(jazzy piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the
Museum of Modern Art.
And we're looking at a
painting by Max Ernst,
Two Children Are Threatened
by a Nightingale,
and this isn't a painting
in the traditional sense.
There's stuff in it.
- [Beth] A lot of stuff, actually,
that emerges toward us from the painting.
There's an open gate,
there's a rudimentary house
with some other objects
stuck on top of it.
And there's something
that looks like a knob.
- [Steven] And despite
these toy-like objects
that are nailed into the
surface of the painting,
there are references to
the tradition of painting.
There's a deep recessionary space
that's beautifully expressed
by linear perspective
and by atmospheric perspective,
but tradition pretty much stops there.
- [Beth] Including
objects from everyday life
had been done by Picasso and
Braque about a decade earlier,
but in those paintings we
see forms that still cohere.
What we have here is something
that was very important
to Dadaist artists, and that
is the bringing together
of really disparate objects.
We see the title on this painted frame
and then we see a surface
painted with a thick impasto
in very flat green and two
figures painted in grisailles,
that is painted in grayish tones.
- [Steven] These are both female figures.
The one that's upright seems to be running
holding an enormous knife.
Her hair is flying up behind her,
and so there's a sense of
velocity, a sense of drama
which suggests that she's
either fleeing or chasing.
And it's completely unclear as to which.
- [Beth] And she moves toward
the outside of the painting.
And so if she is running from something
we don't see anything behind her.
And we certainly don't see anything
that she could be running toward.
So we're missing a big
piece of that narrative.
And then this figure who is either asleep
or wounded or dead in this green field.
There is a feeling of danger.
Perhaps the woman on
the left with the knife
is reacting in some way to
that figure on the ground.
- [Steven] But they're far enough away
that they're also disassociated.
And that's the confusing part.
The woman with the
knife is running by her.
She's not running at, or from
the figure on the ground.
- [Beth] I think that you
raise an important point
that they're not near one another,
but we really can't judge
distance here at all.
That wall moves too quickly
back into that space.
Those forms in the background,
what looked like a wall,
a triumphal arch, and behind
that a domed structure
perhaps with a minaret
or a wall around it,
how far away are those?
How far away other
figures from one another?
The depth of that green field
is impossible to determine.
And then these objects
are really close to us.
- [Steven] I always think
of this as metaphorical,
that that ancient Roman arch
is the distance of history.
And the domed architecture
reminds me at least
of Renaissance paintings that
show Jerusalem at a distance.
And so the distance is not only physical,
but perhaps historical or metaphorical.
- [Beth] And we shouldn't forget about
what is perhaps the most
menacing figure in the painting,
the figure who alights on the roof
as though he's been flying
with just his right toes carrying a child,
and like the female
figure carrying the knife,
reaches out his arm and moves toward
outside the frame of the painting.
- [Steven] In fact, he
almost seems to be trying
to reach or touch the knob
that is physically attached to the frame.
And like the figures below
the child and the man
are painted in grisailles,
which some art historians
have noted reminds them
of Ernst's earlier collages,
where he would cut out
black and white photographs or drawings
and paste them together.
There is a fifth figure
also painted in grisailles.
And that's a bird,
presumably the nightingale.
- [Beth] The title tells us that this is
about the menacing of the nightingale,
this bird, which has a beautiful song
and which is supposed to seduce us,
does the very opposite here.
We have this immediate sense of things
that don't belong together,
suggesting a dream.
- [Steven] I would say that in this image
things don't come together
in an aggressive way
that is a reminder of
the art that was made
by groups of artists in
Paris where this was made,
in Cologne, where Ernst had come from,
but also in New York, in Zurich, Berlin.
And in all of these places,
artists were responding
to the devastation of the First World War,
of its uselessness, of its violence.
- [Beth] The absurdity of the war,
the use of technology in that war.
This is also the time of Freud,
who Ernst was very interested in,
the idea of the unconscious,
of things that can't be controlled.
And there are forms here
that suggest the erotic
or sexual meaning that would have been
similar to the kinds of readings of Freud.
So what are the figures
here afraid of precisely?
- [Steven] Ernest went
into the war in 1914
and didn't come out until the war's end.
He served both on the Western Front
and on the Eastern Front.
And he was wounded when artillery
that he was manning recoiled.
He had firsthand knowledge
of this devastation.
- [Beth] And when he came
back from the war to Cologne,
he came back to a city that
was occupied by British forces
and political and
economic chaos in Germany.
- [Steven] And yet, despite
this unprecedented violence,
society was trying to
normalize what had happened
and the Dadaists refused that.
And so Ernst does seem to be drawing on
his interest in Freud and
especially the interest
in the irrational of the unconscious,
of our state below our socialized beings.
What made the work possible?
(jazzy piano music)