Merchandise that adds up to a man

The work is tiny. It is about fourteen inches tall by eighteen inches wide (roughly 13⅞ by 17¾ in, the size of a place mat), and it is a flat sheet of paper, not a canvas. It reads landscape, wider than it is tall, and across that small horizontal field stand four vertical figures in a loose row, like specimens lined up for inspection. This is something you could pick up in both hands, not a wall-sized statement, and its modesty is part of its nerve.

Top to bottom, each figure is a column of men’s hats (bowlers, toppers, soft felts) cut from the catalogue and piled one on the next into a teetering tower. There is no anatomy in them at all; there is merchandise. The stacks lean and wobble rather than stand square, so the “men” look unstable, as if the whole product line might topple in a breeze. The hats themselves give away exactly what they are: flat, evenly lit, repetitive, rendered in the uniform style of commercial product illustration. That found, mechanical look is not a flaw. It is the announcement that these are advertising images, lifted whole, not things anyone sat down and drew.

Between the cut hats run the painted tubes, smooth drawn cylinders that act as necks, spines, and legs and fuse the stacks into single standing bodies. These are the only hand-made parts of the picture, and they are tinted in clear blue, red, green, and yellow, so the grey catalogue hats appear to be built from, or wearing, bright cylindrical torsos. The contrast does the work: the hats are dull, flat, mechanical; the joins are rounded, bodily, vivid. The seam between the found object and the painted limb is where the figure actually comes to life, which is to say it comes to life in exactly the place Ernst added by hand.

Along the lower edge, in Ernst’s own handwriting, runs the caption, not a wall label added later but part of the work, the punchline written onto the picture. It is a line of deadpan, fake-scientific German that labels the stacked figures as if they were plant specimens in a botanical field guide, followed by a bracketed French proverb. The figures have been filed, classified, named in a register, as though a catalogue of merchandise were a catalogue of species. The flat bureaucratic deadpan is the comedy.

At full-sheet scale the argument is plain. Four men, and not one of them is anything but the hats he is wearing. The picture has reached into a sales catalogue, pulled out the most ordinary objects it could find, and proven that you can build a person out of them, which is, of course, a way of saying the person was never more than the objects to begin with.