This is the most important exhibition to see at the State Gallery this year. True it is only a minor aspect of the man’s deliriously creative career but its integrity and energy shame the local scene. Hence it will not be much noticed. Fashion, ignorance stupidity and prejudice will prevail. However —

If you only see one show this year see this one.

Look deep, look long, give it time and you will be rewarded.

Ernst, the most Dada of the Surrealists, maintained his commitment to the pre-theoretical immediacy of Dada throughout his long career. This allowed him to treat everything as raw material for a self induced epiphany. He was found of remarking that, to make art, one eye had to look out at the world and one eye into the mind.

This attitude is well seen in his famous invention, frottage. He took rubbings of worn wooden floor of his studio and transform its knots and grain into animals or animated homunculi with a few deft strokes. Two plates from his fabulous frottage Histoire Naturelle Paris 1926, a creature " Dans L’Ecurie de la Sphinx" and "Les Mouers de Feuilles ‘ a frottage leaf stuck between two naked rubbings of boards appear in this show. It is however the six lithographs "The Floor Rises" 1973– [Le parquet se soulève] especially plate 2 in which a creature in blue rubbed texture rises from parallel lines which display this best. Plainly the floor is in the outer world while the animation came from Ernst’s mind. It was the process of perception, interpretation and memory that brought them together in a space that, however limited its territory, runs by its own rules,.

It was probably Ernst’s lifelong attachment to the methods of dadaism that brought him closer to the Surrealist poets –Apollinaire, Jarry, Breton, Peret Eluard and to the idea of a portable work of art akin to a slim book of poetry. The younger Ernst preferred to see his work in magazines or pamphlets, even if they were expensive pamphlets, rather than objets de luxe. His illustrations for his friends’ poetry notably Eluard’s Repetitions 1922 are closely linked to his paintings, including his mural in Eluard’s house, they were intended to resonate closley with the text. His own collage novels –"The Hundred Headless Woman" 1929, "The Dream of the Little Girl, who wanted to become a Carmelite Nun" 1930. "A Week of Goodness [issued in seven pamplets]" 1934, and many others – were well wrought worlds that one could hold close, each a private universe much like a book of poetry.

Repetitions [1922] brought Ernst to Paris in 1921, after he and Eluard had chosen the collages from some of his earliest experiment with collages of nineteenth century line engravings. In the cover image two hands pull a string through a pierced eye ball while two other hands pierce one upper arm.

The next year, the same partnership produced the finest of the early illustrated texts. "Les Malheurs des Immortels". In these 22 plates Ernst learnt with Eluard to push associations to their poetic limits. "Mon Petit Mont Blanc" [page 8] features a woman’s rump and torso tipped over so that her backside can be encircled by the rings of Saturn tilted at jaunty angle. A male hand, with shirt cuff and jacket sleeve, holds some unremembered but clearly phallic metal implement so that the image opens a delirium of erotic and technical possibilities. In "Le Fugitif" page [42] shark is trapped by a rope above a jacket on tailor’s dummy whose neck open like a severed artery vaguely suggests a heart. Ernst gave infinite attention to the these associations. Each tiny collage packs an extraordinary symbolic punch.

His friend, the architectural historian Siegfried Giedion, suggested that their magic was so consistent because Ernst always used the same type of illustration, line engraving made by journeymen whose addiction to a consistent code was more fanatical than that of Asian painters to the grammar of the brush. Everywhere he went Ernst collected old books to collage. Giedion also observed that the events, the situations that emerged in the collage novels were not fantasy but revelations of the structures of meaning and desire that lay latent in the subject and style of the original images.

Ernst’s crystal clear collages have little in common with Lautreamont’s well-known definition of a surrealist images as collisions — "The collision of an umbrella and sewing machine on a operating table". They are a far more a universally efficent shifting of the scenery, a kaleidoscope of possible worlds, each seamless, a consistent facet of the totality of the universe.

Giedion located their energy specifically in the repressed power relations of the nineteenth century, but there is no reason to stop there. Ernst’s discipline and restraint in the face of an infinity of source material might well suggest a powerful way to engage contemporary experience. This is equally excessive, a continual flood of banal objects and predetermined relations constantly whispering that there is no other way. Consider a set of collages in any medium illustrating "The Operations of the Market" that could quietly reveal the seamless connection of absolute cruelty and respectability, innocent humanity and willed misery, the evil glamour of lives for sale that flashed naked, for one second only, from the flaming twin towers.

The Lion of Belfort, the first volume/day of A Week of Goodness offers a perfect model. The Lion is a huge bronze sculpture, a real Parisian bourgeois war memorial much illustrated by the state ideological apparatus. Ernst incarnates him as a vicious besuited bourgeois acting out the murder, lust and mayhem already to hand in illustrated novels. This connection of "fantasy" life and the quotidian, as "Communicating Vessels" is a true epiphanic realism. Ernst had provided the cover for Breton’s tract of that title in 1922. Ernst was disarmingly left wing in the sense that he hated theLion of Belfort and all his works.He often retold, with amazement, the story of the rescue of his collages for A week of Goodness from an exhibition in Madrid at the time of its bombardment by Franco, a truly evil bourgeois lion.

The collages for Wednesday - The Inner Eye began as another collaboration with Eluard under that title in 1930,"A l’Interieur de la vue, 8 poèmes visibles," was finally published in 1947. They do not rely on a found space or setting but invoke an inner infinity by frameless formal juxtapositions, best represented by the familiar image of a receding perspective of images of two clasped hands shaking observed from a distance by a solitary boiled egg in a cup. I have long thought these images less successful because they lack a given framework for interpretation but those published in 1947, such as the tinted astrological images on pages 29 and 31, show that Ernst had found ways to collage the interior life under technology to perfection.

Ernst’s collages must have been reproduced by photo lithographic plates, etched at a scale of one to one – an intriguing process. For the first 13 sets of a Week of Goodness he did produce three powerful etchings [printed by Stanley Hayter]. They all point to things to come. The clanky Ubu like machine figure in The Lion of Belfort and the brilliant resonance of the abstract surfaces of Water and The Inner Eye all reappear in his war time work in the USA. Be sure to see these etchings when you visit the show.

During his time in America, Ernst, complete with dinner jacket, red velvet drapes and gorgeous young brunette ‘reenacted’ an episode from A Week of Goodness in technicolor for Han Richter’s movie "Dreams That Money Can Buy". Try to see it you can. It is desire incarnate.

He returned to Paris after an extraordinary wartime exile in the USA during which he invented the possibility of abstract expressionism and coped with Peggy Guggenheim. In France he worked with a number of publishers to produce more up market collectible editions of illustrations visual commentaries may be a more accurate description, on poetic works by surrealist heroes from AlfredJarry to Lewis Carroll.

This second half of the show is an absolute delight, a surprise impossible to write about in any detail. There are discoveries – the large scale lithographs for Jarry’s, "Decervelages" [debrainings] set to music by Claude Terrasse, 1971, are superb. especially Sheet VIII in which a barely human figure decomposing slivers of red ribbon fall backwards over the awe inspiring motto "va-t’en maudit ours tu ressembles à Bordure".

The dense resonance of this exhibition, its prolific references to life the universe and everything, made me weep for the return of the long dead avant garde wit, the universal perspectives and optimism that it made possible. Above all, the serious fun they all had.

[A brief note, some exhibitions last a long time. I first saw this one in 1979 in Liverpool UK. It was organised in that year by Werner Spies the great authority on Ernst and is, therefore the best possible survey of Ernst’s work].