Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting Between the Wars by Ralph Ubl translated by Elizabeth Tucker

Author:Ralph Ubl, translated by Elizabeth Tucker [Ubl, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 49

Max Ernst, The Flamingos (die flamingi), 1920. 29.3 × 23 cm, photographic enlargement and photomontage, mounted on board with ink. Private collection (S/M no. 393). © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Heaven and earth, open space and labyrinth, fulfilled seeing and obstructed seeing: the experience of the front was also split along these poles, as Eric J. Leed has demonstrated in No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. While trench warfare was described as a destructive paralysis (contaminating, visually disempowering, and collectively proletariatizing), the image of the airman embodied lost illusions of personal valor, with all its implied qualities of visibility and the sovereign view, mobility and unprecedented freedom. The sky—which was the “cavemen’s” only view amidst a decimated, often invisible landscape—revealed in the form of the heroic flyer the trench fighter’s disappointed higher self. In the summer of 1914, this higher self had cheered the mobilization, in expectation that the Great War would bring the testing and confirmation, even the creation of its true identity. From the muddy maze of trenches, airplanes in the sky offered themselves as viewpoints for self-distancing and the division of consciousness. At last, from their heights, there was an unimpeded view and the hero’s chance to be seen. From their heights, too, perhaps the labyrinth of trenches would appear logical and justified.48 This division of the experience of war between opaque earth and redeeming sky also structures statements made by several modernist artists who celebrated the industrialized war as the revelation of the hidden reality that their pictures had already been aiming for in the prewar years. Franz Marc, friend and role model to the young Ernst,49 describes an experience of war as could only present itself to a modernist painter influenced by Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy:

We are waiting at the edge of a wood with our munitions wagons; the thunder of the cannons rolls like a furious storm along the whole horizon. All around are little clouds of smoke. Both thunder and clouds are already part of the landscape, like the echo that propels and doubles every shot. Suddenly, a curious whirring that passes above and away from us in an enormous arc, irregular, in constant oscillations, verging from a shrill whistle to a low rumble, like the high, wide cry of a bird of prey, always repeated, with the obstinacy of an animal that knows no other call. Then in the distance the muffled bang. These are the enemy’s heavy artillery shots, which race overhead to a target unknown to us. One shot follows another; the sky is the purest autumn blue and yet we feel the high channels in which the shots storm through it. Even for the artillerists, artillery battle often has some mystical, mythic quality.50

Marc conjures the landscape of war as an opaque space of gun smoke and artillery fire—echo, whirring, shrill whistle, low rumble, the “high, wide cry of a bird of prey,” and a “muffled bang.

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