Painting: House to Dream In

The year was 1922. Dada was dead, Surrealism not yet born. Max Ernst, a fledgling artist who had figured prominently in the former movement and would soon help formulate the latter, was in his native Cologne, yearning for the radical friends that he knew were spawning the most adventuresome ideas of the day in postwar Paris. For Germans in those days, French visas were almost impossible to obtain. Finally, one August night, Ernst slipped across the border. Later he turned up at the Paris apartment of two friends, the poet Paul Eluard and his wife Gala.

The Eluards duly installed the fugitive in an apartment in the same building, and Ernst took a menial job in a souvenir factory. It was obviously no place for an artist, and so Eluard offered Ernst a commission to decorate a house that he had acquired at Eau-bonne, 15 miles outside Paris. The young maverick made the most of the opportunity. He let his playful brush and imagination run rampant over walls, doors and ceilings. By the time Ernst was finished, he had transformed the small stone villa into a uniquely hallucinatory backdrop, hi these surroundings, the founders of Surrealism—Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Andre Masson, Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos and, of course, the Eluards—met and dreamed aloud the bizarre fantasies that would reshape much 20th century art.

Histoire Naturelle. There was a giant strawberry in the bathroom. Across a pair of double doors appeared a huge butterfly that seemed to fly when the doors were opened. Between the windows in the dining room stood a delicately tattooed nude flanked by her green shadow. The master bedroom was turned over to Ernst’s Histoire Naturelle, a subliminally suggestive panorama filled with prickly plants, grasshoppers and a lazy anteater carrying its baby over a brick wall. Some of the most charming reveries were reserved for the bedroom of the Eluards’ five-year-old daughter Cecile, who went to sleep each night amid visions of red-eyed fish, blue horses, hydrocycling ducks and gondolas carrying a giant’s foot over limpid waters.

After a few years the Surrealists scattered. Gala ran off to marry Salvador Dali. Eluard died in 1952. Ernst went on to enjoy international prominence as a perennial myth maker in sculpture, painting and collage. The house itself was sold in 1929 to a butcher and passed through many hands.

One person who never forgot the delightful fantasies was Eluard’s daughter Cecile. Three years ago, she revisited the house at Eaubonne and found the murals covered with layers of wallpaper. It took two years for a restorer, using archaeological techniques, to transfer some of the delicate oils to canvas. The resuit is now being shown at Paris’ Galerie Andre-Frangois Petit. Amazingly, the colors are as bright as the day Ernst painted them, and each of the 14 canvases carries something of that breathless, rarefied atmosphere of in sight and abandon in which they were created. More important, perhaps, notes Paintei Andre Masson, they prove that Ernst was a precursor as far as Sur realism was concerned. “While the rest of us were still formulating our ideas, he already had his foot in the door.”