MAX ERNST’S ‘TWO CHILDREN MENACED BY A NIGHTINGALE’

There seems to have been less gallery-going going on lately, for some reason or another. So I thought instead I’d write about individual artworks which… well, which seem to lend themselves to be written about. Which should be briefer, if nothing else.

Max Ernst’s ‘Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale’ (1924) was one of the works which first got me interested in Surrealism. Now, as I suspect I’m always saying, the connection between Surrealism and dreams is over-emphasised. But a connection there is. And in fact one of the appealing aspects of Surrealism is that the connection is genuine.

As I’ve said before “We’ve become so used to dream sequences in films we now picture actual dreams through these cliches, and tend to imagine a dream’s merely a film which projects in your head.” (And those literary dreams, they’re even worse. Don’t get me started on ’Sandman’…)

I don’t think I’ve had a dream in my life where I came across a significant-looking gold key in a forest, which I pondered while a high-pitched note played. At least if I did I slept through it. But I have had dreams where I was in my childhood home except it looked nothing like my actual childhood home, and I had marmalade for shoes and I had to get to next Tuesday to learn to speak Budgerigar from a glockenspiel but something was somehow stopping me…

And over this jumble of associations hangs a mood, the dream’s unifying device. The mood can be completely unassociated with those events, like… I don’t know… a nightingale being inexplicably menacing or something. The elements, even the setting, can switch arbitrarily. But the mood normally remains. Often, even after waking. One reason dreams may feel so impossible to convey is that you tend to recount the events, hoping they will somehow convey this mood. But the association’s only there in the dream.

Yet, extremely unusually, Ernst’s painting seems very much like an actual dream successfully conveyed. The scenario’s not only absurd, there’s not even any attempt to make that bird menacing. It’s not large or centred, it’s little more than a dot in the sky. And who, of all the birds, would pick a nightingale for this? Nightingales just show up to sing in poems. Yet like many absurd things it’s comical and menacing simultaneously.

There’s pictorial space, perspective and a gradated sky. Yet the shed and gate are collaged elements, stuck onto the canvas. The gate in particular seems too large for the perspective and juts out over the frame. Then there’s the extra figure, unmentioned in the title. Maybe he could manage to stand on that ridged shed roof, perhaps even hold a child at the same time. But, impossibly, he’s shown running. And unlike the running girl he reaches for a handle, an inserted object like the gate, as if unlike her he knows he’s in a painting and is looking for the way out.

It doesn’t make sense, but at a more basic level than the imagery. Different sign systems clash and collide, making it literally irresolvable, each undermining the other.

As if the gate intruding over it wasn’t enough, the first section of the frame is painted over and the title handwritten in the lower part. Which makes it reminiscent of votive art, art intended to have a specific purpose, art which employs signs rather than symbols the better to bring about that purpose. Made doubly absurd when applied to this absurd scene.

There’s often a tension in Surrealism over whether it genuinely wants to be Surreal, or if it would rather be (in the broadest sense of the term) symbolist. Should we look at works like psychoanalytic detectives, armed with clues provided by Freud? The second can get reductive pretty quickly. At Surrealists exhibition you can feel that as soon as you find three castration complexes or phallocentric father figures you should get to shout “house!”

So it’s tempting to want Surrealism to go the other way, to be as irreducibly irrational as dreams, despite the burdensome weight of attempts to the contrary. But what works best is something with just enough symbols in it to entice you, just enough breadcrumbs to lead you into the forest but not take you through it.

Which you can do here. Maybe the flying bird represents the untamed Id, the onset of puberty which arrives to kill the child. Maybe the frame represents the closeted world of childhood, the way your back garden did during those years, only the adult male possessing an awareness of the world outside, the doorknob his… well, that one is quite Freudian.

And as you think these things your perpetual underlying feeling is “getting there, keep going”. One Surrealist practice was to navigate around an unknown town using a map to somewhere else, convincing yourself those strange streets would at any minute resolve themselves into those neat little lines on the map. A Surrealist approach to art should be similar.

I must have first seen this painting decades ago, and it’s still going round in my head. That’s the way to do it.