The inscription, the sources, and a place in the canon

The line Ernst wrote along the bottom of the sheet is the work’s own statement of itself. In German it reads:

“bedecktsamiger stapel-mensch nacktsamiger wasserformer (‘edelformer’) kleidsame nervatur auch !umpressnerven! (c’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme) (le style c’est le tailleur)”

The museum’s circulating English rendering runs: “seed-covered stacked-up man seedless waterformer (‘edelformer’) well-fitting nervous system also tightly-fitted nerves! (the hat makes the man) (style is the tailor).” That translation flattens what the German is doing. bedecktsamig and nacktsamig are real botanical terms: they mean angiosperm (a covered-seed plant, seeds enclosed in fruit) and gymnosperm (a naked-seed plant, like a conifer).

The common English “seed-covered” and “seedless” loses that covered-seed-versus-naked-seed pun entirely; the line is deliberate fake-botanical nonsense, classifying the stacked hat-men as if they were two species of plant. The English is a translation in circulation, not the literal content and not the title.

The title itself comes from the bracketed French at the end. C’est le chapeau qui fait l’homme (“it is the hat that makes the man”) turns the old cliché “clothes make the man” into something literal and a little sinister: here the man really is the hat, nothing more. And le style c’est le tailleur(“the style is the tailor”) twists the famous saying that style is the man into a flat consumer joke: the style isn’t the person at all, it’s whoever cut the cloth. The caption is the picture confessing what it has done.

Ernst kept returning, in his writing, to what collage actually was. His standard formulation describes it as “the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.”That is the whole method in one line: take two things that have no business together (a hat catalogue and a human figure, a boiler and an elephant), force them onto one surface, and let the shock of the mismatch do the work. (Ernst’s idea here descends from a line he loved by the poet Lautréamont, about the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table; the umbrella line is Lautréamont’s, not Ernst’s, but the taste for the impossible pairing is the same.) The hats and the man are exactly that coupling, and the caption files the result as a new species.

Ernst made it in Cologne in 1920. It is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which bought it in 1935 from the French poet Paul Éluard, an early owner; the museum’s credit line reads simply “Purchase,”meaning it was bought rather than given. (The “© 2017” on the museum’s record is a rights-clearance date, not the date of acquisition.) The little hat-collage has been one of the foundation stones of MoMA’s great holdings of Dada and Surrealism ever since.

A note on the materials, since the records do not all agree. MoMA’s catalogue line gives the medium as gouache, pencil, oil, and ink on cut-and-pasted printed paper on paper; the support at the back is variously recorded as paper, as board, and (in German sources) as cardboard. What is not in doubt is the method: clipped commercial print, stacked and overpainted, on a small mounted sheet.

Because the collage was published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States, which is why we can show it freely. Ernst died in 1976, so the work is still in copyright in Europe(the European term runs for the artist’s life plus seventy years), and European and museum reproductions carry a rights line from the artists’ societies that manage his estate. The image is free where we are, in other words, but not free everywhere.

The sheet itself went on to a quiet kind of fame. Bought by the Museum of Modern Art, it became one of the anchor objects of the collection that, more than any other, taught the postwar English-speaking world what Dada and Surrealism even were: reproduced in the textbooks, hung as a touchstone, taught on MoMA’s own learning pages. The angry little joke a discharged soldier cut out of his father-in-law’s order forms is now a fixed point in the official story of modern art, the place where, by the standard account, the cut-and-paste of protest first tipped over into the cut-and-paste of dream.