An "Odyssey" Through the Creative Process and an "Iliad" of the Mind

First, to explain my headline; I found that tasty little morsel while doing research on Max Ernst’s work and his collaboration with Andre Breton. Delicious isn’t it?

I started to write just about Joseph Cornell today. I’ve always loved his little boxes, his intricate collages and his clearly complicated and disturbing mind. But, for some reason I just can’t face the reclusive, gray, long-beaked man on his own today. Instead, I have been drawn, once again to the fascinating collaboration of two of my favorite Surrealists; Andre Breton and Max Ernst. They do all meet up in the middle, just trust me.

How you ask? Among other things collage and a favorite word of mine frottage which has all sorts of interesting and naughty implications. (raise eyebrows here)

Max Ernst came to collage/frottage quite by fortunate artistic accident. Alone in a rundown inn in a village on the Rhine, he was struck by the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, and palaeontologic demonstration. In contrast were the warped and rutted boards of the floor of his room. They meshed together in his artistic eye and his remarkable style was born.

Meanwhile, as Ernst was clipping away at his piles of backdated catalogs and out-of-print wallpaper samples, Breton, was slowly becoming disillusioned with the unfocused and pessimistic anarchy of Dadaism. Breton’s stumbled (I’m not quite sure how) into Ernst’s work which in fact had a profound impact on his own artistic notions. In May 1921 he organized an exhibition of Ernst's first collages. Breton had written to Cologne Dada because something in their work attracted his attention. He explained the impact Ernst's collages made in Paris:
"I remember very well the occasion when Tzara, Aragon, Soupault and I first discovered the collages of Max Ernst. We were all in Picabia's house when they arrived from Cologne. They moved us in a way we never experienced again.”

The exhibition that Breton organized was Ernst's first Paris exhibition. Sadly he wasn’t able to attend because he was denied a visa to visit Paris by the British forces occupying Germany as part of the Versailles Treaty.

Breton always retained a respect for what he described as Ernst's "profound humanity." In two essays, written in 1920 and 1927, Breton sought to explain this. He wrote, "[Ernst] projects before our eyes the most captivating film in the world and retains the grace to smile even while illuminating our interior life most profoundly and most radiantly, we do not hesitate to see in Max Ernst a man of these infinite possibilities" ( Max Ernst: Beyond Painting).

As Breton and Ernst were gulping deep from life’s cup, in contrast is Joseph Cornell-whose isolationist ways nominate him in my opinion as the Emily Dickinson of the early 20th Century. Intensely Francophile, though he had never been to France, he was in fact what we might consider by today’s standards a stalker, penning letters to Jennifer Jones and other movie stars or ballet dancers he'd never met. That being said, Cornell led a rich life of imagination and fantasy that he expressed through his little boxes. He didn't share the revolutionary fantasies of the Surrealists or their erotic obsessions. There’s not a single sexual image, let alone a trace of amour fou, in any of his work. The most he would permit himself was a gentle fetishism. If, as some have thought, Cornell's imagery had to do with childhood, then it was one which no child has ever known. Sometimes he would crack the glass pane that protected the contents of the box, but that is all he allowed in the way of violence - it suggests that the sanctuary of imagination has been attacked.

I could go on and on about the lot of them. There is so very much to say. Their work, their lives, their art, has influenced me in so many ways; from the work that I create to the way that I see the world. But, I will close for today. Sometimes there’s just no good way to wrap one of these up. So, kind readers, if you are out there, forgive me for this abrupt ending.

Abiento.