Collage, painted

Before Celebes, the strange and the dreamlike lived in modern art in two places that had not yet met. One was de Chirico’s metaphysical painting: uncanny, hand-painted scenes of empty plazas, long shadows, and mannequins, full of dread, but plainly invented and plainly painted. The other was Dada photo-collage, including Ernst’s own: machine-creatures scissored out of printed pages and glued together, where the cuts and seams were left obvious on purpose, so that you always knew you were looking at a trick. Dada’s whole stance was disruption. A painted dream that asked you to believeit as a single, coherent, solid scene was not yet anyone’s program.

Here is what Celebes does, and why it matters. Ernst takes the collage operation (the chance collision of unrelated things (a corn-bin, a hose, fish, a headless woman)) and instead of cutting and gluing, he executes it in oil paint, with a smooth, even, photographic finish. The seams vanish. There are no visible cuts, no torn edges; the impossible creature is rendered as solidly and convincingly as if a camera had found it standing on a real plain. The eye, given that deadpan realist finish, accepts the monster as physically there. That is the whole move: the same impossible juxtaposition Dada made out of scissors and glue, now made to look as real as a photograph.

That is the hinge from Dada into Surrealism, the movement, named a few years later, that set out to paint the contents of dreams and the unconscious mind. In Celebes the dream stops being a joke about images and becomes a believable world. The collage-mind stops being scissors and glue and becomes a way of painting.

This is why Celebes is so often called “the first masterpiece of Surrealist painting.” It is a real and widely repeated art-historical judgment, and a critical assessment rather than a date-stamp. Ernst painted this canvas in 1921. Surrealism did not yet exist as a named movement. It was the writer André Breton who founded and named it three years later, in his Surrealist manifesto of 1924. So Celebes predates the movement it is said to launch: often called the first masterpiece of Surrealist painting, though Ernst made it in 1921, three years before Surrealism had a name. It is the proof-of-concept, painted ahead of the theory, and the high Surrealists who followed (Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, René Magritte) all took up its lesson: paint the irrational with hard realist conviction, so the impossible reads as fact.