Collage as Jokework: Freud's Theories of Wit as the Foundation for the Collages of Max Ernst

Abstract

The debt of the Surrealist artist Max Ernst to Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious lies not in the 'Freudian' symbolism it contains, but rather in the verbal devices-such as puns, double entendres and allusions-it describes. Ernst translated these verbal devices into ways of organizing visual material. He collaged bits and pieces of preexisting images, engravingsfrom once-popular magazines and books, into new and often powerful visual sentences. The form or the relationship between these elements gave the finished collage or painting, painted according to the collage method, its impact. Often wordplays in the titles of works interacted with the plays in the imagery. Ernst also took from Freud's writings his methods of self-analysis, such as the cultivation of spontaneous responses. as methods of locating subjects that would have a significance both personal and modern. It is hardly a new thought that a Surrealist artist was influenced by the psychological studies of Freud and others. Usually that influence has been described in terms of strange dream-like images, which are seen as symbolic representations of emotional states. Indeed, this is often psychology's main legacy to Surrealist art. But for artists such as Max Ernst (1891-1976), the debt to psychological study is on a more fundamental level, for psychology was able to provide not only a subject but a method of structuring it. An awareness of the rich possibilities of psychological study is evidenced in Max Ernst's earliest post-World War I collages as well as in his later works. His knowledge and use of psychology are not haphazard. From 1910 to 1914 Ernst had been a college student at the University of Bonn, where he studied psychology among other subjects (1). He even worked in a mental hospital. Because Bonn was an intellectually active city at the time, Ernst learned not only the more conventional psychological theories of the day, but also Freud's theories and writings through a friend, Karl Otten, who had been a student of Freud's in Vienna. When Ernst reentered the art world, on completion of his military service, he did not return to the Expressionist group, several of whose key members had been killed in the war. Instead, he developed with Hans Arp and Johannnes Theodor Baargeld the Dada movement in Cologne, and began to explore the possibilities of collage as an expressive medium. He cut apart and combined fragments of engravings from popular 19th- century books, photographs, and even his own drawings. Ernst's Dada collages and paintings and then his Surrealist works were interpretations of the inner life in a modern and irreverent medium replacing the freely painted and more traditional emotional expressions of his college years. In these later works Ernst concerned himself with their almost-literary significance rather than their formal beauty. Penrose observed that the artist's comment, 'ce tableau en trois couleurs elementaires', written under the title on the face of the painting 'Oedipus Rex', was an indication of Ernst's lack of concern with the refinements of colour demanded of con- ventional works of art (2). Ernst's choices of visual symbols and the way in which they were combined were of central significance to his work. Ironically, this meant that form was of greater importance than subject. The form in question here is what Freud refers to in Jokes and Their Relation to the