Surrealist Persona: Max Ernst's "Loplop, Superior of Birds"Author(s): Charlotte StokesSource: Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 13, No. 3/4 (1983), pp.225-234Published by: Stichting voor Nederlandse Kunsthistorische PublicatiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3780542 .Accessed: 24/05/2011 02:04

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225

Surrealist persona: Max Ernst's Loplop, superior of birds*

Charlotte Stokes

All surrealist art is to some degree autobiographical: it is an avowed codification not only of how artists see the world but of how they see themselves. To make the personal nature of their art explicit, surrealists and other artists like Duchamp with his Rrose Selavy have created individual personas that are incorporated into their works. Although some of these artists simply repeat images of themselves, others create personas of great complexity. By using techniques borrowed from psy- chology and anthropology they search their own pasts and their own personalities to find a unique combination of visual symbols. Such a persona in the form of Loplop, superior of birds, was created by the surrealist artist Max Ernst in the I920S.2 Loplop is not only the artist's

personal symbol, but the presenter of Ernst's inter- pretations of his own world.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that through the persona the artist totally exposes himself- that he is an artistic flasher. Rather, the persona is an aesthetic device created and controlled by the artist. Modeled on his or her own personality, it is the artist's mask. Like the mask of the classical actor-from which the term "persona" comes-the persona defines the art- ist for the public, while concealing the "real" person. The skilful manipulation of the persona often becomes a game of concealing oneself behind an elaborate public

* I would like to express my appreciation to the Oakland University Research Committee for awarding me a grant (1980/1981) to pursue research on this subject.

I Carl G. Jung, The basic writings, trans. and ed. Violet Staub de Laszlo, New York I959, p. I38.

2 For other discussions of Loplop in the work of Max Ernst see: Whitney Chadwick, Myth in surrealist painting: I929-I939, Ann Ar- bor, Michigan 1980, pp. 85-96; Gunter Metken, "Sich die Kunst vom Leib halten. Loplop, die Staffeleifigur Max Ernsts," Pantheon 36 (1978), pp. I44-49; Werner Spies, Max Ernst: Collagen: Inventar und Widerspruch, Cologne 1974, pp. 205-06; and Eduard Tier, "Homage

The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality...1 C.G.Jung

face of one's own invention. This is not to say that the

persona is a pose, but rather that the artist has gone to the subject he or she supposedly knows best in order to find more potent truths and myths.

The seemingly contradictory nature of the persona is similar to Jung's definition of human personality, in which the persona is a compromise between the role the world imposes on the individual and the needs of the self.3 The surrealist's persona differs from Jung's model because much of it is consciously derived from Freud's methods of self-exploration, which are not used by the artists as therapy but, on the contrary, as a means of

bringing to light the beautiful workings of their own minds.

Using Freud's methods Max Ernst sensitized himself to his dreams, cultivated automatic responses and free

associations, and contemplated memories of his child-

hood,4 never ignoring the symbols and traditions from the German culture into which he was born. By ana-

lyzing the symbolism of his dreams and other unguard- ed thoughts, he discovered that for him birds had a per- sonal as well as a general significance. Bird imagery be- came an important part of Ernst's paintings and collages beginning as early as his participation in the Dada move- ment in Cologne before I920. From a general concern with imagery of birds he evolved an image associated

to Loplop" in Homage to Max Ernst, special issue of XXe Siecle Review, New York 197I, pp. 34-38.

3 Jung, op. cit. (note I). 4 Karl Otten, who was in Ernst's close circle of friends before

World War I, was a student and champion of Freud. Returning from Vienna, Otten introduced The interpretation of dreams and Jokes and their relation to the unconscious to Ernst. See John Russell, Max Ernst: life and work, New York n.d., p. 23; Patrick Waldberg, Max Ernst, Paris I958, pp. 80-8i; Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg, "Max Ernst und die rheinische Kunstszene I909-I919," in Max Ernst in Koln, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath, Cologne i980, p. 98.

CHARLOTTE STOKES

I Max Ernst, Loplop, superior of birds, 1928. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Claude Hersaint

with himself, a persona called Loplop, who may be a bird or a man with the head or wings of a bird. Loplop first figures in the 1928 painting Loplop, superior of birds (fig. I). From this introduction he appears in Ernst's works for the rest of the artist's life and is as- sociated with Ernst in the artist's writings and in those of other surrealists.

In the series of paintings and collages which Ernst began in I930, whose titles begin with Loplop intro- duces..., Loplop is part easel and part human figure with a bird's head. He is holding a picture of the thing or person presented (fig. 2). The bird-headed easel is Ernst's stand-in, but it has many more associations. Because Ernst may show him as a human figure with bird attributes, Loplop can take on the supernatural power of winged creatures-angels, cupids, and Lucifer himself. Although bird-headed figures are found less

5 Ian Turpin, Max Ernst, New York 1979, p. I I 6 Ernst had access to any number of books on totems, but two that

he probably read were James George Frazer's The golden bough (origi-

frequently, they are probably the oldest representation of the shaman who controls magical power. More than a touch of irony enters in these birdmen if we note that from the I930s Ernst owned a manual on bird-trapping methods,5 and that cages and caged birds dominated his later works, including his notorious Cage-bed with screen (I973).

Loplop, the birdman, who is Ernst's personal em- blem, takes on the qualities of another supernatural being, the totem. Ernst's persona is in a figurative and poetic sense like the totem in the tribal setting: the crea- ture who is the spiritual father, the god-like protector, the identifying clan symbol, and even the residence of the soul of the believer.6 In Ernst's art and writing Lop- lop slips from one function to another, sometimes em- bodying all at once, which is also characteristic of tribal totems.

nally published in I890) and Sigmund Freud's Totem und Tabu (origi- nally published as a group of four essays in I913).

226

Max Ernst's Loplop

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CHARLOTTE STOKES

In a surrealist autobiography written in 1942 Ernst established the bird as a personal totem by linking it to his own "supernatural" birth in the first sentence: "The 2nd of April ( 891) at 9:45 a.m. Max Ernst had his first contact with the sensible world, when he came out of the egg which his mother had laid in an eagle's nest and which the bird had brooded for seven years."7 Later in the piece he describes an event that took place when he was fourteen years old: "One of his best friends, a most intelligent and affectionate pink cockatoo," died at the same time as Ernst's youngest sister was born. He describes his reactions to the two events, which were like a violent rite of passage: "A series of mystical crises, fits of hysteria, exaltations and depressions followed. A dangerous confusion be- tween birds and humans became encrusted in his mind and asserted itself in his drawings and paintings. The obsession haunted him until he erected the Birds memo- rial monument in 1927, and even later Max identified himself voluntarily with Loplop, the superior of the birds." Ernst closes his notes about himself by saying that he received advice, which can be seen in his paintings, from the bird who hatched him and that this bird followed his plane to America.

Ernst's hatching from an egg has a significance in his artistic life, for in 1922 he had his first German exhi- bition in a small gallery run by Johanna Ey, whom Ernst and his friends called Mutter Ey (Mother Egg). On her sixtyfifth birthday, in 1929, Ernst sent her a telegram beginning, "Great egg, we praise thee."10

Although the name for his persona, Loplop, did not come to light until 1928, some seeds for the name can be found earlier. The single issue of Die Schammade, which was published in Cologne by the Dadaists in 1920, in- cluded several of Ernst's Dada poems, which contain repeated syllables like the word "Dada" itself, "lilli," "titi," etc. This poetry is dependent on such repeated sounds for its rhythm and its peculiar quality. During this period Ernst also used the word Dada as a prefix for his name, Dadamax. Ernst's modification of his identity

7 Max Ernst, "Some data on the youth of M. E. as told by himself," View, 2nd series, nr. I (April 1942), p. 28.

8 Ibid., p. 30.

with repeated nonsense syllables is not unique to Lop- lop. Also in Die Schammade is a poem by Ernst called "Antwort der Weltbiirger an Kurt Pinthus-Genius," in one line of which, "Anti-lops-tilopam," the rhythmic Loplop is imbedded.

But why did Ernst choose a bird to be his personal symbol? Ernst with his smooth fair hair, piercing eyes, and sharp nose resembled an alert bird. Perhaps more important in the mind of an avant-garde artist, the bird has always been associated with freedom, "free as a bird." But in German thought the bird wheeling over a wilderness is not only a symbol of freedom but also an antisocial presence. The German word vogelfrei ("bird free") is the term for a bandit or someone with a price on his head. Nietzsche makes use of this quality in his "Songs of Prince Vogelfrei" published in the second edition of The gay science (Die frohliche Wissenschaft [1887]), which Ernst called "a book which speaks to the future. The whole of surrealism is in it, if you know how to read.""

The bird is also a fit alter ego because of the company it keeps. In the form of an eagle it is the companion of the god Zeus and the wanderer Zarathustra. The wan- derer, like the wild bird, is free of the regimentation which society imposes on its members and, by his very example, a threat to that regimentation. That the great artist or thinker-like the criminal-is outside and op- posed to civilization is an idea which Nietzsche uses to the full in Thus spake Zarathustra. For Nietzsche and Romantic writers such as Goethe, wandering is not ex- ploring or hiking, and the wilderness is not only the wild unsettled land but also a metaphor for the unbridled creative areas of the mind. The wanderer's very lack of purpose or program, coupled with a willingness to give up creature comforts, sets him apart from the highly regulated prosperous lives of the middle-class society of Ernst's youth.

The concept of the wanderer has a psychological mean- ing in Ernst's persona as well. The second of the seven commandments Breton derived from his contact with Ernst reads: "Wander, the wings of augury will attach

9 Ibid. io Uwe M. Schneede, Max Ernst, trans. R.W. Last, New York

I972, P. 44. 1 Russell, op. cit. (note 4), p. 20.

228

Max Ernst's Loplop

themselves to your heels."12 By this, Breton means not only to wander city streets or country roads but also to wander the paths of the mind. Indeed, Freud's method of analysis, so useful to the surrealists, is a kind of wan- dering.

The connection between the German folk hero, the wanderer, and the wild bird was established in the Ger- man youth movement called the Wandervogel ("migra- tory bird"), which was formed in 19go and continued through the First World War. The boys who belonged to this movement walked the countryside in small groups led not by an adult counselor but by one of the older boys. They slept outside or in barns and were sometimes gone for weeks. They wore rough, often very dirty, camping clothes and sometimes a hat decorated with feathers. Generally they were from Protestant, middle-class homes, and these trips literally and figura- tively separated them from the rule of their families.13 The Wandervogel was influenced by political ideas of the time, but it was not a political organization. Its patriotic sentiments were turned more to cultural pursuits, such as preserving and singing folk songs like the one beginning: "Ein Vogel wollte Hochzeit machen in dem griinen Walde."14

Ernst, who was from a Catholic family, was probably not a member of the Wandervogel, but at the age of fifteen he too set out to wander over the Rhineland, Alsace, the Palatinate, Westphalia, and Holland.15 Whether or not Ernst was a member, he could not have escaped knowledge of this movement and its values during his youth. Indeed the Wandervogel and what it stood for may have provided the young German artists, largely members of the Expressionist movement whom Ernst knew before the First World War, with a prototype for an avant-garde artistic movement. The openly anti-authoritarian stance, loyalty to one's peers, valuing of youth for itself, and purposeful non-direc- tion are characteristic of both the Wandervogel and the young Expressionist artists. In any event, the Wander- vogel provided Ernst in title and philosophy an impor-

I2 Andre Breton, "The legendary life of Max Ernst: preceded by a brief discussion on the need for a new myth," trans. Lionel Abel, View, 2nd series, nr. i (April 1942), p. 6.

13 Walter Laqueur, Young Germany: a history of the German youth movement, London 1962, pp. 3-38.

tant synthesis of ideas. Ernst's subscription to that synthesis is graphically

illustrated by one of the engravings he used and reused as source material for images in his collage novel, La femme 1oo tetes,16 which, although he made it in France, takes many of its themes from the artist's own youthful experience in Germany. This engraving, which he found in the popular science magazine La Nature, is of a sheep being attacked by wild parrots called Nestors (fig. 3). The engraving illustrates an article on the introduc- tion of European sheep into the ecological system of New Zealand. The Nestor had found these intruders good prey. Although the author acknowledged the situa- tion that precipitated the behavior of the birds, he states: "Ce fut un trait de lumiere: les Nestors etaient les auteurs du mal."17 Such a description of the activities of the parrots in destroying the domesticated European sheep hardly needs modification to fit into surrealist philosophy. The rest of the article goes on to document in exquisite detail how the birds cripple and finally kill the sheep.

The antisocial wild birds in the source itself are con- sistent with the autobiographical themes in Ernst's work. Ernst cut four of the animals from this engraving and distributed them in collages throughout La femme 1oo tetes. The attribution of meaning to any of the col- lage elements in Ernst's works can be a tricky business: sometimes the element is of little importance itself, mere- ly filling an empty corner, but sometimes the subject demonstrates its importance by almost obsessive re-use in a series of images. The latter is the case with the Nestor engraving. The fragments of the engraving dis- tributed throughout the novel establish a unity in Ernst's mind, albeit a unity not revealed to the observer without knowledge of the common source for the images.

The figure of the sheep (fig. 4) appears first in the novel. Ernst superimposed the tortured and dying sheep, with all its associations with Christ, the Cruci- fixion, and Christianity, as well as the long-suffering

14 Hans Breuer, ed., Der Zupfgeigenhansl, 1909; rev. ed., Leipzig 1921, pp. 228-29. This was the songbook for the Wandervogel.

15 Waldberg, op. cit. (note 4), p. i8. i6 Max Ernst, Lafemme Ioo tetes, Paris 1929. 17 E. Oustalet, "Les Nestors de la Nouvelle-Zelande," La Nature,

I890, part i, p. 235.

229

CHARLOTTE STOKES

4 Max Ernst, L'Agneau demi-fecond dilate son abdomen a volonte et devient agnelle. Plate 8 of Lafemme ioo tetes, Paris 1929

5 Max Ernst, Loplop, le superieur des oiseaux, effarouche les derniers vestiges de la devotion en commun. Plate 58 of La femme 1oo tetes, Paris 1929

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3 A. I. Clement, Nestors de la Nouvelle-Zelande attaquant des moutons, wood-engraving. Illustration from La Nature, 1890, part I, p. 233

civilized man, on the "Vue d'ensemble du nouveau Ly- cee Buffon, rue de Vaugirard, a Paris."'8 The docile sheep and the school bring to mind Ernst's account of his own rebellion against passive acquiescence to social demands at school: "Duties at school were already odious. Indeed the very sound of the word Pflicht [duty] always inspired M.E. with horror and disgust."'9 Taken with the school setting, the untranslatable word play of the captions also suggests the budding and confused sexuality of a boy first aware of girls at school who were not his sisters. (Like all such secondary schools, the Gymnasium which prepared Ernst for the university was for boys only, but the elementary school, the Volksschu- le, he attended was probably coeducational.)20 The phrase in the caption "dilate son abdomen" recalls an- other aspect of Ernst's childhood. He was the second of six children, and his mother's pregnancies were an im- portant aspect of his home life. Indeed Waldberg goes so

I8 The engraving Ernst used for the scene is from La Nature, 1890, part I, p. 113.

19 William S. Lieberman, ed., Max Ernst, New York 1961, p. 8. 20 I am indebted to my friend and colleague Professor Katherine

Kennedy, whose vast knowledge of late nineteenth and early twen- tieth-century education in Germany was of great help to me in un- derstanding the social and scholastic world of young people during the years Ernst was growing up.

230

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Max Ernst's Loplop

6 Max Ernst, Et lesfemmes volcaniques relevent et agitent, d'un air menafant, la partie posterieure de leur corps. Plate 64 of Lafemme 0oo tetes, Paris I929

far as to say that Ernst's father imposed a rhythm of pregnancies on his wife.21

At the beginning of La femme 1oo tetes, and to some

degree throughout the novel, Ernst recalled the environ- ment and experience of his childhood. The other surre- alists often used Freud's theories to justify their current feelings and the need for sexual expression and agressive behavior, but Ernst understood the fundamental aspect of Freud's theory: that the child is the father of the man. Thus he spends, at least in the beginning of his career, a good deal of his artistic energy examining the nature of his past and locating the authentic symbolism of his early life.

Three birds from the Nestor engraving appear in the plates in the middle of the novel and deal with Ernst's definitions of his persona. The first appears in plate 58 (fig. 5) flying downward, untergehend as in Zarathustra, attacking and driving back pilgrims who are making a devotional climb on their knees in St. Peter's.22 In the caption he is honored again by being given his quasi- religious title "superior of birds," indicating that Lop- lop's power is in driving out older Catholic ideas and

21 Waldberg, op. cit. (note 4), p. 21.

22 The engraving Ernst used for the scene is from the popular

7 Max Ernst, Lesforgerons gris, noirs ou volcaniques, tournoieront dans r'air au-dessus des forges et... Plate 84 of La femme 1oo tetes, Paris 1929

practices and replacing them with his own religion or new mythology. Both Ernst and his contemporaries refer to his role as a mythmaker. In the I942 View de- voted to Ernst, both Andre Breton and Sidney Janis mention this aspect of his work, while Ernst says that he aspired "to become a magician and to find the myth of his time."23

In Lafemme 1oo tetes Loplop in the guise of a Nestor next appears in a confusion of erotic figures, animal parts, and musical instruments dominated by a pick- pocket (fig. 6). The new religion is chaos, and the bird, the symbol and leader of the religion, is haloed by a gaming wheel. The sleeping woman, who suggests the mind in the unguarded or dream state, is the source for the new regime. Sexy and irreverent, the caption adds to the chaos. The last of the Nestors appears as Loplop in a collage in which mature male sexuality is quite literally forged and knowledge is confirmed in the presence of a serpent, Satan's representative (fig. 7). Loplop appears throughout the novel and the sources for the birds vary, but our knowledge of Ernst's multiple use of the engrav- ing of the wild Nestors' violent attack on the passive

nineteenth-century French magazine Le tour du monde, 15 (1867), p. 216.

23 Ernst, op. cit. (note 7), p. 30.

23I

CHARLOTTE STOKES

civilized order that has intruded on their natural state contributes to our understanding of the artist's working methods and values. That these values and bird sym- bolism are associated with Ernst is made clear by Jacques Viot: "La civilisation fait dans le basse-cour. On a ses animaux domestiques. Les poules ne volent plus... Max Ernst, l'homme lui-meme arrive a voler des qu'il a cesse de s'apprivoiser."24

The German language makes other associations be- tween birds and behavior beyond usual social accep- tance. No code is more closely associated with nine- teenth-century middle-class values than the appearance of sexual abstinence in the unmarried and sexual fidelity in the married. Thus the code of sexual behavior was more lovingly broken by the younger rebels in society than any other moral code. The word for bird in Ger- man, Vogel, offered Ernst his opportunity. Vogeln from Vogel is the slang word for sexual intercourse. The slang usage of the word and the pictures of birds in paintings which carry a sexual meaning go back as far as the Renaissance, if not before. About Dutch genre subjects which contain such double entendres de Jongh writes: "Numerous i6th- and I7th-century texts clarify the meaning of the terms vogel (sometimes meaning penis), vogelen (to copulate) and vogelaar (sometimes meaning procurer or lover)."25 Although the word has similar slang meanings in German and in Dutch, the verbal term being translated into a visual image in Dutch Baroque painting could even have come to Ernst while he studied Dutch art history at Bonn University.26 The significance in the word-play lies not only in its verbal double meaning but in its ability to be translated into a visual image with a wide range of associations.

A similar word-play is narrated by Freud. In The in- terpretation of dreams, first published in 900o, which Ernst read while still a student, Freud gives an account of one of his dreams: "in it I saw my beloved mother, with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with birds' beaks and laid upon the bed... The strangely draped and unnaturally tall

24 Jacques Viot, "Max Ernst," Cahiers d'art 8 (1933), pp. 215-16. 25 E. de Jongh, "Erotica in vogelperspectief: de dubbelzinnigheid

van een reeks I7de eeuwse genrevoorstellingen," Simiolus 3 (I968- 69), p. 72 (from the English abstract of the article).

26 Eduard Tier, "Was Max Ernst studiert hat," in Max Ernst in

8 Illustration of Egyptian religious symbols from Die Israelitische Bibel, ed. and trans. by Ludwig Philippson, vol. 2, Leipzig I858, p. 871

figures with birds' beaks were derived from the illustra- tions to Philippson's Bible. I fancy they must have been gods with falcons' heads from an ancient Egyptian fune- rary relief" [fig. 8].27

On the funerary significance of the dream imagery, he goes on to say that his mother's expression "was copied from the view I had had of my grandfather a few days before his death as he lay snoring in a coma."28 But Freud gave the dream an overriding sexual significance by associating the figures with the slang term for sexual intercourse, vogeln, told to him by one of his childhood playmates named Philipp. Freud traced the source of the anxiety generated by the dream "to an obscure and evidently sexual craving that had found appropriate ex- pression in the visual content of the dream."29

Koln: die rheinische Kunstszene bis I922, Cologne 1980, p. 63. 27 Sigmund Freud, The interpretation of dreams, trans. James

Strachey, New York I965, p. 622. 28 Ibid., p. 623. 29 Ibid.

232

Max Ernst's Loplop

9 Max Ernst, plate from Oedipe, the fourth booklet of Une semaine de bonte, Paris I934

Details from this anecdote ring throughout Ernst's work. The bird-headed figure who is both death's ser- vant and the forbidden or potential sexual partner is a theme linking the imagery of Freud's dream and Ernst's less sedate versions in Une semaine de bonte (fig. 9). Even the disreputable little boy who enlightened the young Freud had the same name as Ernst's father, Philippe, who figures prominently in the artist's writings and visual art. But all the bird imagery and other particulars

aside, the most important aspect of the report of this dream is the method of collaging a fragment of nine- teenth-century engraving seen in childhood to other images to make an image that reflects some current inner reality. In other dreams, especially those told by Dora in A case of hysteria (first published in 1905), Freud identi- fies sources for dream images as photographs and paint- ings seen by the patient in art galleries.30 Ernst's imagery reflects similar sources. But Freud also located the

30 Freud, "A case of hysteria," in The standard edition of the com- plete psychological works, vol. 7, trans. James Strachey, London 1978, pp. 95-100.

233

234

sources of dream imagery in encyclopedias and medical books which might be in the home, because these books were common sources of sexual knowledge available to the middle-class child of the nineteenth-century.31 Ernst's very method of searching for collage elements in old books is itself probably quite a conscious reprise of his childhood search for sexual information.

The second important aspect of Freud's childhood dream for Ernst is the translation of a verbal double en- tendre into a visual image which keeps its tie with the verbal meaning as well as other associations. The me- chanism is a modern variant of and justification for the long tradition of such bird images and word-play in Dutch art. In many of his collages Ernst took the idea of verbal prototypes beyond Freud's theories and motifs used in traditional art. Ernst's skill at organizing images within a single collage expanded to include the organiza- tion of groups of collages into a visual syntax, like that of a spoken sentence in which the relationship between the parts is expressed over time. For example, the chapters in Une semaine de bonte, each of which is based on a more or less unified set of images, have this visual syntax in which pre-existing images (bits of engravings), like pre- existing words, take on meanings according to context,

rhythm, and position in relation to other images. Ernst created visual sentences and poems of great subtlety in which the images take on a wealth of complementary, even contradictory meanings.

Ernst saw Freud's theories and methods as a means- modern and personal-of organizing a work of art. In Ernst's use of these methods the therapeutic or cathartic purpose seems limited, if it is a concern at all. Rather, the process of making "dream" associations becomes a new and evocative method of combining images. The images themselves are remembered bits of unimportant observations from common experiences, which, as Freud pointed out, are the source of significant dream symbolism.32 In the making of collages it became Ernst's business to cultivate an awareness of such secondhand imagery. For Freud the value of combined images in a dream was measured by how telling the imagery was in terms of mental illness; for Ernst the value was in the effectiveness of the poetic juxtaposition.

DEPT. OF ART AND ART HISTORY

OAKLAND UNIVERSITY

ROCHESTER, MICH.

31 Ibid., pp. 99-IoI. 32 Freud, op. cit. (note 27), pp. 52-54.