The hat makes the man

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The hat makes the man
Max Ernst , 1920
Gouache, pen, ink, oil; Overpainting a print and collage on cardboard
35.2 x 45.1 cm
Museum of Modern Art , New York

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

The hat makes the man (the style comes from the suit) is the title of a small-format work in collage and mixed media on paper and cardboard from 1920 by Max Ernst (1891–1976). It was created in Cologne and became one of the most popular works from the artist's early Dada phase. It is under the title The Hat Makes the Man in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

description

Brochure from a Berlin gentleman's outfitter with hats, 1910

For this work, Max Ernst used the printing template for a sales catalog of his father-in-law, the Cologne hat manufacturer Jacob Straus, on which different hat shapes were shown for an order. Ernst had headed his father-in-law's hat molding factory in Cologne for six weeks . By overpainting this print template, tower-like figures were created.

The hat shapes consist of colored tubes and cubes in shades of blue, red, green and yellow that fill the spaces between the printed hats. The right tower figure also shows two legs in this way , the one next to it two necks . The tower figure on the far left consists of cut-out hats glued to the template and partially set against one another, closed to form the tower by a trapezoidal surface in black. All figures end at the head with a hat. The contours and shadows are accentuated by pen and black ink. The background is painted over with opaque white; if you look closely you can still see the printed hats hidden underneath.

The sheet is trimmed according to the composition and stuck on tinted cardboard. At the bottom right next to the signature under a hat foot - max Ernst - the following handwritten entry is inserted on the cardboard: bedecktsamiger stapel- / Mensch nacktsamiger Wasserformer / (“noble former”) cleavage nerve / also /! Umpressnerven! / (c'est le chapeau qui fait l'homme) / (le style c'est le tailleur) .

interpretation

The particular popularity and charm of the work are attributed to the abundance of possible associations. The hat that makes the man refers to similar proverbs like “clothes make the man ” or “C'est le ton qui fait la musique”.

The words "nerve strands" and "umpressnerven" suggest to perceive the slightly bent tower figures as ridiculous creatures with a manly tailor-made hat, through "noble formers" and a "dressy nerves". This perception is coupled with psychoanalysis and its established metaphors for sexual characteristics, for example in family trees, but also in biological terminology ("naked seed waterformer", "covered seed stack man"). Sigmund Freud identified the hat as a necessary accessory of the bourgeois man with an everyday symbol for suppressed desires in his study The Joke and its Relationship to the Unconscious in 1905 . The association of the phallic-looking hat stacks alludes to this symbolism and thus refers to the content of the desires hidden under the hat.

classification

Page 3 of the catalog for Max Ernst's first exhibition in Paris, 1921

As a feature of the sedate bourgeoisie who were concerned about security, the hat was among other things a target of attack by the Dadaists , while the cubes and tubes of Ernst's hat figures declared cubism , the leading artistic style of contemporary modernism, to be the proverbial old hat .

Max Ernst, the main representative of Cologne Dada , had corresponded with the French poet Paul Éluard (1895–1952) and the writer André Breton (1896–1966), the two leading intellectuals of the Dada movement in Paris , since 1919 . The Éluard couple visited Max Ernst and his wife Luise in Cologne in autumn 1921 , before Ernst moved to Paris alone the following year and lived with the Éluards.

As a result of his acquaintance with Éluard and Breton, Max Ernst sent a selection of collages, objects, drawings and paintings from Cologne to Paris in 1921 in order to have his first solo exhibition Exposition Dada Max Ernst in the Au Sans Pareil gallery at 37 avenue Kléber , organized by the Paris Dadaist Circle in May of the same year. The collage The hat makes the man was there and is listed in the catalog of the Paris exhibition under the title C'est le chapeau qui fait l'homme .

Provenance

The hat makes the man collage was sold by Paul Éluard to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1935 . Éluard had acquired them - according to the museum's indication of origin - from Max Ernst. The catalog of the Paris Max Ernst exhibition Exposition Dada Max Ernst from 1921 mentions another first owner, a Monsieur PS , who can, however, be seen as fictional and part of a Dadaist staging for the vernissage .

appropriation

In 2004, the British artist Damien Hirst constructed a sculpture made of painted bronze and iron entitled The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) . He quoted Ernst's work by depicting four “guarded” figures arranged on three pallets.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ulrich Bischoff: Max Ernst 1891–1976. Beyond Painting (1988) p. 16
  2. ↑ Susanne Lücke, Max Ernst "Euclid": a mental picture puzzle . A. Bongers, 1994, ISBN 3764704373 , p. 20.
  3. ^ Ulrich Bischoff: Max Ernst 1891–1976. Beyond Painting (1988) p. 16; 18th
  4. ↑ Explanation of pictures from the Museum of Modern Art, New York [1]
  5. ↑ Exposition Dada Max Ernst. Paris: Au sans pareil, 1921 , sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu, accessed October 23, 2012
  6. ^ Ulrich Bischoff: Max Ernst 1891–1976. Beyond Painting (1988) p. 18
  7. ^ Lothar Fischer: Max Ernst , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1979, pp. 41, 45-47
  8. ↑ Robert Lebel, Michel Sanouillet, Patrick Waldberg: Surrealism. Dadaism and Metaphysical Painting . Cologne 1987, p. 116
  9. ↑ Catalog Exposition Dada Max Ernst (Paris, 1921), No. 4
  10. ↑ Provenance reference of the Museum of Modern Art, New York [2]
  11. ↑ Page 4 in the catalog Exposition Dada Max Ernst (1921) contains under catalog number 4 after the title C'est le chapeau qui fait l'homme the reference "appartient à MPS", German: belongs to M (onsieur) PS [3]
  12. ↑ MPS is a reference to Philippe Soupault who was present at the opening of the exhibition on May 2, 1921 ; the other owner abbreviations shown in the catalog also refer to other Parisian Dadaists who had staged a bogus court hearing for the vernissage, for which Soupault, among others, had taken on a role. For the opening of the vernissage and the participants, cf. Robert Lebel, Michel Sanouillet, Patrick Waldberg: Surrealism. Dadaism and Metaphysical Painting . Cologne 1987, p. 116; see also photo of the opening : René Hilsum, Benjamin Péret, Serge Charchoune, Philippe Soupault on top of the ladder with a bicycle under his arm, Jacques Rigaut (upside down), André Breton and Simone Kahn; Max Ernst was not there.
  13. ^ The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) ( memento March 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive ), damienhirst.com, accessed on November 3, 2012

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