Spiky Magic

During the opening of an exhibition of his latest spiky and delicate abstractions in Manhattan last week, Painter Jimmy Ernst was confronted by a visitor who with mock solemnity reported: "There's a white-haired gentleman over there who keeps looking at your paintings and saying 'I have a 40-year-old kid who could do as well as this.' " The old gentleman at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery was famed Surrealist Max Ernst, who will have a major retrospective of his own at the Museum of Modern Art in March. But last week he was using his joke as a way of saying that he could not have been prouder of his 40-year-old son.

From almost the moment he was born, in Cologne in June of 1920, Jimmy Ernst was surrounded by artists ("my mother told me that Paul Klee once changed my diapers"). But not until he was 18, and visiting in Paris, did he himself begin to move toward art. When he saw Picasso's nightmarish Guernica, showing the bombing of civilians in that city during the Spanish Civil War, he came to realize what an impact paintings could have.

In time, he settled in the U.S., and after working for a while at odd jobs, embarked on his career. He found he did not need formal study: "The technical side of painting just came--it was there." But finding an idiom that satisfied him took time. He tried briefly to capture on canvas the creative improvisation implicit in jazz. Later, under the influence of Mondrian, he would leave vast expanses of white in his paintings. Then he turned to black on black--"flat blacks, glossy blacks, all different textures of black that would change with the light." Even before his present style began to develop about ten years ago, the art world knew that a second Ernst was on his way.

Today Ernst's paintings consist of innumerable slender, graceful lines that slide through and contain his bright but never garish colors. Occasionally a shape will emerge--a bird or a kind of landscape--but it is "implied, never stated. I'm not predetermined. About halfway through, an idea may come, and I realize that something has been preoccupying me." For all their intricacy, the paintings manage to avoid seeming fussy. The lines create soft pockets of space that seem to stretch back indefinitely. In the end, Jimmy Ernst remains his father's son, for in their wholly different ways, both men possess the magic of the dreamer.

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