NAPOLEON IN THE WILDERNESS
MAX ERNST, 1941
Max Ernst died the first of August, 1914. Relax, he wrote that himself. Died the day the war started, came back November 1918 as, and this is him talking, a young man aspiring to become a magician. Four years in the German artillery. Wounded in the head, twice. On the losing side. And he comes back with one rule. Stop trusting reason. Reason's what dug the trenches. All those smart, sensible men, and that's what they built. So he flips it. Stops composing pictures, starts finding them. Squash paint between two surfaces, peel them apart, look. Whatever shows up in there, that's the painting. Trust the accident, never the plan. Twenty years on, it happens again. The Nazis stick his work in their degenerate art shows. France, where he's living, locks him up as an enemy German. Wanted by both sides, for opposite reasons. Interned twice. Friends write letters to get him out. Peggy Guggenheim, the heiress, gets him across the ocean. Summer of 1941, he lands in New York. Same year, this. It's small. Eighteen inches, give or take. You could carry it under one arm, which feels about right for a man who'd just carried his whole life across an ocean. And of all things, he paints Napoleon. The most famous exile there ever was. An emperor who ended up stuck on a rock in the sea. The figures are squashed and peeled, found in the paint. The tall one with the horn, that's Leonora Carrington, the painter he loved and lost somewhere in all that running. Behind them, ocean. He never said who the Napoleon is. Could be the men who chased him out. Could be him, washed up on a new shore with his empire gone. The painting's not telling. Magicians don't explain.