From the studio to the Tate

There is no reliable statement by Ernst about Celebes in particular. But there is a load-bearing statement that fits the painting exactly, because the painting iscollage-logic carried into paint: Ernst’s own general definition of collage. He described it as

the systematic exploitation of the coincidental or artificially provoked encounter of two or more unrelated realities on an apparently inappropriate plane, and the spark of poetry created by the proximity of these realities.

The line circulates in several English translations of the same French sentence (you’ll also see “the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane”). They are renderings of one statement, not different claims.

And Ernst was not claiming to have invented the idea. He was generalizing a famous image from the 19th-century French writer who called himself Lautréamont, whose book Les Chants de Maldoror praised something as “beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” That line (two ordinary, unrelated objects forced together on a third surface where neither belongs) is the whole recipe of Celebes: a corn-bin, a hose, and a headless woman, met on a bare plain that suits none of them. Ernst is the painter who turned Lautréamont’s sentence into oil.

The painting’s own travels are a small map of how Surrealism spread. (The provenance, again, is the documented chain of owners from the artist’s hand to now.) Early on it passed to the poet Paul Éluard (1895–1952), Ernst’s close friend and patron, who carried it to Paris around 1921. In 1938, when Éluard sold off much of his collection, it was bought by the English Surrealist painter and collector Roland Penrose (1900–1984), the man who did more than anyone to bring Surrealism to Britain and who later wrote that Ernst gave him the title’s schoolboy-rhyme origin. In 1975 Penrose sold it to the Tate in London, where it hangs today with the accession number T01988. He used the proceeds of that sale to found the Elephant Trust, which still supports artists, named for this very canvas.

What Ernst built in 1921 turned out to be a door. The thing he proved on this one canvas (that you could paint a dream with the deadpan realism that makes the impossible look solid) became the working method of high Surrealist painting. Dalí’s melting clocks, Tanguy’s still alien plains, Magritte’s tidy impossibilities are all paintings that ask you to believe an irrational scene because it is rendered with hard, convincing conviction. They are the children of the move Ernst made when he stopped cutting paper and started painting the dream straight. The Elephant Celebes is a Cologne Dada canvas that turned out to be standing, quietly, on the far side of a line nobody had drawn yet (the line into Surrealism) three years before the line had a name.