Two Children are Menaced by a Nightingale (1924)
Surrealism occupies a curious place in the history of art or at least in the popular perception of it. Surrealist exhibitions are not usually crowd pleasers the way that shows of Impressionist works or Renaissance art are. [A list of the top ten shows from the history of the Met in Art News includes The Mona Lisa of 1963, The Vatican Collection of 1983, Painters in Paris (Matisse, Braque, Picasso, etc.) an Origins of Impressionism show and the Picasso Show of 2010.]
Yet surrealist work remains obscurely accessible. One reason might be its sense of humor. Freud, the author of Jokes and the Relationship to the Unconscious (1905) is a good guide here. The point he made is that a joke’s witzarbeit or joke techniques of condensation and double meaning allows us to address topics that we could not in serious conversation. The Surrealists valued this commitment to jokes, pranks and to games. I saw recently some of the original Exquisite Corpse drawings done on café menus by groups; the ones I saw including André Breton, spokesperson for the movement, Remedios Varo, and the Eluards. These were people who had lived through WW1 and its horrors and had returned both to laugh at the pretentions of bourgois society, and to do their best to turn it on its ass.
How to explain the staying power of Surrealism? Perhaps it is because our dreams are not abstract, yes, confused, yes elliptical, but somehow “more” than reality, rather than removed from it the way, for instance abstract or conceptual art might be. And of course perhaps because the role of the unconscious in human subjectivity remains central as a space of cultural exploration.
I first visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the age of eight in the late 1950s. I grew up on the West Coast, and my parents were divorced. My dad was working in New Jersey, and arranged for my sister, age six, and myself, age eight, to fly to Idlewild on our own. New York in the Fifties was a revelation, and my dad, an engineer, introduced us to its bohemian aspects — cafes in the West Village with espresso coffee and jazz music, an Haitian-American artist friend busy painting giant abstracts in a small apartment on St Marks Place, and a cacaphony of cabs, trains, steel, concrete and fashionably decorated flesh. But it was our trip to the Museum of Modern Art that left the most lasting impression on my development as an artist. There were two works, one was Max Beckmann’s terrifying triptych Departure (1932-33) in the stairwell. The other was Ernst’s small work Two Children are Menaced by a Nightingale. Looking at it now, as I went back to do recently, it is not a wildly vivid picture. Other works by Ernst are more demonic, more luridly bizarre. Despite the title, the bird seems to be in danger from the children, notably the black and white girl with the knife. Although she may be defending her sister lying on the ground in front of the building, the action is obscure.
As an eight-year-old I was struck by this small curious work. Ernst spoke of a disconnect, a world where children were menaced, could have their lives thrust into uncertainty and even fear of death. My own experience of uncertainty and trauma as a kid led me to see that image as evocative of a shared experience, one that was otherwise disallowed and sufferered in silence. Ernst apparently based the picture on a dream image from his own childhood. The surrealist belief in ‘dream traces’ and Ernst’s own belief in the validity of dreams as valid experience gave him room to create the work.
In The Freudian Body Leo Barsani points out that Freud, in his own writing, and he offers The Interpretation of Dreams as an example, uses an approach that undercuts his own arguments, what Barsani calls a “narrative collapse.” Barsani sees this as a feature rather than a bug.
The relevance of psychoanalysis to literature has nothing to do with the discovery of the literary work’s secret content… That relevance is rather to be sought in a certain relation between meaning and movement in discourse… Writing may begin to operate as the activity we call literature when, by a particular kind of replicative insistance which I shall try to define, it erodes its own statements and thereby blocks interpretation.
Leo Bersani (11)
Bersani’s thesis suggest that while dreams may be “the royal road to the unconscious” the road to representing dreams in art, as Ernst sought to do, is not a straightforward one.
What Ernst offers us in Two Children is, according to his own account, a “fever dream” from a childhood illness. And dreams, like the rest of the subconscious, offer us displacement, projection, puns and obscure metaphor. So maybe what is significant about the surrealist effort is that its methods seek not just to represent dream traces, but actual deploy some version of the methodology of the dreaming mind.
The painting is actually half sculpture, with mysterious wooden objects on the front of the house, and on the right side, another roundel, like a target toward which a man carrying a third child, one ignored in the title of the piece, is headed, hand outstretched. Here again, the ambiguity is telling, is he rescuing the child, or absconding with it? The red gate has been thrust open, right out of the picture plane, again suggesting a breakin, but how would a nightingale get through a gate, and why would it bother?
This complexity is heightened by the title which is blazoned across the bottom of the work. In French “2 enfants sont menaces par un rossignol M. Ernst” Although the legend offers a reading, I see it also as a form of misdirection or perhaps of over-determination, offering an easy explanation for an image that dwells in an oneiratic realm where every clarity can be seen as a detour.
The painting is there still, on the wall in what is now the third building of MOMA’s to house it. The piece still has power for me. Even as a kid I got the deadpan humor, as dark as it might be, the notion that children are treated as innocents on a theoretical level, and treated as are most of society’s powerless the rest of the time. The menace offered by American society to its children has changed forms since the 1950s, no doubt, but has hardly abated. Only a few days ago, my fellow citizens voted into power a political party that sees more threat in the potential transexuality of its youth than in the reality that we are busily and rapidly making our planet fatally uninhabitable by burning fossil fuel. And on a global level, millions of children are adrift as refugees, while others from the Sudan and the Ukraine to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, suffer attacks daily.
Although they tended to be radical leftists, for the Surrealists, it was Freud that was their ace in the hole. The notion that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, that you could learn as much from games and automatic procedures as from learned discourse, this willful sidetracking of the Enlightenment project could still provoke outrage in the 1920s (and was happy to do so.)
The 19 century was one of rationalism and noble values, notably the notion that European society was the culmination of humanity’s efforts to civilize itself. At the same time, the remnants of the Enlightenment Project, with its radical ideas about equality and rationalism was crushed both by the imperial designs of European powers and the immiseration of the working class populations of the new industrial societies well before WWI. Nonetheless, the war with its millions and millions of meaningless deaths, was a knell for rational thought for many.
Many of the Surrealist artists had direct experience of World War I. Breton was in the medical corps dealing with shellshock victims. Max Ernst had a career as an artist in the German Expressionist movement before the First World War. Wounded, he survived, unlike many others, including his friend and fellow painter, August Macke.
At the end of the war Ernst founded the Cologne Dada group with friends. Soon thereafter, he made his way to Paris, where a new idea about the relationship between subjectivity and creative practice was in the air.Whether Ernst’s work from the early 1920s was an inspiration for the ideas that crystallized around Surrealism, or vice versa, Ernst was a good match for the groups forming in Paris around figures like André Breton, Jacques Prévert, Man Ray and many others.
Mathew Gale (Dada and Surrealism. Phaidon, London, 1997) suggests Ernst’s early surrealist work precedes and leads to the manifestoes. Speaking of Celebes (1921) painted in Cologne and sold to the poet Paul Eluard “Such works provided a major impetus for the group by seeming to demonstrate the liberation of the unconscious.” (221)
One thing that strikes me now as essential is the commitment to the collective approach. As one recent exhibition at the Met notes:
Surrealism depends upon a collective body committed to going beyond what can be done by the individual in isolation, often in response to political or social concerns. Viewed across time and place, this quality has manifested in group exhibitions and demonstrations, cowritten manifestos and declarations, and broadly shared and circulated values… Collaborative pursuits could release what Simone Breton, an early participant in Surrealism in Paris, called “images unimaginable by one mind alone.”
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/surrealism-beyond-borders/visiting-guide
Was it that solidarity I felt at age eight? We highlight the Exquisite Corpse as a game, trivializing it, or celebrating it for its insouciance, while what is important is that a group of people is trying together to open up a shared route to the unknown but very real currents of the unconscious mind. And this is a shared effort not as a form of socialization but rather a revolutionary one. The main route to the unconscious in the US today is through psychotherapy, a notably individual pursuit and certainly a private one. Breton was explicit on the difference. He had medical training and understood therapeutic uses of engagement with the unconscious. But he saw surrealism embracing automatism, free association and a belief in the aleatory as an answer to the stifling mindset of the older generation whose belief in the rational to the exclusions of other forms of human understanding was pathological.
While the Surrealists spoke out on behalf of the rights of the mad, and of the imprisoned, children weren’t typically on their radar. Nonetheless, the idea of a movement that offered a look into the collective subconscious, and could voice support and offer validity for the traumas of childhood as well as for its preoccupations with play and games, how could it help but be appealing? Since I am writing this at a time when the United States has taken a giant step into pathology and collective psychosis, the work of Ernst and his fellow Surrealists, artists who believed in a shared creative embrace of the non-accessible and non-rational aspects of our selves as a step toward a flourishing of humanity seems more important than ever.