O.C. ART : A Stage for Impromptu Inspirations of Max Ernst : Newport Harbor Art Museum opens first-ever exhibit to concentrate on artist’s sculpture in bronze, precious metals.

At the entrance to “Max Ernst: The Sculpture” (at the Newport Harbor Art Museum through Sept. 6), a blowup of a 1947 snapshot shows a woman with her eyes closed, reclining luxuriously against the outstretched concrete arm of a giant creature with a stylized goat’s head.

This regal figure--accompanied by his demure, long-necked goddess/queen, a manic-looking kid with Martian-style antennae, and a big-nosed bird--rules benignly over a patch of scrubby land in Sedona, Ariz. Beaming happily over the goat god’s left shoulder is Ernst himself, one of the founding fathers of Dada and Surrealism.

The 56-year-old German-born artist was in his element that summer, happily posing with his fourth (and last) wife, Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Her precarious health had brought them from a threadbare but culturally rich life in New York (where he fled after being interned in France as an enemy alien during World War II) to the stunning isolation of Arizona. There they built themselves a lopsided two-room house they grandly dubbed “Capricorn Hill.” Ernst assembled his domestic shrine for the homeliest of reasons: to celebrate the laying of a utility pipe that freed the couple from having to haul water from a well five miles away.

An avid collector of expressive sculpture from non-Western cultures, he installed a Northwest Indian totem in the front yard. His sculptural tableau, “Capricorn,” incorporated various ethnographic influences visible in exaggerated body proportions and serenely simplified faces. But the piece also was uniquely an Ernst creation, a paean to impromptu inspiration.

Everything was pieced together from cement casts of odds and ends: milk cartons cast and piled on top of each other to make the king’s scepter (also reminiscent of Brancusi’s undulating “Endless Column”), eggshells for the queen’s downcast eyes, a cello (harking back to Cubist still lifes) for her body.

Like most of his other sculptures from the ‘30s and ‘40s, this piece was seldom seen publicly until it was cast in bronze years later (in this case, in a slightly different form). This exhibit, organized by Themis Visual Arts of Edinburgh, Scotland, is the first to concentrate specifically on Ernst’s sculpture in bronze and precious metals.

The sensibility that informed these large and small three-dimensional works was the same puckish, deliberately irrational and willfully inventive spirit that earlier led Ernst to make collages of bizarre encounters (based on illustrations clipped from magazines), fantasy drawings based on rubbings ( frottages ) from pieces of wood, leaves and other materials, and dreamlike paintings.

What we tend to forget is that these sculptures also represented a revolutionary way of viewing the human body, beyond traditional Western representations of ideal or actual human figures. During the first few decades of the 20th Century, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Ernst and others dared to raise the curtain that separated polite, normative behavior from secret and “forbidden” thoughts and actions.

These artists were emboldened by a kaleidoscope of influences that included Cubism, increased awareness of non-Western art forms, the exhaustion of academic tradition, wartime destruction, and breakthroughs in psychology. (Ernst was especially interested in art made by mental patients.)

Artists gave themselves permission to reinterpret the human body from the inside out, as an extension of mental states rather than a reflection of what the eye sees. They frequently allowed themselves to scramble, duplicate, omit or exaggerate body parts, especially those charged with sexual potency. Made of simple, discrete elements stuck onto each other in a “primitive” way, Ernst’s sculptures generally represent gut feelings.

His lack of formal training as a sculptor was liberating, while his relish for chance encounters gave him the equivalent of an extra pair of eyes. It wasn’t altogether surprising that an artist who habitually saw hallucinatory visions in wood grain and cracks in the wall would seize upon ordinary objects as a basis for his sculptures. His first pieces, made in 1934, were stones he found in a stream, to which he added color and or made shallow carvings.

Surrealists as a group were crazy about objects. Certain objects--natural or man-made--were believed to offer great revelations if perceived serendipitously and wisely interpreted. Perhaps the best known example of Ernst’s object-mania is his lithograph “The Hat Makes the Man,” in which branching stacks of bowler hats served as stand-ins for an actual flesh-and-blood figure.

With a wink at the standardized parts of machine technology, he assembled figural sculptures from plaster casts he made of such household basics as bottles, cups, plates and sand pails. Two of these early (1934) pieces were versions of “Oedipus,” which Ernst made decades after reading Freud’s discussion of the Oedipus Complex in “The Interpretation of Dreams.” These works already displayed his witty shorthand for body parts and mental states.

Projecting elements serve equally as noses and phalli--and perhaps also as horns, referring to Oedipus’ cuckolded dead father figure and the female cuckoo bird’s habit of changing mates. (Ernst’s art is full of bird images, supposedly because of a bizarre adolescent confusion between the simultaneous death of his pet bird and the birth of one of his sisters.)

Broad slits can be read as mouths or female sex organs. Figures perching on top of other figures exert psychological weight--the equivalent to having something “on” your mind. (See “The Imbecile” and “Bird Head” for more examples of Ernst’s amusing visualization of mental preoccupations.)

Dating from the following decade, “Young Woman in the Shape of a Flower” is a valentine to the vagina, which appears proudly front and center, in the guise of a “flower” shape that serves as the body of a square-headed little figure. The winsome “Young Man With Beating Heart” has a cowboy’s bowlegged stance, with a shallow indentation on his torso to mark his lovelorn heart. At the end of his gawky neck, a curling petal-like form might be an abbreviated Stetson or an anatomical reference to his beloved.

Ernst’s sculpture often is reminiscent of caricature. In “An Anxious Friend,” two figures seem to have backed inadvertently into each other. The taller figure is open-mouthed; the shorter one exposes its private parts, as if to symbolize the ultimate social embarrassment of being caught “with your pants down.”

Even Ernst’s totemic columns tend to be topped with quirky figures that are the antithesis of what we expect from towering sculptural landmarks. The creature celebrating the French Revolution that crowns the undulating column of “The Spirit of the Bastille” looks rather like a flying teddy bear. “Beneath the Bridges of Paris” turns out to be a tribute to a squarish, pop-eyed Everyman--probably one of the clochards (bums) who traditionally live under those bridges.

Very occasionally, Ernst sheds his sweetly punning persona for a sterner or more coolly enigmatic effect. In “Are You Niniche?” a 1956 assemblage, he pairs two yokes to make a crude figure standing on a printing plate embossed with the nonsense letters, NINICHE. “A Microbe Seen Through a Temperament” (1964) mingles delicacy and brute form in a seemingly ominous way. A chain-link “spider web” stretches across a tall, lyre-like yoke, as if some persistent force were blocking off access to the world of art. Below, a bulky group of metal machine parts form the lineaments of a cold, humanoid face.

Ironically, “Capricorn,” the central work in the exhibit, was not on view at the opening. A bronze cast of the piece was supposed to have been loaned by the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg but the new government that took office last spring has entangled the loan in bureaucratic red tape. Informed of the snafu late in June, Newport Harbor hastily appealed to the National Gallery in Washington, which is lending another cast of the sculpture. The piece is expected to arrive today and be on view Tuesday.

Another key Ernst sculpture missing at the Thursday night opening--but expected to arrive in Newport Beach later this week--is the punningly sex- and chess-themed “The King Playing with the Queen,” from 1944. Why the delay? Well, it seems that the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which owns one of nine casts of this piece, has been involved in protracted negotiations with the exhibit organizers. (New sources for some of the casts had to be located when the show--which originally traveled to European museums--was reconstituted for a U.S. tour, and some of the original lenders balked at sending their possessions on the road again.)

Of course, not all of the 80 works in the exhibit are of equal quality. For the most part, the silver and gold reliefs Ernst made from the late ‘50s to the early ‘70s--when he was living in Paris--are little more than whimsical baubles without the wry edge that marks his best work. The set of silver plates from 1973 essentially recycles old themes in collector-pleasing form.

Other quibbles have to to with the installation. Several of the small pieces are hung so low that you have to crouch or kneel to see them properly. The minuscule gold pieces might have been displayed to better advantage in flat display cases, rather than scattered on walls. And “Janus”--a two-faced piece that shares a platform with a group of other works--is thoughtlessly positioned so that the reverse side is almost impossible to see.

Finally, it is somewhat disconcerting to see an exhibit devoted entirely to Ernst’s sculpture that offers no tangible reminders (not even photographs) of his work in other media. For all his importance to 20th-Century art and Surrealism, Ernst is not nearly as well known as Picasso or Marcel Duchamp. Delightful as it is to see a village of Ernst figures sprouting up in one gallery, they beg to be reunited with their spiritual kin in some of his other idiosyncratic inventions.