THE Surrealists were an amorous bunch, much given to tempestuous affairs. They were also consummate travelers -- some around the world, others to the parks and outskirts of Paris, many only in their dreams. In 1922 the poet André Breton, a co-founder of the Surrealist movement, wrote an influential article titled "Lâchez Tout" ("Drop Everything") in which he advised his colleagues to quit their jobs, their daily routines, even their families and head out. Travel would offer a fresh start, and maybe even a cure for the ills and ennui inflicted by World War I. It certainly had a profound effect on two artists and the woman who was their lover and muse.
It started in 1921 when Breton organized an exhibition in Paris for Max Ernst, a strikingly handsome young German Dada artist. The French poet Paul Éluard and his Russian wife, Gala, were fascinated by the show and arranged to meet Ernst in the Austrian Alps and later in Germany. Ernst, Éluard and Gala quickly became inseparable. The artist and the poet started a lifelong series of collaborations on books even as Ernst and Gala started an affair that eventually propelled the trio on a journey from Cologne to Paris to Saigon.
Their peregrinations are the focus of "Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle" (Yale University Press), a recent book by Robert McNab that could prove an enlightening accompaniment to an Ernst retrospective opening on Thursday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mr. McNab, an art historian and documentary filmmaker who lives in London, is also an aficionado of steamships, and he tracked the Surrealists through the records of the ships they took, uncovering their sailing dates, ports of call, passenger lists and much more. He also uses Ernst's work side by side with historical photographs to show the transformation of land and sea into art.
The Éluard-Gala-Ernst marriage à trois lasted three years. During this time and for all his life, Éluard, who was well heeled, remained a generous supporter and defender of Ernst. First he lent Ernst his passport to travel to Paris (the artist had by then left his own wife and young child), after which he invited Ernst to live in his house. He not only bought many of Ernst's artworks, but allowed the painter to cover the house's interior with murals.
Then in 1924 something in Éluard snapped. On March 24 he indeed dropped everything, walked out of a bistro and disappeared. In fact, he went to Marseille and boarded a steamer. Following in the wake of the French ships that had carried Gauguin through the Panama Canal to the South Pacific islands, Éulard continued into Rimbaud and Conrad territory in Southeast Asia. Some assumed that his domestic arrangement, which was becoming increasingly strained, had led him to suicide. Adding fuel to the speculation, a collection of poems published soon afterward, which Éluard described as his last book, was titled "Mourir de ne pas Mourir" ("Dying of Not Dying"). The frontispiece was a portrait of Éluard by Ernst.
When Éluard disembarked in Singapore about two months later, Gala and Ernst, who were in on the plan, had already set out from Marseille -- through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean -- to meet him. They sold Éluard's painting collection to raise money for the journey. Reunited, the three sailed to Saigon, arriving on Aug. 12. After touring the city for about two weeks, Éluard and Gala returned to France together, arriving on Sept. 28, with Ernst following about 10 days later. They all behaved as if nothing had happened. Silence reigned. It was the end of the affair.
After being left alone in Saigon, Ernst took a trip to Angkor Wat, the ancient Cambodian ruin that had been rediscovered by the French naturalist Henri Mouhot in 1861 and had already become a "destination" for world travelers.
There Ernst found a florid wilderness of menacing jungle, some of which had been cleared to reveal monumental sculptures and buildings. The 39-square-mile site left an indelible impression on him. There was only one hotel, where Ernst must have stayed, across a moat from the Temple of Angkor Wat. This vista, among others, appears from memory or with reference to photographs and engravings, in Ernst's paintings like "The Entire City" and "The Petrified City" (1935-37) and "Totem and Taboo" (1941), which are in the Met show, as well as in "The Stolen Mirror" and "The Eye of Silence" (1943-44), and many more.
Ernst had an encyclopedic memory for art, and scholars still argue over his sources. Examples of his range and techniques can be seen in the Met show, which includes about 180 works and is his first museum retrospective in 30 years.
After his return to Paris, Ernst, by then 34, moved to new quarters and some months later started to paint again. The Manifesto of Surrealism had been published in October 1924, and Ernst found himself on the front lines of the new movement. He had made his earlier reputation on hallucinatory collages and mixed-media works. What the Surrealists prized, a sense of estrangement, was already familiar turf; now he began to experiment with new means of coaxing the "inner eye," the artistic persona that operates from the subconscious.
To avoid confronting a blank canvas, Ernst had always needed to jump-start his work with some ready-made idea. Now he successively added three new energizers to his repertory: frottage, grattage and decalcomania. Frottage is the age-old technique of rubbing reliefs, like coins or gravestones, though paper with chalk or pencil to make impressions. Ernst made rubbings of everything from buttons, seeds and pebbles to wood planks. The process led him to unexpected patterns that he developed into delicate and mysterious scenes.
Grattage is frottage taken a step further: a canvas is placed over an object like, say, a straw mat. The canvas is painted and then scraped with something that leaves tracks, like a comb or a brush handle. For decalcomania, two wet painted surfaces are pressed together and pulled apart to leave a geography of valleys and hillocks from which to create figures and landscapes.
The careers of Éluard and Ernst flourished, as did their love lives. In 1927 Ernst caused a scandal by eloping with a teenager just out of convent school. He later lived with the English painter Leonora Carrington, fled Vichy France and married his patron, the American collector Peggy Guggenheim. In 1946 he moved to Arizona (his dreamscape come to life) with the American painter Dorothea Tanning, his fourth and last wife, who now lives in New York. He died in 1976, finally a French citizen, one day short of his 85th birthday.
Éluard, who married again twice and became a Communist, is still considered a leading 20th-century poet in France.
And the ambitious femme fatale Gala? She left Éluard and, following numerous affairs, married Salvador Dalí, in 1934, after living with him for five years. She was the éminence grise behind his flamboyant career.
Éluard burned Gala's letters, and those to her sister have been lost. Her vivid personality has gradually been overshadowed by the fame of the men in her life. When she died in 1982, even her exact age was not known. She has become that most elusive and desired Surrealist entity: an enigma.
MAX ERNST A RETROSPECTIVE Metropolitan Museum of Art, opening Thursday.
'GHOST SHIPS: A SURREALIST LOVE TRIANGLE' YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS By Robert McNab