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Ernst had a distinct prophetic faculty: immersed in the 20th century and lacking any nostalgia, he could feel what was coming. The ruins of The Petrified City (1933) are both an aftertaste of the first World War and a foretaste of the second, and The Angel of Earth (1937), a monster prancing in devouring rage across a flat landscape, had more than a fortuitous connection with the advance of fascism. In Europe After the Rain (1940-42), Ernst produced a vision of spongy, iridescent ruins that deserves a place with Picasso's Guernica as one of the supreme documents of historical evil.
His predictive powers also had to do with art style itself. Having fled from Occupied France to the U.S. (where he married Peggy Guggenheim, his third wife, in 1941), he made some small paintings by swinging a punctured can of paint on a string above a canvas laid flat on the floor; the resulting pattern of drips clearly anticipates Jackson Pollock. There was no chance technique — staining, rubbing, splashing, accidental manipulation, transfer blots — that Ernst did not pioneer; and if the work of his last 30 years (except for the sculpture, which is still much underrated) rarely seemed as impressive as his early collages or his dreamlike images of the '20s and '30s, it still bore testimony to one of the most durable and fertile talents of our entire culture, a great enemy of the trivial and the bogus and the solemn.
* "Pataphysics," wrote its founder, Poet Alfred Jarry, in 1898, is "the science of the realm beyond metaphysics." It will study the laws that govern exceptions and "explain the universe supplementary to this one."