NAPOLEON IN THE WILDERNESS
MAX ERNST, 1941
Max Ernst died on August 1, 1914. Came back to life four years later, November 11, 1918, as a young man who wanted to become a magician. His words. Not mine. Now, those dates: August 1914, the war starts. November 1918, it ends. In between, four years in the German artillery. Wounded in the head, twice. On the losing side. That's the death he means. And when he comes back, he does not exactly come back trusting reason. Why would he? Reason had just dug the trenches. All those smart, sensible men, and this is what they built. So Ernst flips it. He stops composing pictures and starts finding them. He presses wet paint between two surfaces, peels them apart, and looks at what the accident gives him. Rocks. Bodies. Monsters. Forests. Whatever crawls out. Trust the accident. Never the plan. Then, twenty years later, Europe does it again. The Nazis put his work in their degenerate art shows. France, where he's been living, locks him up as an enemy German. He gets released, then arrested again. Wanted by both sides, for completely opposite reasons. Friends help get him out. Peggy Guggenheim helps get him across the ocean. Summer of 1941, he lands in New York. And this painting comes with him. He starts it in France and finishes it in California, which feels right. It's small, eighteen inches tall. You could carry it under one arm, which is about the right size for a man who has just carried his whole life across an ocean. And of all people, he paints Napoleon. The most famous exile there ever was. An emperor who ends up stuck on a rock in the sea. The landscape is made by accident, squashed and peeled and found in the paint. The figures feel like they were discovered there too, half-person, half-fossil, half-bad dream. That strange figure in front is often read as Leonora Carrington, the painter Ernst loved and lost somewhere in all that running. Behind them, ocean. Ernst said the Napoleon here was not triumphant. This is Napoleon after the fall. Napoleon in exile. Napoleon defeated. But he never says exactly who Napoleon is. Could be the men who chased him out. Could be Ernst himself, washed up on a new shore with his empire gone. The painting's not telling. Magicians don't explain.