The ready-made advertisement, made to dream

For all of the long history of Western painting up to this point, a picture was something an artist made, drew or painted, with the hand as the origin of every mark, working from observation or from imagination. Collage already existed: the Cubists Picasso and Braque had glued bits of newspaper and printed oilcloth into their canvases around 1912 (they called it papier collé, “pasted paper”). But in Cubism the pasted scrap was mostly a fragment, a patch of texture or pattern set into a picture that was still, fundamentally, composed by the painter’s hand. The found material was an ingredient, not the dish.

The Hat Makes the Man does something different in kind. The image is built from ready-made commercial print, illustrations lifted whole from a mail-order catalogue, recombined, not drawn. The “subject” of the picture is mass-produced advertising matter. And the recombination is absurd and figure-making: stacked merchandise becomes a person, glued together with a little painted anatomy and captioned in deadpan pseudo-scientific nonsense. This is the logic of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade (the idea, a few years earlier, that an artist could simply choose a manufactured object, a bottle rack, a urinal, and declare it art) carried up off the gallery floor and into the picture plane.

The hinge is this. Take that same cut-and-paste, that same chance recombination of found commercial images, and read the uncanny figure it produces not as a joke about consumer society but as a glimpse of a dream, and you have walked out of Dada and into Surrealism (the movement, founded in Paris in 1924, of the dreaming unconscious). The mechanism is identical: irreconcilable images forced together on a surface that does not suit them. What changes is the destination. For the Dadaist, the dislocation is iconoclasm, an attack on art and reason. For the Surrealist who comes next, the very same dislocation becomes, in the standard account, a direct manifestation of unconscious thinking, a window onto the desires reason keeps locked away. The Hat Makes the Man stands exactly on that line. It is anti-art collage that has already started to dream.

Ernst said as much about these overpaintings of catalogue and textbook pages. His aim, he wrote, was “to transform what previously had been merely banal pages of advertising into dramas that contained my most secret desires.” Banal pages of advertising; secret desires. That sentence is the whole crossing in miniature: the lowest commercial print, turned into the theater of the unconscious. Within a year Ernst would paint Celebes, a looming dream-monster with a boiler for a body, often called the first masterpiece of Surrealist painting; within four years he would be a founding member of the Surrealist movement in Paris. The road to all of it runs through a page of hats.