In the World of Marvels

"Artistic creation is the result of playing like a child, ' says Painter-Sculptor Max Ernst. Ernst himself has been playing all his life, and the result is some of the most imaginative and ingenious work done in this century. Very early he began his "excursions in the world of marvels, chimeras, phantoms, poets, monsters, philo. ">phers, birds, women, lunatics, magi, trees, eroticism, stones, insects, mountains, poisons, mathematics and so forth." As could be seen at his big (240 works) retrospective exhibition at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week (see color}, the excursions have been strange and even a bit scary, but the man who took them obviously enjoyed himself.

At 69, Ernst is a spry, bright-eyed artist whose most engaging trait is that he has never lost his sense of wonder or his sense of humor. The most routine experiences during his childhood in Briil, Germany--a walk into a forest, a case of measles, the death of a pet bird--produced visions that never left him. Somehow the most painful experience of his youth, his four years as an artillery engineer for the Kaiser, has become with time part nightmare and part joke. He was, he says, wounded twice at the front: once by the recoil of a gun and once by the kick of a mule. It was "four years of nonsense," and when peace came he was ready to move on to France, to the U.S. (during World War II) and, lately, back to France.

Everyone Is President. The Dada movement of the late 'teens and '203 suited his mood perfectly. Part of its creed, Ernst recalls, was that "everyone who declares to be a Dada isn't; and everyone who is a Dada is president of the movement." But what began as a serious if wild attempt to break new ground tended to deteriorate into mere sensationalism, and Ernst moved on to surrealism. Though he formally broke with the movement in 1938 in protest against the highhandedness of its self-appointed leader, Poet Andre Breton, he has remained a surrealist in spirit ever since.

He has always been the most versatile of technicians. He invented his own brand of collage that went far beyond the two-dimensional pastings of his contemporaries. To a collection of banal and unrelated objects, he would add line and color and thus produce a scene that seemed full of recognizable images and yet was essentially a recorded hallucination.

In Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (see overleaf}, the house and gate are made of wood and protrude a couple of inches from the canvas. In this particular case the idea came first; in almost all others the image, the theme, and finally the title were dictated by the emerging pictures themselves.

Spots on the Surface. Children produce compositions by placing paper over coins and rubbing the paper with a pencil; Ernst has used the same technique, jrot-tage, to inspire him. But whatever he takes an impression of--perhaps the sinuous grain of a piece of wood--is merely a ''starting point, a surface with some spots on it on which the imagination can play.

You see an eye, you accentuate it; you see a beak, something else becomes an animal. It is a discovery trip, but you never know what you will find.'' To produce the intricately jeweled Eye of Silence, Ernst placed two wet painted canvases together, pulled them apart, let his fancy take over. At one time Ernst even experimented with a technique he called "oscillation.'' He pierced cans of paint and let them swing gently over the canvas. "Surprising lines drip upon the canvas, and the play of association then begins," he says. "Jackson Pollock made quite a nice adventure of this.'' The Loplop Spirit. Tricky as these techniques sound, they never intrude upon the painting; what might have been mere sleight of hand turns into genuine magic.

In Ernst's world of fantasy, the image is never lost, though it can be marvelously elusive. Machines are almost people, plants grow eyes and arms, human figures are bits of geometry, strips of wallpaper become layers of geology, a forest could easily be an ancient ruin, and a ruin might seem to be made up of human organs.

Almost every being and thing on Ernst's earth wears a borrowed mask.

As an artist he ranks high, but perhaps his greatest charm is that he never gets overwhelmed with the importance of being Ernst. All his life he has cherished a private spirit called "Loplop, Bird Supe rior.'' and this is typical of the man who has never wholly deserted childhood. If he has his nightmares, they are quickly over, for his very next painting will brim with laughter. Even his barbarian hordes seem a trifle whimsical, as if they were spooks that a child might see in the shad ows. Just as the image refuses to be itself, so the emotion refuses to stay still --and that is the effect Ernst is after. "Birds become men," he once explained, "and men become birds. Catastrophes become hilarious. Everything is astonishing, heart breaking and possible."

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