Jimmy Ernst: hope emerges from darkness

In photographs, Surrealist painter Max Ernst appears a stern and forbidding figure, with razor-sharp features and deep-set, cynical eyes. By contrast, his son Jimmy -- who was also a painter and is the subject of a retrospective now at Pepperdine’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art -- had the broad, fleshy face of his mother, art historian Louise Strauss-Ernst, and large, round eyes. Pictured in the catalog in his later years (he died in 1983 at age 63), he has a receptive countenance, as open and amicable as his father’s was dark and reserved.

A similar pair of portraits emerges in Donald Kuspit’s recent monograph on the younger Ernst (published in 2000): of a disillusioned and nihilistic father, tainted by the experience of two world wars and committed, in his work, to a ruthless excavation of the human psyche; and an idealistic son, citizen of a forward-looking New World (Jimmy Ernst fled Germany for New York at age 18), whose art is humane, hopeful and driven by an “ambition to repair.”

“Jimmy’s art rebuilds what Max’s tears apart,” Kuspit argues. It “struggles to present a civilized alternative to Max’s discovery of the emotional barbarians and predators we are underneath our civilized veneer.”

In Kuspit’s view, Jimmy’s is the greater feat (“civilization is always breaking down,” he points out; building up is more difficult). But his father is by far the better known. Individual reactions will no doubt hinge largely on which function one prefers to see art perform: constructive or deconstructive, spiritual or psychological.

Unfair though it may be to couch the achievements of the son in the success of his father, it is a compellingly archetypal dichotomy and difficult to overlook.

The exhibition outlines the context of Jimmy Ernst’s family history but presents the work on its own terms, making it possible to appreciate both the strengths and the pitfalls of his position.

Subtitled “Transcending the Surreal,” the exhibition portrays the painter’s career as a rather tidy arc stretching up from the ashes of Surrealism, through the heady clamor of American Abstract Expressionism, into a realm of compulsive pattern and geometry that largely evades categorical description and finally, in the last few years, down into a strangely amateurish sort of Impressionism and an unfortunate flirtation with Native American imagery. Throughout the work, there is a notable sense of optimism and a quality of sheer giddiness that stand in contrast to the European art of Max Ernst’s generation. Though Jimmy was hardly untouched by World War II (he emigrated in 1938, but his mother, who was Jewish, perished at Auschwitz), this is art that could only have been made in America, with its atmosphere of security, opportunity and possibility.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the work, however, is an element not attributable to either family background or historical circumstance, and that is Ernst’s particularly fine handling of line and pattern. It is a subtle quality, easy to miss in a glance, but one that permeates every phase of his work, distinguishing it not only from that of his father but also from that of his contemporaries.

Indeed, one is frequently struck, moving through the show, by how current many of the paintings appear. With his seemingly instinctual sense of delicacy, his fondness for fanciful motifs and his propensity for meticulously rendered, surface-covering pattern, Ernst has more than a little in common with many artists working today.

Among the most uncanny works in this regard are the overtly Surrealist paintings of the early 1940s, which would not look out of place today on a gallery wall in Chinatown. Though undeniably derivative -- or faithful, in any case, to the aesthetic orthodoxy of Surrealism -- the paintings are happily devoid of Freudian cliches, relying on abstract pictorial elements rather than symbols to mimic the strangeness of the subconscious. That the result should feel more closely aligned to Dr. Seuss than to Salvador Dali -- preferable though it might seem to us -- probably had something to do with Ernst’s decision to abandon the mode altogether. At their best, these paintings are neither deep nor disturbing but rather wonderfully enchanting.

In the next few paintings, dating to the late 1940s, Ernst adopted a sci-fi tone -- with cool colors and mechanistic forms -- and began to develop what became a major motif: long, thin, mostly straight lines that cluster like pickup sticks in various regions of the canvas. In a terrific piece called “The Wake” (1947), they coalesce to form a slender, ominous, robot-like figure, but more often they remain abstract elements, lending Ernst’s compositions a dynamic, jittery sense of rhythm. (In the early to mid-’50s they consumed entire compositions.)

Also in these paintings, he began to play with depth. In two of the most exciting works in the show -- “See See Rider” (1946) and “Drum Improvisation” (1948), for example -- he layered the linear motifs over smooth, slightly blurry fields of gray and blue, causing them to leap off the surface of the canvas. In others, he added flat, solid color to select negative spaces; in still others, he piled up so many lines that they created their own depth, forming a sort of thicket.

In the early 1960s, another motif emerged that dominated the works of the next decade: a pattern of short, thick strokes that resemble scales or feathers and create the illusion of texture when viewed from a distance. Whether mingling with the linear motifs, as in the spectacular “Chronicle” (1964), or dominating whole compositions, as in “Mombasa” (1975), the pattern lends an organic quality to the work but also a curious degree of obsessiveness. In some paintings, its presence feels compulsive, even ravenous; it consumes the surface of the canvas like a disease consuming the skin.

As if to check or stabilize this unwieldy new entity, Ernst began in the late 1960s to incorporate interlocking networks of thick, flat bars, which lay across the fields of texture like highways across open farmland. He also began to experiment with iconic geometric forms derived from hieroglyphics.

Kuspit argues that Ernst was reaching for spiritual harmony here, and in the best of these paintings one does begin to feel a real symbiosis, as if he were actually marshaling natural forces rather than simply composing a painting.

Aspiring to the universal, however, is as doomed an aesthetic strategy, ultimately, as the Surrealists’ attempt to chart the reaches of the subconscious mind. The moment one believes oneself to be tapping into something that big, the art, for whatever reason, simply goes flat.

Several of Ernst’s geometric paintings hover near this point, speaking in forms so stylized that they come to feel cold and distant. The very last paintings, however -- which involve rows of Native American kachina dolls and elements of a Florida landscape -- lunge definitively past it, into the realm of kitsch.

It is a disappointing turn and no doubt best forgotten. Whether Ernst ultimately succeeded in rebuilding the world his father tore apart, he certainly made, in trying, an invigorating contribution.

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Jimmy Ernst

What: “Jimmy Ernst: Transcending the Surreal”

Where: Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu

When: Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Ends: April 4

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 506-4851