Art 9

We emerge into Art Nine and we're looking at an illustration from a book on the Dada movement, from the early 1920's. In fact 1919 to 1921 is the heyday of the Dada movement. This is by Max Ernst, one of the two artists that we're pairing to get a tuning for this last four presentation month in the Art phase. The caption of this is by Paul Éluard, a French surrealist poet. And Éluard writes:
In February 1917, the painter Max Ernst and myself were at the Front in World War One, barely one kilometre away from each other. The German artillery man, Max Ernst, was shelling the trenches where I, a French infantryman, was mounting guard. Three years later we were the best friends in the world and since then we have struggled together eagerly in the same cause, the total emancipation of man.
The emancipation of man from his previous self. World War One was one of the most vicious surprises in history. There have been wars since the beginning, of large groups of men wanting to take over smaller groups of men, or tougher groups of men wanting to have what weaker groups of men have. But World War One was called the Great War because it tore all of the shreds that were left of civilisation, permanently. That war ended Western civilisation. In his Nobel Prize speech of 1954, Faulkner, William Faulkner, in Stockholm, accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature speech, said that, 'War has never ended, there have been lulls, but the Second World War was certainly another surge of it.' And the sense that we got in the early fifties was that indeed we were facing a tidal wave and a tidal wave is not a single wave, it is a set of waves and it is the fourth wave in the set that is the most devastating. The only tidal wave action I ever saw was in 1964 after the great Alaska earthquake in San Francisco. We were up on Sutro cliffs and down below us was the great highway and Playland at the Beach was an amusement park and then was the big, huge beach down to the Pacific Ocean. We watched the first couple of waves in the set come up and by the third wave it was over the beach and up against the sea wall, but the fourth wave that came in - and this earthquake was in Alaska, 10,000 miles away - that fourth wave went over the brick highway, into Playland at the Beach and it was at least 25 feet high. And there are tidal waves that are enormous. The one in Indonesia, a year or so ago, the tidal wave was 60 feet high when it hit the coast of Sumatra. There are historical tidal waves and what we are learning is how to ride out and to surf something which is catastrophically enormous, that is upon us. We're trying to free ourselves from the tidal wave of negative regret, of accumulated anger, of intense loathing for ourselves, that has come as a result of centuries and millennia of disappointment, of madness, of ridicule and there is no way that it's going to be deferred. But what we can do is become extremely capable at not only surfing that great wave that is upon us, but to actually find that we are not subject to the limitations of four dimensions and in a spiritual way, to walk through the water, to walk through the wave and carry on.
In our learning we have seen that vision transforms nature and now we're learning that art transforms ritual. And one of the qualities that comes in your maturity is your conscious visioning as a fifth dimension begins to have its dynamic effect, is you will discover that the rituals that you do are now beginning to morph and change into craft. So that what you do has a craft to it and where ritual is done to be precise so that tradition is fulfilled, a craft fulfils the craftsman. There is a personal tone now to what you do. My ritual of making these presentations has been every single Saturday for 24 years without a break, but it isn't a ritual, it is a craft that is now raised to an art. There is an art to a higher order of craft and the craft exists in a four-dimensional space time, but the art brings the craft through the visionary fifth dimension of differential consciousness, into a six-dimensional form. And so that art, the person, the art of being a person, the very artist who makes whatever art there is, is a craftsman who is able to pull their activity, their existential action, their doing, through what would be normally the culmination of the mind. Ritual always culminates in the mind, in symbols, in symbolic thought. The structure of thought is an integral index of all actions, all the experiences that come out of the actions and it is strong enough to really pull it together to a unity of almost any concentration that one would like. And while that becomes very, very dangerous in one sense, because the more that the power of the structure of thought pulls everything together into a dominating idea, a dominating mind, a mentality that is stronger than the world, it can go further than that and it can have an integration so powerful that it vanishes in upon itself. We know now that cosmologically, galactic structures are so strong that they have at their centres supermassive black holes, which are not the end of things, but the end of a space time limitation, where energy was carried by light, by photons. Now the energy is carried by something of such a higher order than light, it has more dimensions than space time, that it exceeds the ability for detection, for identification. And we are used now to cosmological statements like, 'The visible universe that we see is only four per cent of what is real.' We can tell by gravity, we can tell by the behaviour of magnetoelectric qualities in the cosmos, that there not only is dark matter, which is three quarters of everything that is real, but there is dark energy which is almost another quarter. 96 per cent together of what is real is not visible, it is not integrable by the electromagnetic energy carried by light, by the photon and this is the realm that the mind is able to integrate. So that mentality, even at its strongest, the optimum that a human being on this planet can achieve would be control of something approaching four per cent of what is real and only on a limited terrain, this single planet. This is a learning that pulls us out of that devastating limitation which is the intuitive trigger behind the disappointment, behind the violence, behind the ridicule, behind the shame, behind the guilt. By pulling us through, the mind is refreshed, it is purified in the sense that you don't get rid of something, but you transform all of it increasingly into an exchange with others, where giving is just as important as receiving and sharing becomes the dominant tone, rather than taking over. Rather than controlling it, one now shares it. That new space is an aesthetic space; it is beautiful not because it is pretty, it is beautiful because it is real. And as we gain a dimensionality in reality, our ability to resonate becomes literally infinite. Our ability to have a harmonic extends to whatever dimensions of variability and of exploration that we could possibly imagine.
The illustration by Max Ernst is entitled Health through Sport. And the original Dada Manifesto, by Paul Éluard in 1918, was very careful of recognising that the world had become untenable and it is was up to artists especially to literally destroy the world that had come to a conclusion. In his Dada Manifesto of 1918, which he read in public on July 23rd...he was originally from Zurich, Switzerland. Tristan Tzara, t-z-a-r-a...and it stressed the broad scope of the poetic act. The poetic act is a ritual action, transformed to craft and raised in dimensional order power to an art, the poetic art. And out of this comes a poetic act. 'I destroy the drawers of the brain of social organisation, spread demoralisation wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to objective forces, in the imagination of every individual.' They found that the key was that the powers of human creativity, which should have been in beautiful bows, had been cinched into knots and that art especially had been cinched into a knot of propaganda. Not just a propaganda for this cause, or that cause, for this kind of politics, or that kind of a politics, but the knot of the propaganda that human beings could be controlled by doctrines that were more important than the freedom of their spirit. That their capacities as a living being of more dimensions than the world has, that they must confine themselves to the control of those who control the world and that this was an inadvertent imprisonment of the entire species. And that the little tyrants responsible for the great powers and the wars, were literally just the street pushers of this addiction and that the product of the addiction was the limitations of a deceptive mind.
We found in the early 1960's, that the third wave of that set of the tidal waves had come. The Cuba Missile Crisis of 1962 was about as close as you will ever get to devastation of the entire species. Where I was, Madison, Wisconsin, was not only the University of Wisconsin and the state capital, but it is a strategic air command base, Truax Field, right next to Madison's airport. At Truax Field, five hours after Kennedy, President Kennedy made the announcement that there was going to be a blockade of Cuba, stopping the Russian trawlers and military craft bringing more missiles with nuclear warheads into Cuba, five hours after that, in the evening, we drove out, six of us, in an old jeep. All the lights were on, all the floodlights were on, the MP's with loaded BAR's were patrolling actively all of the roads coming in. We could get just so far as a chain-link fence and there on the runway were 13 B-52's, loaded to the gills with enough nuclear weapons to take out the Soviet Union completely, from that one command. And their engines were revving and they were running, they were all set to go. And it occurred to us at the time that that was pretty much it and all of us decided to just go back to where we had been born and get as far as we could of just going back to the cities where we were born. I got as far as Lansing, Michigan, when word came that there was some delay, there wasn't going to be a nuclear war that day and walked around Michigan State all night and in the morning decided, 'I might as well go back to school, I'm working for it to pay for it. They might as well kill me there.' Fortunately it didn't happen.
We're at a position where the fourth wave is coming, rumbling. We can walk through this and by the time that it comes in 2012, we'll be able to make a difference. The difference is this: we are not limited to an animal, four-dimensional frame and as soon as we get a quintessential fifth element, a fifth business, a magical part of us activated and in play, that is a creative hand now and can begin to change everything. And the ecology of consciousness runs through the entire gamut. Nature is transformed by vision, ritual is transformed by art and myth is transformed by history and finally, science transforms symbols. And the symbolic mind, once it is transformed and understands, it can never dot all the t's, cross all the i's...I'm mixing the metaphor here. That it can never cinch it all together permanently. That the best it can do is to make a frame through which one can expand the references and finally grind that frame into a lens where one can see the array of possibilities. And in this way, the analytic, the infinite analytic of kaleidoscopic consciousness in science beings a deep humility to the mind, finally. And even the mind learns that it can be at play in the fields of the Lord, instead of being a warden over a prison that it has proudly made. The difference is to let the play of the ecology of consciousness go through all of its array, its four phase array, but the mind of false integration before, misconceived everything as just being material to be brought together, to be integrated together and that once you have integrated together, you have the universe. Well, the universe is only one possibility of an infinite kaleidoscope, that the cosmos in all of its scintillating facets, really is. This planet shrinks to a blue star just by going to the next planet, to Mars. The entire star system shrinks to just a star as soon you get about one light year out. The cosmos is 15,000,000,000 light years. If you just went 100 light years out, there are more star systems than there are square miles on the continent. It's not just about learning humility, it's about exemplifying reality and that those who are other than us are not other individuals, but they are resonant to us in ways that we may not have explored yet. And to discover that we're all related by certain resonances, all of the other differences then become the gorgeousness of the variety of costume and we have a costume ball every time you get a number of human beings together, from whatever angles, from whatever sides. This is part of what the generation born in 1890's first recognised.
Max Ernst and Henry Moore were both born in the 1890's, Ernst in 1891, Moore in 1898. But both of them came into their own about the time of 1920, 1921. It's interesting because, take Henry Moore. Henry Moore was born in one of the deepest, darkest social situations that you could imagine. He was born...his father was a coal miner in Yorkshire, England. Their house was not just a track house, but it was just a narrow thing of a door and two little windows and there were like 40 or 50 of these little units out of red brick and then the next street over were units of the same thing and the backs of those units had just enough yard so that the mother could hang the laundry and then there was an alley with the trash, the garbage, where the kids could play in among the trash and the garbage and the coal belching stacks. And the father would come home depending on what shift, there were three shifts of eight hours. If he came home from the early shift in the afternoon, he would go into this little hip bath to wash the coal grime off, to get a cup of tea from the missus, who would scrub his back and occasionally the children would come in and help clean dad up. Or if he was on the graveyard shift he would get in at four in the morning and he would have to clean himself. And there were only a couple of rooms in the house, the front room, left for guests; most of the living was done in the kitchen back room. And just a couple of little bedroom spaces above where the kids...there were eight kids in the Moore household, Henry was the seventh of the eight. One of the things that got to him though was that his dad drew. His dad liked to just encourage his sons and his daughters to look beyond this and in fact three of the children became prize teachers and Henry Moore became one of the greatest artists in the world.
When he came back from World War One, Moore began to make sculptures and the first sculptures that he made were quite telling. Here is one of the earliest sculptures, here at the top, '1922.' It's a mother and child. The child's emerging, not being born, but crawling, because it's the only place it can play is around the raised legs of the mother, that's about all you had. Later on, 1924, Maternity. The mother, who becomes extremely important. The mother is not just a woman, not just a feminine, it is the body of the mother in the resonance that makes the space in which one lives. The arbiter of where it is that you are, your orientation. Your co-ordination of what you might wanna do, or what you're going to so, or what you did do, is within that resonant space that she generates. She doesn't control it, but she generates it. And later on, the Mother and Child, you see the child almost like a totemic spirit above the head of the mother. And finally...that was in 1925, you begin to get the sense of young women, of girls, of nudes, but not nudes. Of young mothers-to-be holding the breast, which later on will be holding the child and as soon as the child comes into play again, Moore, by 1928, some six years later, has in place of the child, has a vessel like a vase, which is the beginning of a hole. A space that the baby held, is a space within the resonance of the mother, so that the child, the baby, the baby child, is the punctuating space in the resonances of the mother. And that together then, when they make a set, you must have the children's spaces doing the periodicity of the resonances of the mother, so that there is now a set for the home. Where's the father? Where is the male? For Henry Moore, the father is the sculpturer. The one seeing this, understanding this, appreciating this, making this and not just the artist, but whoever now sees this sculpture, whoever appreciates this sculpture is sharing in the making of that sculpture. And so one sees that there's a transcendence here of gender and of roles and that art begins to move out of the four-dimensional, ritual, symbolic mentality, into the visionary capacity of six-dimensional forms that are now prismatic of consciousness freed from the old, limited space, into a new aesthetic space, looking towards freeing our experience from the old time to a new time. The old time was constrained by the periodicity of things, by the periodicity of rituals, by the periodicity organised by mentality and indexed by it and ordered by it. Now the artistic, aesthetic space seeks to free itself into a new time and that new time will not be a mythic horizon, but historical horizon. History actually frees us by transforming mythic experience out of its limited periodicities into the kaleidoscope of indefinite variations of periodicities. One of the favourite phrases in the Beat movement in the '50's was the question, 'Just what time is it in the universe anyway?' Or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 'What time it is depends on who you think you are and where you are' and it may be multiple. This quality in Moore is extremely hard to appreciate because he became more and more refined, he lived to be 88. And as he did, his sense of working with sculpture, of working with material, began to change, because he sensed now that it isn't just a mother and child, but there is something like a reclining woman and in her reclining there is this wave like form that begins to have clusters of tones and the spaces that punctuate the composition of those volumes and those spaces in that tone, begins to be like a frequency. And so the reclining nude is one registry of the frequency of that kind of creativity of life, that kind of generation of the experience of being oriented in the world, that kind of attractiveness for a love relationality. And so that reclining nude now becomes increasingly of interest and as he does follow that, by 1930 he began to make not only reclining nudes, but seated, immense women, huge. He used to say that at this time in his life he just, 'Wanted to sculpt bulk, as much as possible.' And someone asked him once, 'Why would you do that? A back is not interesting.' And he said, "Yes, a back is interesting. My mother would always, after working on my dad and cleaning him up, have a sore back and she'd say, 'Be a good lad and just massage my back.'" These are the days before there was a shame of a child being able to rub the mother's unclothed back. But he became very sensitive and he said his, 'Fingers are trying to do for his mother, what his mother had done for his father.' He began to sense the bone structure underneath, the tissue, the knotted muscles and so backs became enormously interesting to him. And as we go through the presentations of Art, we'll see that more and more the quality of the figure of the feminine becomes more and more rugged, in the sense of almost surrealistically rugged form, resembling huge stones and rocks more than anything else, but on deeper inspection, in an aesthetic space, in that texture of appreciation of the minuteness of feeling the frequency of that vibration in one of its most massive presentations, you begin then to get the sense that this is an enormous quality of revelation for one. One of the largest reclining figures is in New York City, in Lincoln Center and it must be almost 40 feet long, set in a pool of water. So you begin to see that this resonance, this form, has a mirror quality, so that it's tuned together and enormous and even set in something like Lincoln Center, New York City, which is one of the most enormous urban structures in the world, Henry Moore's sculpture maintains its tone. That life still registers and is expressible and is appreciable here and not only that, but is carriable as a transform metric to the entirety of the architecture of the city and it is no longer an entrapping, overwhelming environment, New York now becomes of aesthetic interest. The people, the buildings, the massiveness itself, is a particular special charm and not at all a threat. It is a challenge, but the challenge itself has a bit of a pride that one is able to work with this. We're gonna take a little break and come back, but I want to just read one little thing here from...the earliest books on Moore are by Herbert Read. Sir Herbert Read is a great writer in his own part, he was also one of the editors of the Collected Works of Carl Jung in the Bollinger Series.
The art of sculpture is notorious, notoriously difficult to appreciate. To the Greeks it was the supreme art, the one which called for the highest talent in the artist and the subtlest sensibility in the spectator. The Renaissance, for reasons which I shall discuss presently, deprecated sculpture and gave the highest place to painting.
When Moore as a young man first went to Florence, his first interests were in the painters: Giotto, then to Masaccio and finally the artist that captured him was Michelangelo. And for the rest of his life Michelangelo became like a talisman for Moore. He used to get his marble from Carrara, from the same mountain that...inland from the northern Tyrrhenian coast of Italy, that Michelangelo got it. And he found a stone one time, a piece of Carrara marble, that he felt that Michelangelo had held and carried around and then had dropped there to find something else. He kept that in his studio all the rest of his life. That he was carrying the same kind of talisman that Michelangelo was carrying. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to a correction that Henry Moore's sculpture in New York City is not in Lincoln Center, that's the Concert Hall, but in Rockefeller Center. My patron for ten years was Laurance Rockefeller and his office was the 56th floor of Rockefeller Center, so that you could look out on a parity with almost any high-rise that was up there.
Let's come back to why we take pairs. We take pairs so that we have a tuning fork. And we use sequences of pairs so that we have a set of tuning forks and each season will have three tuning forks in a set and with four seasons of a year, we'll have 12 tuning forks. And those 12 tuning forks as a set allow us to give a calibration to a year, so that we're not playing a musical instrument that's out there, but we're playing the instrument of the annual cycle of nature. And so we're tuning our ability to make music, with the periodicity of life. And by pairing a pair of years, we now extend the tunability, the tuning capability, to something that transcends the year, not just a pair of years, but that pair of years now is able to bring into tune much larger structures, not only of the periodicity of time, but to open up so that there is a new kind of time, an historical time. And what we're looking towards is in four more presentations after today, to emerge into the kaleidoscopic, conscious dynamic of history and to appreciate that there we finally come into possession of something that is very rare. How to unhook experience from its karma? How to unhook the action of our images and our feeling, from the devastating causality of connections and to open up possibilities and to open up explorations that would never have existed before? And we will find that history is a seven-dimensional continuum. And with seven dimensions now, one is able to rise in a very powerful soar, beyond the...not only the limitations of time space and dead mentalities, but to bring with one now, the jewels of person, the jewels of art, the jewels of the prismatic forms of aesthetic space, into a play, an amphitheatre, where now the cosmos is available, personally available and personally real. That the cosmos is personal is an enormous scale of realisation. Quite really personal.
There is a deep paradox that occurs when vision is able to come into form: the artist, whoever manages the art of being a person and really makes that prism, that prismatic quality, has a deep paradoxical quality to it. For instance, Henry Moore grew up as a poor miner's son and his father worked all of his life in the mines, grime beyond belief, devastating physical activities. And the one thing he wanted was that none of his children would ever have to do that and especially for his sensitive son Henry, to never have to go down into the mines. And so it's paradoxical that on one of the great, crucial moments of his life he had to go down into the mines. And it worked out like this, that during World War Two, when London was being bombed by the Nazis everyday, to destroy the confidence and the security of the British people, of the children, of the women, of the men, that the only course of action was to give in because, 'We are a devastating power. We will not just kill you, we will grind you, we will smash you.' One of the things that Henry Moore did, he volunteered to go down into the London subways, where the people took refuge from the rocket barrages and the bombings and he sketched all of the people asleep, embalmed like mummies, who were still alive and would come back out. And he made hundreds and hundreds of these sketches of the people of London in the Underground and then he went back to his home in Yorkshire and went into the mines and sketched the miners down in the tunnels, trying to bring the material, the coal, that would make light and heat for the people. Like people in the tunnels in London, like people in tunnels everywhere, in a world that by World War Two, it was evident that the scale of warfare was now extended. That the battlefield was everywhere that one could be and with the advent of the atomic bombs, it was apparent that perhaps even tunnels are not going to be safe. Almost at the same time, Max Ernst maturing. He was just getting started as an artist when he was drafted into the German Army in the First World War. He became an artilleryman, which meant that he wasn't just cowering in the trenches, he had to be operating these huge canons, everyday, for years on end. The sound was so loud and so continuous that it disappeared from hearing, not that you went deaf, but that it became such an enormous white sound, that it could no longer be heard individually, or heard at all. And in this kind of slow motion nightmare that went on for four years and two months, he said later, 'Max Ernst died in August of 1914 and came back to life in November of 1918, determined never to participate in the madness of the world again and to find some other way to live.' He went to France, which had been the object of shelling the French soldiers for all that time. He went to Paris to live and they weren't going to let him in because he was German and so a Frenchman, Paul Éluard, the surrealist poet, gave him his own passport. And so he lived on the passport of a French infantryman that he was shelling for four years and he lived in Paris. And it was so peculiar and he was looking for a different source of vision, of artistic vision. He didn't trust his mind anymore. This is the mind that sends millions of young men to kill other millions of young men, over property, the bounds of which change all the time. So he was in a hotel in France, staring at the floor, when suddenly he got some blank paper, some graphite, lead bars and rushed down to the floor, put the paper on the floor and started taking the graphite, the lead and he invented frottage, where you make patterns out the grains of things like wood and stone, where you put leaves and make patterns out of them. And pretty soon you begin to get all kinds of interesting shapes that are actually the rubbings of natural things brought into a supernatural juxtaposition. And so with frottage, Ernst discovered that there are not accidental sources, but there are those sources that call out below the mentality figuring them out. At the time the term that was used was, 'Unconscious,' or, 'The subconscious.' That the subconscious calls out to us and it is to the sense that we are sensitised to respond to that. No you don't hear sound, no you don't see something that's really there, but intuitively you see what could emerge and help coax it to emerge. You sense the possibility of sound and you evoke to bring it out. And in this, the artistic, visionary sensibility begins to trust that there are other ways to do things. As a reward for Éluard, he illustrated a volume of poems of Éluard, reprinted here. This is a 1997 reprint: Paul Éluard, Poesies, 1913-1926. With little illustrations and the illustrations were again something new, because they were bits of illustration from different sources and he invented collage. So he invented frottage, then he invented collage, then he began to understand that...because he was an enormously creative, great artist, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. We're used to thinking of someone like Salvador Dali as great, Max Ernst is many orders beyond that, he's on level of Cezanne and Matisse. So he began to compose surrealistic novels, almost completely out of collages, with just little bits of prose. This was translated by his last, beautiful wife, Dorothea Tanning, into English and published a few years ago. Here is a...it says, 'And images will descend to the ground.' It looks like a flying saucer coming down. This was done in the mid-1920's. The Hundred Headless Woman. One of her names is Germinal, she is his sister. She does not have a specific identity, she has 100 heads which she does not have to wear at all, or she can wear anyone of them and she is his sister and accompanies him through an enormous range of experiences and materials. Almost by the end of the novel, there's a blank page, there is no image, Zen like. 'Be advised that in the memory of man, the hundred headless woman never had a rapport with the phantom of repopulation, nor will she. She would rather be crushed in the dew and feed upon frozen violets.'
One of the things that changed about Ernst at this time, is that he went to the Far East, with Éluard and his wife Gala, who later became the wife of Salvador Dali. Now, the French were in Indo-China - Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia - and by going there he stepped completely outside of the European experience, out of the amphitheatre of French against Germans, British against Germans, us against them, into a realm where all of that was taken as baggage, but never had a historical hold. Later, he did another surrealistic novel, reprinted in Dover Paperbacks. Its translation is A Week of Kindness. And this has 182 collages in it, some of them extraordinarily mysterious and challenging. All of it is a kind of a novel that is not based upon a linear, nicely crafted, rhetorical way, but is like a bunch of differential conscious facets that have been put into a kind of resonance free-for-all, so that when they come out, they come out different every time you read it. Every time you go through it, your composing creativity will make a different version of what this is. It's not just that you can play with the characters and have different endings, like sophisticated games on the Internet now, this is like real creativity and in this, Moore and Ernst begin to have a convergence. And in that convergence, World War Two, the early part of it, played an enormous role. For Ernst, he was put into a French concentration camp, being a German enemy alien, even though he had been there for decades by that time. Éluard wrote a letter to the president of France, saying, 'Ernst is a very wonderful man, he owns a house now in the south of France, in the Ardèche Valley, which he has built himself, he's decorated himself. He's living a very quiet life. He's my best friend, he's a credit to France and to the world.' So they let him out of that concentration camp and pretty soon he was put into another one. And to try to get better conditions, the commandment of the concentration camp said, 'Oh, you're a famous artist. Paint me a painting and I will make conditions easier for you.' And Max Ernst painted something like The Unrobing of the Bride and he was castigated. 'This is degenerate. No one should paint these kinds of things. How dare you paint these kinds of things?' And just as that was being declared against him in France, the Nazis were declaring his art as degenerate in Germany. So on both sides of World War Two trenches, he was now a degenerate artist and he should be, if not jailed, at least something terrible should happen to him. So he ended up in sort of an artists' hobo camp in the south of France, trying to find some way, he said, 'Just to go west, to get to the United States.' His son, Jimmy Ernst, had a gallery in New York City, he was trying to get to New York. 'How can I get to New York?' No one would issue passports, on one would issue anything to him. When a very wealthy woman from New York, named Peggy Guggenheim, who was scouting places like this to pick up lots of good art cheap, she bought dozens and dozens of his paintings and wrote him out something like $2,000, which for who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars that art was worth? Then decided that she was going to get him into the United States because she would marry him, take him into New York. So when she got him into New York Harbour, to Ellis Island, they said, 'We don't want you. We don't care who you are. We don't want you.' And it took three days of the highest level of manipulation to get him released so that he could go and walk the streets of New York. And the photo that they took of him, on Ellis Island, looking absolutely stunned that all his life he had heard that the United State was free, New York is the greatest cosmopolitan city on the planet. He's going to be OK once he gets there and as soon he got there they arrested him <Laughter> And this look on his face of absolute stunned shock. 'And I thought I was a surrealist! This is surreal.' So in order to cheer him up, she decided that they would take a trip and go across the United States and just get rid of the bad taste. And he was sort of glum until they reached the American South-West, till they got to the western part of Arizona. The desert started to appeal to him and when they got to the Arizona-New Mexico line, they stopped in a trading post and he discovered Kachina dolls. And because he had the chequebook of Peggy Guggenheim, he bought all of the Kachina dolls, every single one of them, 'I want them all.' And he brought them all back to their nice Manhattan apartment and he was dressed in these white furs and had hundreds of Kachina dolls out in his terrace. And he was offering thanks and sacrifice that he had finally found the real America. He was at home in New York as a Zuni shaman and now he had a place to be. And increasingly his whole artistic sensitivity opened up, until he came into contact with a woman, Dorothea Tanning, who was...had just finished a painting of herself as a surrealistic, nude beauty. In this crazy kind of juxtaposition of the world, Ernst happened to be there at her apartment and he said, 'Oh, this painting should be called Birthday.' Later on, her autobiography of their 37 years together was called Birthday. They agreed to leave New York City, to go to Sedona, Arizona, where they would live and once a year they would drive to New York and they would bring all of their paintings, sell them, get the bucks and go back to Sedona. And so they lived that way for about a decade. He built his own house in Sedona. He always liked being primitive after that: just a loincloth, hammer and nails, carpenter's jacket and of course this wild, white hair that started to just shine and shimmer in the Arizona sun. And he finally hooked up electricity and the first thing they did is they bought a phonograph player, to play these RCA Victor classics and he had a little Brahms in the desert and he said, 'It was like heaven to be able to have the best of all possible worlds right there.' He drove an old Model A pickup truck and it made about nine trips back and forth to New York, had troubles all the time. He got very good as a mechanic at just fixing it, 'cause those kinds of vehicles you could fix. You could jack it up, you could work on the engine, you could keep it going.
And when we come next week, we're gonna take a look at the tremendous transformation that happened to Ernst with Dorothea Tanning. That he let the collages and frottages and the surrealistic illustrations and graphics go and more and more began to discover a fount of creativity in his painting. And the great painting that is the dividing line and the mark, was done in 1940, '41 and I'll leave it up here for you to see later and I'll put it in the Art notes. It's called Europe After the Rain. It's as if a sulphuric acid rain had melted the entire landscape, the urban cityscape and almost nothing was left recognisable. When he went back to Europe for the Venice award as the great artist in the early 1950's, he saw cities in Europe still ruined and looked exactly like his painting. The crumbled mounds of endless streets, of bombed and destroyed cities and he realised that he was able to envision, artistically, what was to come. But increasingly his paintings, towards the last 30 years of his life, became extraordinary, visionary. This one on the right will be called The Submerged Rock and the one on the left will be called The World of the Naive. They are from 1965 and 1966. That there is something mysterious being born in man and is going to be colossal, but unseeable, unhearable by those who are deaf and dumb by remaining in the old mentality. Only by being invited and beckoned and evoked to come forth out of that mentality, will the dimensions of this new realm be kaleidoscopically apparent. More next week.