A page of hats, scissors, and a brush

Ernst began with a single printed page from a commercial sales catalogue of men’s hats. The catalogue came from his father-in-law, Jacob Straus, a Cologne hat manufacturer, and the page was the ordinary thing such a page always is: neat rows of orderable hat forms (bowlers, top hats, soft felts), each one drawn flat and evenly, the way merchandise is drawn so a customer can pick a model and a size. This is advertising. It is the lowest, most disposable kind of printed image there is. Ernst chose it on purpose, because the gap between “a hat catalogue” and “a work of art” was exactly the gap he wanted to leap.

Working over that page (in MoMA’s accounting, with gouache, pencil, oil, and ink on cut-and-pasted printed paper, mounted on a second sheet), Ernst did three things. First he cut the hats out. Then he stacked them, one on top of another, into tall, teetering vertical towers, four of them across the sheet. Then he reached for a brush.

Between and around the stacked hats, in the gaps the scissors left, Ernst drew and painted smooth tubes, cylinders, and a few cubes, washed in clear blue, red, green, and yellow gouache. These painted shapes do the connecting work. They run through the columns like necks and spines and legs, joining the separate cut hats into single standing things. And that is the moment the trick fires: stack enough merchandise into a vertical pile, wire it together with a bit of painted anatomy, and the eye reads it as a person. The hats become heads and torsos; the tubes become limbs; four piled-up towers of product become four figures standing in a row.

The joke is the whole work. Take the off-the-peg uniform of the respectable bourgeois man (the hat, the single most class-coded thing he wears), pile it up, and you have literally “made the man.”Identity, in Ernst’s deadpan, is just the merchandise piled into a body shape. The figures have no faces, no hands, no selves; they are their hats and nothing else. It is a flat, withering little gag about a society that had decided a man was the sum of what he could be sold, aimed straight at the bourgeoisie that Dada blamed for the war.

There is a second reading running under the first, and it is a reading rather than a fact. The stacked, swelling towers are unmistakably bodily and upright, and the title has long been tied to Sigmund Freud, specifically to Freud’s 1905 book on jokes and the unconscious, in which the hat turns up as a symbol of repressed masculine desire. By that read the consumer gag (you are what you buy) doubles as a sexual one (the hat as a stand-in for what the buttoned-up bourgeois cannot say). Ernst never spelled this out, so it is an interpretation the picture invites, not a meaning he documented. Either way, the figures are absurd, and the absurdity is the point: this is what happens when you build a human being out of an order form.