of the lead women in Westerns, for example Russell’s Penny and Crawford’s Vienna.

This article explores the complex role the Sedona Western played in the surrealist art and literature made during Ernst and Tanning’s Sedona period and beyond, particularly in terms of gender politics. In order to rethink this moment of “Western surrealism,” I offer a Tanning-centric perspective through methodological use of Mieke Bal’s feminist “autotopography.”

This article discusses the 1940 "International Surrealist Exhibition," a paradigmatic event in the history of Surrealism's transition between Old and New Worlds. Breton’s brainchild, the show claimed a large part of Mexico's national art canon as part of the transnational Surrealist cause. Proving controversial in a heavily nationalist art scene, the show continues to occupy a conflicted position in the historiography of Mexican art. Many describe it as the pivotal event that drove art in Mexico away from nationalism, while others trivialize its impact. In the 1969 book El Surrealismo y el Arte Fantástico de México, the most ambitious response to the 1940 show ever produced, art historian Ida Rodríguez-Prampolini takes the latter position. Much of what Breton and his circle viewed as surrealist in Mexican art, Rodríguez argues, was instead part of the country’s own “fantastic” tradition, in place long before Surrealism arrived. A chauvinist treatise on Mexican identity at first glance, this essay argues that the book instead is emblematic of a long history of anxious relationships between definitions of national identity and the practice of art history in post-revolutionary Mexico.