Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

The following days are devoted to Max. In him, Leonora discovers an artisan, a carpenter, a plasterer, an electrician, a plumber. Compass, hammer, file, any tool whatsoever, pliers, blow-torches, moulds, all matter much more to him than so-called objets d’art . Ernst constructs, glues, nails, makes little boxes, opens drawers and doors, builds, refines and incorporates. More than inhabiting an atelier , he accommodates an entire ironmongery. As a result, before simply mixing blue and green paint on his palette, he imports screws and cables. The essence of his creativity is his handiwork. His hands, as dextrous as any cabinet maker’s, naturally incline towards saw and sandpaper. Screwdriver and pliers are more in evidence than paintbrushes. His spatula is heavy enough to resemble a builder’s. And he prefers to talk to a plumber than to a fellow painter, who makes assumptions about his creativity.

‘You know, Leonora, my father was also a painter, a bad one, as all he painted were copies. He taught the deaf how to speak; I would accompany him, and follow the movements of his lips so closely that I learnt how to become such a technical expert that I am now the most observant of men, knowing exactly how to read not only lips, but evil intentions. I also know how raw materials are going to behave, and I read not merely the human face but the surfaces of plaster, chalk, wood, tincture of iodine, coal and oils.’

That night, on returning to her room, Leonora repeats to herself: ‘I am happy, I am me. What I’ve always held on to inside me at long last will be liberated and gallop forth.’

The British art collector, Roland Penrose, invites Herbert Read, author of the book on Surrealism that turned Leonora’s head, Man Ray and his lover, the dancer Ady Fidelin, Paul and Nush Eluard, Eileen Agar and her husband Joseph Bard, E. L. T. Messens, Magritte’s great friend and the editor of the London Bulletin , to Lamb Creek House, his holiday home in Cornwall.

‘Why don’t you invite your little friend along?’ proposes Penrose.

‘I think I shall die of love,’ Leonora confides to Ursula Goldfinger.

‘If you don’t die, from now onwards your life will begin to make sense.’

‘That girl of yours is brilliant. Where on earth did you find her?’ Penrose persists, idolising Max still further.

Leonora is the centre of attraction, the novelty in the group, the big discovery. At night, Ady Fidelin, Penrose’s wife, Lee Miller, Eluard’s wife, Nush, and Eileen Agar dance naked in the light of their lovers’ car headlamps that illuminate the garden. Ady Fidelin’s hip movements prove superior to those of Nush. ‘Indecent, pornographic,’ the newspapers accuse Max. The order for his arrest was not long in coming.

‘What about you? Are you just going to stand and stare at us?’ asks Ady. In a flash, Leonora has stripped naked. What freedom! Lee Miller assures her: ‘Madness opens the doors on your inner world. Performing acts condemned by others raises you to a new level, you leap out of your own mediocrity.’

The nocturnal dance is an act of redemption. Leonora is exalted, believes in herself, in the beauty of her body, she is a mare set at liberty within her animal hide; seeing her now, the Reverend Mother would bear witness to her capacity to levitate. During the daytime, she walks everywhere at Max’s side as part of an ongoing apprenticeship, while he collects leaves and bark from the trees, places them under a sheet of paper, traces them with a pencil and teaches her the technique of frottage.

‘I discovered how to do it one day, having carefully studied a plank of wood flooring, then placed a sheet of paper on top of it, rubbing it with a pencil until the grain of wood turned into the surface of the sea. I found knots in the wood and wanted to conserve what the wood showed me, its landscapes, its dearly cherished poetry, its sexuality.’

Leonora looks at him. He is a man possessed and she longs to hurl herself into the abyss with him. Whatever nobody else notices, to Ernst is creative material. He might well be mentally ill, but he draws her to him, and she can no longer draw back. In his frottage she can see a forest, birds and hybrid animals never previously imagined. All now transformed into memorable objects.

‘I had no idea that matter could contain so many unrecognisable spirits.’

‘I know a great deal about trees, because when I was in Brühl my father went into the forest to paint and took me with him.’

Max hoards what nobody else notices, his field of study includes a length of rope fibre, a piece of cork, a wooden peg, a hair forgotten in the sink. ‘You have to go beyond painting.’

He introduces her to one of the works he gave to Roland Penrose:

‘It’s an oil painting, can you see how thick it is, see every corpuscle it contains? I mixed the paint in with the hairs from my arm. I made up a paste, applied it to the canvas and then rubbed it for hours with sandpaper. Other colours and then other textures emerged, and look how it came out. Now we are going to rub this canvas I have just painted, until its entrails are exposed, new pigments, its deepest veins. It will reveal everything it contains within, and you’ll discover how many things lie beneath what you saw at first sight. What happens to the viewer when images are superimposed is simply astounding. Look how this fragment of linen fabric unravels, can you follow the trail of each thread? Now cross it over the next one. Anything serves a purpose: you can use a spatula or even a knife, grattage means that the marks of time emerge like hieroglyphics, even like cries.

‘It looks to me as if you are violating the fabric.’

‘That’s the convulsive beauty Breton talks about.’

Leonora is dazzled as she follows the maestro, she’s swinging on high tension cables, unpicking the weft of her life.

‘Everything that lives has its way of being, and it’s not true that painting is no more than the application of colour to canvas. That kind of painting is finished, what counts is what goes way beyond it. You can smear it with your excrement, scratch it — go for it! — don’t sit around copying the masters as you’ll never be able to supersede them. The life in your body, in the composition of its very cells, is what composes your painting, Leonora. You can brush the canvas like your hair, scratch it with your nails or your teeth, stain it with your blood or your saliva, salt it with your tears.’

Frottage also reveals to Leonora the seven circles of hell. She descends to new strata inside the mine. Max shows her a forest constructed out of fish bones.

‘How?’

‘I removed the fish skeleton, let it fall on the canvas, and transformed it into a forest.’

Leonora murmurs admiringly: ‘You teach me to see what I have never seen before. The potential was there, that I knew, I could feel it. Thanks to you, I am now certain of it!’

Ernst gives her a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, then sets her to trace the rough surface of a plank. Soon she becomes excited.

‘Now, add your own colours to it, and your forest will be just like mine.’

When Leonora shows him what she has drawn on top of her tracing, he exclaims:

‘Don’t be so orthodox, don’t seek to obey, free yourself, unearth your past. What did you dream last night?’

‘The impossible.’

‘Then draw the impossible.’

‘I dreamt there was a whale at the far end of my bedroom, and I was also a whale, and we were going to eat me.’

‘That’s a familiar image that goes all the way back to the Bible. Jonah was more creative with it. You were really going to eat yourself?’

‘Assisted by you and the depth of your mouth.’