Revolution by Night

The blind man rocks a pretty child

The doe with all her fauns slips by

The dwarf observes with saddened pose

How Harlequin magically grows

Apollinaire, Twilight (Last verse), 1913

 Max Ernst, Revolution by Night, 1923 

Max Ernst (1891-1976) was the son of a teacher for blind and deaf children from Cologne. His father also was an amateur painter who once painted Max in the character of the infant Jesus. Seeing a Van Gogh exhibition inspired him to become a painter, but the First World War, in which Ernst - like Apollinaire - served as an artillery engineer, radicalised him. On his discharge, he joined the dada movement, attacking militarist Germany in darkly witty, enigmatic collages. The French poet André Breton organised an Ernst show in Paris in 1921; Breton rejected dada in favour of his own movement, surrealism, taking Freud's idea of the unconscious as a critique of rational bourgeois society.

 Neo Rauch, Father, 2007

The figure carried by the bowler-hatted man is generally accepted to be a self-portrait; it has Ernst's features. The bowler-hatted man is a portrait of Ernst's moustachioed father. Ernst - who was a vivid reader of Hegel, Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Freud -  thought of his father as a fool. He was not just a Sunday painter, but one with a heavy academic style. Ernst's entire career was a rejection of the middle-class idea of art for which his father stood.  A staunch Catholic, Ernst's father later denounced his son's work.

Max Ernst, The Virgin punishing Jesus in front of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and the painter, 1926

And yet it is his father who takes on the role of the Virgin Mary in this Pieta, a representation of the cradling of the dead Christ by his mother. Here the child is not dead but on the verge of sleep, about to be carried up to bed. Father and son are at the bottom of a staircase on which a bearded figure, his head bandaged, sleepwalks. 

 Apollinaire with bandaged head, March 1916

This figure has been interpreted as a portrait of the French poet and critic Apollinaire, wounded in the head in the first world war. Max Ernst and Apollinaire met in Paris in 1913. It might well be that Ernst's Pieta was inspired by Apollinaire's Twilight - The blind man rocks a pretty child. And young Max's classical Roman hairstyle is certainly a reference to de Chirico's famous portait of Apollinaire:

 Giorgio de Chirico, Portrait prémonitoire de Guillaume Apollinaire, 1914

The Pieta in Renaissance art is an image of maternal love. In Ernst's painting, the father becomes a mother. The son, instead of raging against him in the Oedipal drama familiar to Ernst as a student of Freud, becomes as passive as a corpse. The father in his bowler hat, at once phallic and stultifying, has downcast eyes; he too is passive, an automaton. The funnel on the wall appears to be a communications device to take orders from the unconscious. It is floppy, another image of the phallus softened. The revolution here is not one fought across barricades, but a dreamy one in which barricades disintegrate and the boundaries of identity dissolve.

Arturo Nathan

 Arturo Nathan, Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes, 1925

 

Arturo Nathan, born in 1891 in Trieste, a city that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, was the eldest child of a rich and cosmopolitan Jewish family. Like his father, a merchant who was born in India and had lived in China, he was a British subject. His mother, Alice Luzzatto, was from Trieste. Nathan lived in the city until 1911, attended the Austro-Hungarian lyceum, and was taught in German (he read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant). After earning a degree in classical studies, he was forced to relinquish his passion for philosophy to follow in his father’s footsteps, embarking on a career in commerce that took him first to London and then Genoa.

Arturo Nathan, Costa Ghiacciata con rovine, 1929

During the Great War he served in the British army in England. A fervent pacifist, he stated that he had only finished the third grade and, as a result, he was assigned menial jobs. In 1920 he returned to Trieste, but became seriously depressed. Consequently, the following year he went into psychoanalysis with Edoardo Weiss, a young doctor who had studied with Freud and encouraged him to take up painting as a form of therapy. 

 Arturo Nathan, Solitary Statue, 1930

 

In the early 1920s Nathan, a self-taught artist, befriended Leonor Fini (who was born in Argentina but grew up in Trieste) and Carlo Sbisà, and began to frequent Trieste’s intellectual circles, where he met notables such as Umberto Saba and Italo Svevo. In 1925 he went to Rome to meet Giorgio de Chirico: the artist’s works made a deep impression on Nathan, who continuously took up the master’s iconographic motifs from then on. De Chirico was equally impressed with Nathan and attempted - in vain -  to have him invited to participate in the first Novecento exhibition curated by Margherita Sarfatti in Milan in 1926. 

 Arturo Nathan, Untitled, c. 1930

 

In 1926 Nathan took part in the Tre Venezie art exhibitions in Padua and showed his works at the Venice Biennale, returning in 1928, 1930, 1932 and 1936. He also participated in important group exhibitions of Italian painting staged internationally. In January 1929 Nathan staged his first and only solo show, along with Leonor Fini and Carlo Sbisà, in Milan at Vittorio Barbaroux’s Galleria Milano. He also entered works in the 1st and 2nd Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale in Rome (1931 and 1935). The first monograph on the artist, written by Jacques Girmounsky, was published in French in 1935 and was followed by Umbro Apollonio’s in 1936. 

 Arturo Nathan, The Exiled, 1928

 

During this period Nathan also participated in important collective exhibitions on Italian painting in Barcelona (1929), Vienna (1933) and Budapest (1936). When Italy entered the war in 1940, Nathan was banished to the Marche, remaining there until the summer of 1943. He was then sent to the concentration camp of Carpi and deported to Germany in 1944, first to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen and then Biberach, where he died in November of that year.