Beach Boys, Part 1: War in the sand,
Max Ernst finds a turtle
Never one to malinger creatively, Max Ernst built himself this Giant Tortoise while loafing through a few summers in Great River, on Long Island’s south shore. It was the last half of the 1940s.
His chief companion was fellow artist Dorothea Tanning but, then as now, there was a whole crowd of creative types kicking back among the dunes. New York City was just at the end of the island, a short train hop away, life here was cheap, and who doesn’t like being a kid again at the seaside?
Or was it Amagansett where Ernst lived? They’re certainly not the same place, quite a distance apart in fact. Yet among the many online accounts of Long Island’s bustling arts community, when it comes to Max Ernst they hop between little Great River and tiny Amagansett, a village whose name is Montaukett for “place of good water” — not the rivers or the sea but a fresh inland source.
Ernst had spent his first summer in America on Long Island, with the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim who’d bought so many of his paintings and helped him get clear of the Nazis and move to the States.
He married her, but by 1943 that was over, and in ‘46 he would make Tanning his fourth wife in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills. The Ernsts, pictured together here, settled for awhile in Sedona, Arizona, before returning east.
I looked into the circumstances of its creation, found out more about the Long Island art colony, spotted Dali among the dunes, got to know the Murphys and spent time with them and Picasso and old Scott Fitzgerald on the Riviera, and got back to the Hamptons in time for a dangerous ride with Jackson Pollock. Then came a postcard from Georgia O’Keefe, so I joined her in New Mexico, only to discover that she’d been a student at William Merrit Chase’s summer school in the Shinnecock Hills of Long Island! The tortoise has covered a lot of ground, all to be chronicled here in the next little while.
Ernst, who was 52 in 1943, turned the garage of their rented house in Great River or Amagansett into a workshop where he could transform all sorts of bits and pieces into sculptures. Among these were a few born of necessity: He’d sent a postcard to art dealer Julian Levy in New York complaining that he couldn’t find a chess set anywhere on the island.
So Levy came out for the summer and shacked up with him and Tanning. He didn’t bring a chess set, though — they made their own.
While Ernst, the collage king, fashioned chess men out of bits and pieces found around the house — as well as stark sculptures like the one shown here, “The King Playing with His Queen” — Levy, who been taught the game by Marcel Duchamp during a trans-Atlantic crossing they’d shared in late 1926, made a set out of plaster moulded in the eggshells from breakfast. Their rounded bases were perfect for nesting in the sand so they could play on the beach, on a board drawn by finger.
Did a sea tortoise come by to watch? Unlikely in these climes, but Ernst invented one using a pair of spoon-shaped forms for its head. On the surface of the shell are grooves that imitate the veins (so I read) on the big leaves of the Seibold plantain lily common in southern France, providing a clue, along with the the animal’s famed longevity, to what Ernst was contemplating — the cycle of life.
In early May this year, Sotheby’s sold this piece as “Grand Tortue” — one of an edition of 12 cast in 1998 — for $517,000. That would buy a lot of chessmen.
Had you known who these people were, or who they were about to become in history’s weft, It would have been astonishing to stroll along the beach and come across Ernst and Levy meditating over their weird pawns in the sand, or Ernst and Duchamp (who really knew the game), or Ernst and Robert Motherwell (who joined the clash of surrealist knights later). They were all at play on this stretch of shore. Atlantic Avenue is in the foreground.
You’d wonder what was being plotted on the calm little island so close to the great metropolis, especially if you didn’t know who Ernst was and heard him speaking German. In the summer of 1942 a German U-boat dropped four saboteurs off on this very beach. They buried a stash of explosives and got as far as the train station in Montauk before they were picked up. A mirthless chess game by the surf could have looked like another conspiracy in progress.
Just down the shore in Hampton Bays in 1943, André Breton was summering at a rented cottage and riding the train back and forth from the city while writing his epic poem “The General States”, which features the line, “There will always be a wind-borne shovel in the sand of dreams.”
At the cottage were his estranged wife, Jacqueline Lamba, a one-time cabaret dancer in the process of becoming an (obscure) surrealist painter, and her lover, the sculptor David Hare. Breton had the dubious pleasure of watching them sauntering along the beach together in the nude. Lamba is shown here with an “exquisite corpse” montage she made with Breton and Yves Tanguy a few years earlier. (There’s a link to more exquisite corpses in the “Call For Help” menu on the left.)
In 1953, with Tanning, Ernst returned to Europe for good, dying in Paris in 1976 on the eve of his 85th birthday and joining the other greats at Pere Lachaise Cemetery.
Three years after that, Dorothea Tanning finally returned to New York, where she will celebrate her 98th birthday on August 25. She paints less now but writes a great deal, and in 2001 published her memoirs, “Between Lives: An Artist and Her World”.
Her 1942 self-portrait “Birthday”, shown here, remains her most famous painting, and although Salon.com headlined a 2002 interview with her “Oldest living surrealist tells all”, she had this to say about it:
“I still believe in the surrealist effort to plumb our deepest subconscious to find out about ourselves, but please don’t say I’m carrying the surrealist banner. The movement ended in the ’50s and my own work had moved on so far by the ’60s that being a called a surrealist today makes me feel like a fossil!”
Long Island’s artist colony never died either (although Tanning thinks poorly of art today, finding it too often derivative, dumbly dada and deliberately provocative). Who’s going to disagree? Nevertheless, the island has a reputation to try and uphold.
It struggles to do so in Part 2.
