What They Tried to Hide About Picabia and Max Ernst (Video Essay)

What if the two most dangerous artists of the twentieth century were dangerous not because of what they painted, but because of what they refused to be? Francis Picabia spent fifty years betraying every movement he helped found, and Max Ernst spent thirty years inventing techniques designed to remove his own hand from his own paintings. Between them they staged the most sustained assault modern art ever mounted on its own founding myth, the myth of the artist as origin, as author, as the sovereign cause of the image. Art history has never quite forgiven them. Picabia was filed away as a dilettante, a rich man who changed his mind too often to be taken seriously, and Ernst was domesticated into a pleasant maker of dream pictures for museum gift shops. This essay puts the machine portraits, the frottages, the grattages, the collage novels and the transparencies back where they belong, inside a coherent and deliberately corrosive project. It corrects the dates that circulate wrongly online, it examines what surrealism actually meant when it spoke of the marvelous, and it asks what is left of a painting when the painter has been subtracted from it. So who is really speaking when nobody claims to be the author? Jorge Lucio de Campos