Free Leonora by Elena Poniatowska

faces of rabbits or dogs or cockerels, or most frequently of a lion, embracing widows and animals in smart suits, creatures who would never be seen together in daily life. The same follows for plants and insects: a woman as a gardenia, a man as an elephant. Everything moves with a hallucinogenic quality. Ferocious and sarcastic, Max Ernst scandalises his viewers. Dürer, Blake and Goya must be turning in their graves to see themselves depicted suckling the Lion of Belfort, his snout buried in the breasts of a hetera, an upmarket prostitute. Max has converted men into murderers, nocturnal bandits, carrion crows, and into priests: unclean animals who violate women. A new and hitherto invisible reality emerges from the surface of his painting, to be explored by his eagle eye.
    Why does this German artist have no respect for them? What harm did they do him, for him to shoot them down in flames in the weekly editions of Une semaine de bonté ? La femme 100 têtes consists in little scraps of papery nonsense which he cuts and arranges to form a profoundly perverse and malevolent whole; nudity would be less lascivious than tight-fitting corsets from which a breast is about to escape. Unveiled women proffer their backsides to a decorated military general, an archbishop, a dandy, to the Sphinx. Max Ernst, king of all the birds, still carries within him a Sleeping Beauty, a Red Queen.
    â€˜So everything can be art, can it?’
    â€˜No, not everything,’ replies Ursula. ‘Max’s art is a real find. As you can see, the least offensive of his prints is this one of a woman riding the waves on her bed. It is a poem made visual. Would you like to sleep on the sea?’
    â€˜It looks like the work of a diabolical child … The idea of anyone but Nanny watching me sleep terrifies me …’
    â€˜The work of art of his that has caused the most scandal is that of the Virgin breast-feeding the Infant Jesus in the presence of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and Max himself. Any ordinary person seeing it for the first time will feel hit between the eyes, and it goes beyond that and confronts the Surrealists themselves.’
    â€˜André Breton looks like a wild animal …’
    â€˜Yes, he is the lion in all his collages.’
    â€˜What does Ernst want to tell us?’
    â€˜His creations are an anti-art, he is rounding on his masters …’
    Max Ernst appropriates from the works of the past and profanes them; inside his mind they become outrageous, he over-paints classical images and in so doing violates them; he exploits them to fire his own inventiveness. Despite her fears, Leonora is enthused; there’s something about Max’s collages that takes her out of herself, and his cruelty terrifies her. He never requests permission, but appropriates, smudges and cuts, mutilates and muddies. Everything is his to do as he wants with. According to Ursula, he once declared: ‘The Venus de Milo has to be torn down from her pedestal.’ He then puts the pieces back together again as if reassembling a chicken before serving up its dismembered parts for dinner.
    â€˜The truth is that I have never dared to search my unconscious for what he has found in his. I hide many images away deep inside me so they won’t discover me. The most I have managed to give Ozenfant is the head of a grackle bird but what Ernst gets up to astounds me. Next to him the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse is a turtle dove. Oh Ursula! I feel surrounded by madness, and I don’t know how to shut the door on it.’
    â€˜You can never close the door, don’t act as if you don’t know as much. It all goes back to the First World War and the imbecility of the powerful. Dadadadadadada.’
    â€˜What’s up with you, Ursula?’
    â€˜I’m imitating the repeat shot of artillery fire or the speeches of the heads of state. In 1920, Jean Arp – a friend of Max’s