The Optical Unconscious

It is difficult not to wonder how Mayor Giuliani's decency committee might have dealt with Max Ernst's The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E. and the Artist, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Ernst retrospective through July 10, had some whistleblower from the Christian Coalition solicited the mayor's opinion of the painting. The enthroned Virgin has been spanking the Holy Boy's bare bottom vigorously enough to have knocked His halo to the ground, while three avant-gardists--the writer and theorist André Breton, the poet Paul Éluard and Ernst himself--coolly avert their eyes from the scene, which somehow has not been depicted in canonical narratives of Jesus's childhood. New York has been spared the all-too-familiar scenario of pious poster bearers, outraged politicians, defenders of artistic freedom citing the First Amendment, and the learned presence of art historians, theologians and perhaps psychologists explaining to viewers of The Charlie Rose Show that the Holy Boy, in the nature of His humanity, must more than once have tried his Mom's patience. But I doubt Ernst would have been pleased by the somber spirit of cultural duty and aesthetic appraisal with which his art is being approached at the Met. No one loved a good public dust-up more than Ernst and his Dadaist comrades, who used art to assail a society they held responsible for the pointless slaughter of millions in World War I.

In his Notes pour une biographie, Ernst wrote:

The Dadas shared the desire to denounce mercilessly the infernal conditions which idiotic patriotism, supported by human stupidity, had imposed upon the era in which they were condemned to live. France's military victory was as odious to the Dadas of Paris as Germany's military defeat was warmly cheered by Dadas on either side of the Rhine.

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