It is always about sex, except when it is about sex

Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism and a bit of astrology: Analyzing "Les Hommes n'en sauront rien" from Max Ernst

This painting by Ernst measures 803 × 638 mm and belongs to the Tate collection.

Geometric shapes, legs, a moon, a desert landscape, a hand, a whistle, and a black background fading into white. It's a sort of painted collage arising from a combination of elements that appear unrelated. At first glance, the scene seems absurd.

Taking anthropomorphic figures and juxtaposing them with common everyday objects, then placing them in a different context without necessarily imbuing them with meaning or sense, were the main characteristics of the Dadaist art movement (Waldman, 1975). This avant-garde art movement emerged as a reaction to World War I. During this period, societies were in disarray, and intellectuals were questioning traditional values and beliefs. Thus, this movement was a protest against bourgeois society, logic, reason, aestheticism, and against elements that had hitherto perpetuated the idea of high culture (Bottinelli, K., & Laxton, S., 2018). The displacement of the object from its normal context was the Dadaist response to conventional pictorial narrative (Waldman, 1975).

This characteristic of juxtaposed objects within an apparently irrational context, is also common in Surrealism. However one of the major differences between Surrealism and Dadaism is that Surrealist works are imbued with intellectual content (Hinton, 1975). For this reason, I would classify this painting as a Surrealist painting, because as we will see in this analysis, the elements in this painting are deliberately arranged and not randomly placed.

Max Ernst, like many artists of his time, did not attend art school. Painting was something he inherited from his father Philipp Ernst, who painted in an amateur academic style. Max Ernst, imitating him, also painted at home, learning this profession by osmosis. Ernst studied German, philosophy, Romance languages, and the history of art at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bonn between 1910 and 1914. During that time, he also attended seminars on ancient and contemporary philosophy, Flemish, Dutch, and French painting, and became familiar with literary works by Goethe, Holderlin, Novalis, von Arnim, Heine, Jean Paul, Grabbe, Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, and Baudelaire. Thanks to his studies, Ernst possessed a deep understanding of these symbols, and his paintings, like this one, are laden with intellectual content. That is to say, each element has a meaning.

During his Dadaist period, Ernst introduced words into his paintings not only through titles or in the form of poems but also by placing them within his paintings. In this painting, dedicated to André Breton, the father of Surrealism, the text also plays an important role. On one hand, we have the title "Les Hommes n'en sauront rien" in English "Of this Men shall Know Nothing", which leads us to ask, what do men not know or shall know? What does the title mean, and how is it related to the content? These questions I leave open to the reader.

On the other hand, we find a poem, which was written by Max Ernst himself in French, accompanying this work. Although it is behind the canvas and not visible to the general public, this poem gives us the key to interpreting the symbolism of the elements within this painting.

«  LES HOMMES N'EN SAURONT RIEN Le croissant (jaune et parachute) empêche que le petit sifflet tombe par terre. Celui-ci, parce qu'on s'occupe de lui, s'imagine monter au soleil. Le soleil est divisé en deux pour mieux tourner. Le modèle est étendu dans une pose de rêve. La jambe droite est repliée (mouvement agréable et exact) La main cache la terre. Par ce mouvement la terre prend l'importance d'un sexe. La lune parcourt à toute vitesse ses phases et éclipses. Le tableau est curieux par sa symétrie. Les deux sexes se font équilibre. à André Bretontrès amicalement Max Ernst »

"The crescent (yellow and parachutic) stops the little whistle falling to the ground.

The whistle because people are taking notice of it, thinks it is climbing to the sun.

The sun is divided into two so that it can spin better.

The model is stretched out in a dreaming pose. The right leg is bent (a pleasant exact movement).

The hand hides the earth. Through this movement the earth takes on the importance of a sexual organ.

The moon runs through its phases and eclipses with the utmost speed.

The picture is curious because of its symmetry."

and dedicated to Andre Breton.

Max Ernst

Symbols and Metaphors

At the top of the painting lies a circle with three colors: the outline is orange, the center divided in half by blue and black. Thanks to Ernst's poem, we know this represents the sun. The sun, as a symbol, has held significance in the mythologies of many civilizations, associated with gods and viewed as the creator and sustainer of shared life. In Western mythology, ancient Greece depicted it as Helios, often associated with Apollo.

Beneath the sun hangs a yellow crescent moon upside down (resembling a croissant or parachute, as the poem names it). A waxing crescent, along with the color yellow, is often a symbol of fertility and/or madness. For alchemists, this inverted moon represented an eclipse, signifying the union of the sun and the moon.

From the moon dangle two pairs of legs: one male, one female, intertwined through penetration. Later, I'll return to this visual element and its analysis. But a copulating couple suspended in space, typically represented alongside the sun and the earth, was, for alchemists, a symbol of coincidentia oppositorum. They sought the Philosopher's Stone, believing it could be obtained through the union of the Sun and the Moon. This union is represented not only by the couple but also by the upside down moon.

From the upper circle extend thin white lines, threads supporting a pair of geometric figures. These threads hold a whistle, preventing it from falling to the ground, or rather, as the poem suggests, aiding its journey to the sun. The whistle could represent a phallus aspiring to reach the sun, traditionally associated with masculine characteristics. Alternatively, it could symbolize man aspiring to reach the "Philosopher's Stone."

A circle in the center, the same shape but smaller than the sun, represents the earth. The earth symbolizes life and death. Above it rests a hand with half a glove, resembling the posture of the Venus Pudica, and the circle it covers could be a reference to the vagina. The Earth-vagina is surrounded by other three circles. If the earth is at the center, this could be a geocentric representation according to Ptolemaic cosmology. If that would be the case, two of the circles there are the sun and the moon.

The third circle (the white one), according to Hinton's analysis of this work, could be Mercury, ruling Gemini and possessing a dual hermaphroditic nature strongly associated with the moon. Mercury is also represented by twins, which in ancient societies are continually associated with the moon and the sun, elements present in this work. It could also symbolize the unconscious due to the fluid and dynamic nature of Mercury.

These celestial bodies represented by circles cast shadows, their shape revealing that they are not circles but cones seen from above. Given the sexual charge of this work, as we'll see later, these shapes could well allude to the phallus.

At the bottom, the ground is brown with a reddish tinge, resembling sculptor's clay. In the center lie unrecognizable forms, which from afar could be mountains or parts of the body. In ancient societies, the dried bones and viscera of chiefs symbolized the strength and fertility of the tribe. However, the aridity of the landscape rather evokes death.

The background is a gradient of two colors. The upper half is black, fading through various shades of gray to white. Night, darkness preceding light. This horizontal division divides the painting into two opposites. While if the painting is divided in half with a vertical line, it appears quite symmetrical, as indicated by the German painter in the poem accompanying this work.

A set of opposites coexist in harmony and perfect balance within this painting: night and day, light and darkness, sun and moon, life and death, earth and space. For the alchemists, the key to the Great Arcanum, Harmony, lies in balance, and balance persists through analogy from contradictions. For them, the secret of perpetual motion and the essence of the Philosopher's Stone was the balance of two binaries. This is what Ernst could be representing in this painting full of conjunctions of opposites that maintain the balance of the world and, in this case, support the whistle. This painting could be Max Ernst's version of yin and yang.

Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Freud and Schreber

In addition to Dadaism, Breton also drew heavily on Freud's psychoanalytic theories. Freudian psychoanalysis theorizes that unconscious thoughts and motivations are the underlying causes of human behavior, rooted in primitive impulses toward sex and aggression. Freud proposed and used methods such as dream interpretation, free association, and hypnosis to access the unconscious and reveal the mind's conflicts. These Freudian techniques were employed in Surrealist artistic practice (Bottinelli, K., & Laxton, S., 2018).

For Breton and the Surrealist movement, imagination was of paramount importance. Dreams were granted the same importance as wakefulness, making the moments spent dreaming equally significant as those in reality. Surrealism also questioned traditional distinctions between sanity and madness. Madness was seen as a way to access different perspectives of the given world and was thus revalued. Dreams and madness were two means of liberating the imagination and through them, Surrealists believed they could create pure images of the spirit, encompassing all that could be and all that could be created.

On one hand, Ernst himself claimed to suffer from hallucinations that initially appeared as banal images but, upon closer inspection, transformed into dreams revealing his deepest desires (Hinton, G., 1975). On the other hand, Ernst also drew on Freudian theories, which he studied extensively. He read works such as "The Interpretation of Dreams" and "Wit and It Relation to the Unconscious" (Drost, J., 2005).

"Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" is a book published in 1903 by Daniel Paul Schreber, a significant figure who was appointed President of the Senate at the Dresden Higher Regional Court at the height of his career in 1893, but who suffered at that time from paranoid schizophrenia. Freud analyzed Schreber’s case through this writings and published his analysis in 1911. There are several parallels between Schreber's hallucinations and this painting, suggesting that Max Ernst may have read Schreber's case and based his work on these texts (Hinton, G., 1975).

Schreber had a heliocentric fixation, which could be represented by the sun at the top of this painting. For Freud, the sun symbolized the father, who was the source of Schreber's problems and the center of his delusions. Schreber also had delusions that parts of his body were being removed by rays and were disappearing. The figures in the painting’s landscape might represent Schreber's disintegrating body parts. Additionally, Schreber had an obsession with stones, which he believed symbolized children and thought men originated from stones, similar to the myth of Deucalion (Hinton, G., 1975). The figures in the landscape could also represent men being born from the earth.

However, the most striking similarity between this painting and Schreber's hallucinations is the following: "[Schreber] imagined himself as 'floating in voluptuousness' [he] wrote: …’I have to imagine myself as a man and a woman in one person having intercourse with myself.’ (Freud, 1911). This painting seems to illustrate this hallucination, as a copulating couple in space is one of the central elements of this work.

Schreber had doubts about his gender and, within his delusions, saw himself transforming into a woman. For this reason, Freud diagnosed him with the castration complex.

From Psychoanalysis to Feminism

In "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), Freud divided human sexual development into five stages. The third stage he called the phallic phase. During this phase, which occurs between the ages of three and six, boys and girls begin to develop different sexual identities as they become aware of their genital differences. While girls feel a sense of lacking something and develop penis envy towards their male counterparts, boys fear losing their penis and becoming passive like a woman. Freud named this the castration complex.

Through his theories, Freud suggested that gender roles were formulated and assigned by the unconscious mind and that each individual adopted the gender corresponding to their sexual organs. Thus, Freud believed that the division between men and women was not culturally conceived but had a biological basis (Bottinelli, K., & Laxton, S., 2018).

Freud’s theories contributed to justifying and perpetuating the idea of women as inferior to men. At that time, women continued to have secondary roles, being passive and powerless. Women served either to produce children and thus preserve the male lineage or to satisfy men. Additionally, it was believed that women were inherently incompetent on their own, unable to be independent, and should be the physical possession of men.

This patriarchal structure was also propagated by Surrealism, which was based on Freud’s psychoanalysis. Breton wrote on his Manifestoes of Surrealism: “And anyway, isn't what matters that we be the masters of ourselves, the masters of women, and of love too? […] Man proposes and disposes” (1921).

The father of Surrealism believed that poetry was an exclusively male endeavor. Although Surrealists were familiar with the work of their female counterparts, many of the Surrealist women we know today gained visibility primarily by being wives or lovers of the male Surrealists, such as Leonora Carrington or Dorothea Tanning, both of whom were lovers of Max Ernst (Caws, Kuenzli, & Raaberg, 1991).

Surrealist artists not only accepted this patriarchal structure through their manifestos and lifestyle but also reproduced it in their work. Within Surrealism, women were represented as naive young girls (femme-enfant), muses, seductresses, and submissive figures. These representations, according to the male artists’ gaze, depicted women’s naked, vulnerable, and passive bodies, sexually objectifying them and turning them into objects of male desire (Bottinelli, K., & Laxton, S., 2018).

In a rejection of bourgeois repression and oppression, the surrealist artists reactivated the libido and evoked sexual liberation. In this way, sexuality became a central theme in many Surrealist works, which nonetheless reproduced the idea of men as active entities and women as passive entities (Caws, Kuenzli, & Raaberg, 1991).

Sexuality was also a recurring theme in Max Ernst's work. An example of this is his piece "The Hat Makes the Man" (1920). Here, the hats depicted have a phallic shape, and the title suggests that the phallus is what makes the man. The hat can be seen as a symbol of civilization and a representative of bourgeois capitalist manners, as removing one's hat is a gesture of greeting (Camfield, 1993). The emphasis this painting places on the phallus reflects a phallocentric society.

In "Les Hommes n'en sauront rien," sexuality is also a central theme, as it depicts penetration. However, Max Ernst, as indicated in his poem, sought to represent the balance of both sexes. Through a contemporary feminist perspective (though not the only way to view this painting), we can question whether Max Ernst freed himself from this misogynistic structure and truly achieved this balance.

From Surrealist works, Bottinelli and Laxton critique the following:

“Men possess the penis, the active form of sexuality, while women have the vagina, which acts passively to envelop the penis during conception. Men experience fear of castration because they do not want to become the passive woman, while women envy the man's penis because they play the passive role, an object used only to satisfy the man's sexual and maternal needs. This theorized scenario strips women of their autonomous sexual identity. Only the man's sexual identity exists, and she is a secondary part of that role, exemplified by Surrealism's use of the female muse.”(Bottinelli, K., & Laxton, S., 2018).

In this painting, we see two pairs of legs: a man's legs placed above a woman's legs, which can be interpreted as a vertical power relationship where the man comes first and the woman second. The woman is shown being penetrated, repeating the traditional roles of the woman as the receiver and the man as the penetrator and provider. This aligns with the idea of the passive woman and the man as the active subject.

Furthermore, in "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), Freud also classified women into three categories based on how they experienced sexual pleasure. On one hand, there were women who never reached orgasm, and then there were women who only reached orgasm through clitoral stimulation. Freud categorized these two types of women as infantile and, therefore, sexually immature. The women Freud considered mature were those who achieved orgasm through penetration.

Max adds in his poem that the woman being penetrated bends her legs in pleasure. This reduces sexuality to penetration and reproduces Freud's idea that a woman needs a man to feel pleasure, as according to the values of the time, penetration was the only legitimate way for a woman to achieve orgasm. The focus remains on the man, who continues to be at the center. Thus, this work places women in the same repressive role conceived by bourgeois culture, and sexual liberation was more for men than for women.

At this juncture, it's important to recall that Ernst crafted unified images. If we cease to focus on individual components and instead look at the painting as a whole, we encounter another element: the hand (that resembles the Venus pudica) upon the circle (earth-vagina), which in sexual terms could allude to female masturbation. If so, it would be a way of subverting Freud's ideas and attributing certain power to women.

Moreover, Ernst was a man of his time and back then, he believed that the portrayal of a penetrated woman opposed the neoclassical nude, which idealized the Renaissance body, depicting women as closed, soft, and impenetrable. In this sense, a penetrated woman could also suggest tension between real-life and the ideal of beauty. (Karmel, P., 2005)

Ernst may have reproduced certain sexist ideas, but like I said, he was a product of his time, and the society in which he lived still upheld misogynistic and patriarchal principles (ours too). From this context, we must acknowledge the significance of his desire to address symmetry and balance between the two sexes.

While a contemporary view might cast doubt on whether Ernst achieved his objectives, Ernst used the elements available to him to tackle the subject and from a simplistic standpoint, penetration does somehow represent the union of both genders, and it's this union that, in his painting, prevents the whistle from falling to the ground and keeps the balance.

Conclusion

Max was a scholar; therefore, I believe that with his vast knowledge of mythologies and symbolism, Max Ernst didn't confine himself to discussing men and women in this work. As mentioned earlier, this painting is imbued with opposites that constantly refer to the union of the sun and the moon. The moon is associated with femininity, sensuality, seduction, sensitivity, darkness, death, madness, cycles, fantasy, the unconscious, and solitude, while the sun is associated with masculinity, rationality, fertility, life, light, culture, strength, and societal life. Thus, man and woman could merely be two more opposites among the many present in this painting: life and death, moon and sun, night and day, space and earth. Penetration, like the eclipse, might only represent the union and balance of all the opposing poles depicted in this work. Maybe it’s just Ernst representation to the alchemist’s key to the Great Arcanum.

From astrology and alchemical symbols to psychoanalysis and a feminist perspective, this painting, whose central theme is symmetry and balance, can be analyzed on different levels, leading to different interpretations that this essay does not exhaust. As a matter of fact, it’s impossible to assign a single interpretation, therefore I ask: What interpretation do you give to the painting?

Sources:

Breton, A. (1969). Manifestoes of surrealism (Vol. 182). University of Michigan Press.

Breton, A., Davies, H. S., Éluard, P., & Hugnet, G. (1936). What is surrealism?.

Drost, J. (2005). " Biographical notes": how Max Ernst plays with a literary genre.

Men Shall Know Nothing of This https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ernst-men-shall-know-nothing-of-this-t00336

Ernst, M. (2005). Max Ernst: a retrospective. Metropolitan Museum of Art. - Introduction by Sabine Rewald

Ernst, M. (1975). Max Ernst: a retrospective.  The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York, - Introduction by Diane Waldman

Camfield, W. A. (1993). Max Ernst: Dada & the Dawn of Surrealism. MoMA, 13, 7–11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4381215

Caws, M. A., Kuenzli, R. E., & Raaberg, G. (Eds.). (1991). Surrealism and women (No. 18). MIT Press.

Bottinelli, K., & Laxton, S. (2018). Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Depiction of Women in Surrealist Photography. UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal, 12(1).

Hubert, R. R. (1984). Max Ernst: The Displacement of the Visual and the Verbal. New Literary History, 15(3), 575-606.

Hinton, G. (1975). Max Ernst:'Les Hommes n'en Sauront Rien'. The Burlington Magazine, 117(866), 292-299.

Freud, S., & van Haute, P. (2015). Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905). V&R Unipress.

Karmel, P. (2005). Terrors of the Encyclopedia: Max Ernst and Contemporary Art. Max Ernst: A Retrospective, 81-102.