THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNST : A Video Journey Through Max Ernst’s Life and Times Is the Perfect Companion to Newport Harbor Exhibit

“To create the fantastic, you must use the banal.” --Max Ernst In another universe, all films about artists would be as witty, personal, visually rich and well-documented as “Max Ernst,” by Peter Schamoni, recently re-released on videotape. On Wednesday, the video opens Newport Harbor Art Museum’s four-part film series, in conjunction with “Max Ernst: The Sculpture.” (The exhibit, a centennial celebration of the birth of one of the founders of Dada and Surrealism, is on view through Sept. 6.)

The film enters the spirit of Ernst’s mind and work with personal reminiscences (including snippy comments by art collector Peggy Guggenheim, wife No. 3, and poetic memories by artist Dorothea Tanning, No. 4), a plethora of his works of art, vintage photos, clips from newsreels, home movies and Surrealist cinema, interviews with Ernst and brief re-enactments of revealing moments of his life. Excerpts from music by Igor Stravinsky, who admired Ernst’s work, provide another cultural link with his era.

Ernst wrote in his autobiography that he “died” on Aug. 1, 1914, and was “resurrected” on Nov. 11, 1918. For him, World War I, in which he served in Germany’s field artillery, was a nightmare of “crying, cursing, puking.” Afterward, he and other angry young men felt a “furious lust for life,” he wrote, and a feeling that the only way to release his rage was to defy “reason, logic, conventional language, beauty and poetry--and conventional stupidity.”

Nonsense syllables on the soundtrack help cast the proper spell for Ernst’s deliberately irrational images of improbable flora and fauna. After receiving a series of anonymous threatening letters from a die-hard war supporter, Ernst left Germany for Paris, “where a man was free to do anything he pleased.” He camped it up with artist friends and began making collages, combining fragments of old engravings in improbable ways to create “a flash of poetry.”

Ernst (then involved in a menage-a-trois with the French poet Paul Eluard and his wife Gala--Salvador Dali’s future spouse--which the film doesn’t mention) decorated the interior of Eluard’s home with such mind-boggling scenes of bizarre vegetation and erotic nudes that his daughter recalls running out of the house in terror of the nightmarish images.

But he always retained a terror--he called it a “virginity complex”--of having to look at a blank piece of canvas. In 1925, he hit on the solution of making rubbings from the floorboards of his room in a seaside inn, and teasing out hallucinatory imagery from the resulting patterns. (The film shows the mature Ernst re-enacting this process.) Long attracted to forests--which he viewed as both liberating and oppressive--Ernst discovered that the rubbings suggested all manner of imaginary landscapes to him.

Unaccountably, the film ignores wife No. 1 (art historian Luise Strauss, who bore Ernst a son, Jimmy) and claims dark-haired, high-strung Marie-Berthe Aurenche was his first spouse. Aurenche reveled in her status as an illegitimate descendant of Louis XVI, while Ernst, always the ladies’ man, enjoyed viewing himself as the “crowned prince.”

In 1929, Ernst was cast in a small role as a poor man in Luis Bunuel’s then-scandalous film, “L’Age D’Or.” In the ‘30s, the outside world barged in again, with the Spanish Civil War and the ominous activities of that “ex-painter” (as Ernst called him), Adolf Hitler. Ernst’s collages and paintings of the period were rife with images of destruction.

“If painting is the mirror of its time, it must be mad to (convey) the true image of what the time is,” he wrote. Ernst was included in Hitler’s 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. His painting, “The Creation of Eve or the Beautiful Garden,” was deemed “a slur on German womanhood.”

The following year, Ernst also participated in a very different exhibition--a Surrealist show at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris held under blackout conditions, with viewers training flashlights on the works, jungle sounds playing in the background and moldy leaves scattered on the floor.

In the late ‘30s, having left his wife and disassociated himself from the Surrealists to protest their treatment of Eluard, Ernst spent an idyllic interlude renovating an old farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d’Ardeche with his then-lover, painter Leonora Carrington. Ernst’s architectural contributions included cement reliefs of exotic creatures he attached to the facade.

Sculpture served as a “vacation” when he reached a dead end in painting, he once said. The activity of making his figures was “more like playing a game . . . both hands play a role, just as they do in love.”

Ernst’s life took many twists and turns during World War II. An enemy alien, he escaped to the United States after the combined efforts of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Peggy Guggenheim (who adored him and also was anxious to get her hands on his paintings) and his son Jimmy.

Insecure knowing Ernst’s girlfriend Carrington also lived in New York, Guggenheim got him to take her to California. They stayed at the best hotels, bought a car Ernst loved to drive and seriously considered buying Charles Laughton’s $40,000 “castle” in Pacific Palisades. But Guggenheim concluded that California wasn’t ready for her proposed museum of Surrealist art, so they returned to New York.

On the drive back, Ernst discovered the Southwest, which turned out--to his delight--to contain the strikingly unusual landscape imagery he had invented in his painting. He was also intrigued by Hopi and Zuni tribal artifacts, and bought a slew of Kachina dolls (the beginning of a large collection that would contain works from several non-European cultures). Ernst would return to this magical land several years later with Tanning, a period evoked at great length in the film.

Intrigued by the way he heard art students were taught in Japan--by developing the free action of the wrist, then the elbow and shoulder--Ernst devised a method of painting that involved filling a pot with paint, punching a hole in the bottom and suspending it from strings to let to it spray the canvas. Reminiscent of a famous film of Jackson Pollock making one of his famous “drip” paintings years later, a piece of glass--superimposed over an interview with Ernst--is shown being gradually covered with a skein of dripping paint.

Although Guggenheim boasted that she included more of Ernst’s paintings than anyone else’s in her historic “Art of This Century” exhibit, their marriage was a failure. She kept seeing portraits of Carrington in Ernst’s paintings and she felt “jealous” he never painted her.

Settled in Sedona, Ariz., in a tiny wooden house they built themselves, the couple felt “strangely quiet and intense” in their desert habitat, Tanning says. After a trip to the Grand Canyon, Ernst lauded “the incredible beauty of the American landscape,” joking that “if Richard Wagner had seen this, his music would be even louder than it is.”

The last we see of Ernst in this film--which ends a couple of decades before his death in 1976--is a clip from Hans Richter’s Surrealist film, “8 x 8,” that shows the artist gravely waltzing with a small piece of rock on a deserted city street, in the dark of night.

What: “Max Ernst,” part of film and videotape series at Newport Harbor Art Museum, in conjunction with exhibit, “Max Ernst: The Sculpture.”

When: The film screens on Wednesday, Aug. 5, (repeats Aug. 26) at 2 p.m. Exhibit hours are Saturday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Fridays till 8 p.m., through Sept. 6.

Where: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach.

Whereabouts: Take San Diego (I-405) Freeway to Jamboree Road. Turn onto Santa Barbara Drive, just north of Coast Highway; the first left is San Clemente Drive.

Wherewithal: Film admission $1; reservations are not required. Exhibit admission: $4 adults, $2 seniors and students, free for children under 12; free for everyone on Tuesdays.

Where to call: (714) 759-1122.