MAX ERNST Lot n° 22

Max Ernst Mer agitée, soleil, nuage et maître Corbeau avec son fils 1953 Collage and oil on canvas 92 x 73 cm Framed. Signed and dated in grey lower right 'max ernst/53' and signed, dated and titled on the reverse 'mer agitée, soleil, nuage et maître corbeau avec son fils max ernst /53'. - In fine condition. Spies/Metken 3025 Provenance Estate of the artist, since then family property Exhibitions Stockholm 1969 (Moderna Museet), Max Ernst, cat. No. 79, with ill. p. 61; Amsterdam 1969/70 (Stedelijk Museum), Max Ernst, cat. No. 75; Stuttgart 1970 (Württembergischer Kunstverein), Max Ernst, Cat. No. 89, with ill. p. 142 (with exhibition label on the reverse); permanent loan of the Ernst family to the Max Ernst Museum, Brühl (2007-2021) Literature Werner Spies (ed.), Max Ernst, Life and Work. Documentary volume to "Max Ernst. Oeuvre Catalogue", Cologne 2005, with colour illustrations p. 255. "1906. the bird obre Hornebom. A friend named Hornebom, a clever, colorful, faithful bird dies in the night; a child, the sixth in the row, comes to life in the same night, confusion in the brain of the otherwise healthy youth. A sort of delusion of interpretation, as if the innocence just born, Sister Loni, in her lust for life, had appropriated the dear bird's life juices. This crisis is soon overcome. But in the young man's imagination a voluntary-irrational imaginative mingling of people with birds and other living creatures continues; and this is reflected again in the emblems of his art." - Thus Max Ernst notes in his biographical notes (quoted from: Aust. Cat. Max Ernst, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Cologne/Kunsthaus Zurich 1962/1963, p. 23). This museum picture by Max Ernst from 1953 corresponds formally to his Meer-Gestirn pictures. In its surreal qualities, however, it goes far beyond their modes of representation. As early as 1931, the artist resorted to the means of collage in his landscapes, arranging partly painted fragments of old wallpaper and giving the pictures an obvious or fanciful title. This is also the case in this painting: Alternating between stillness and movement, the sea is presented in a linear-organic acanthus ornament on two slightly oblique collaged strips of wallpaper. Through them, the viewer can discern powerful wave movements. The glittering sea, painted in a clear blue-light blue-white chord, appears cool and fresh. The sun enthroned in the sky, for once not fully painted, is superimposed by a smaller, plastic-looking "cloud". For this collaged compositional element, he uses a piece of painted wallpaper that allows the association of a cloud. If one follows the title, "Master Raven with his son" hovers in the sky. The heads of the birds are created with the help of drawing stencils. In Ernst's vision, these already have the forms of a bird's head. He positions them in the picture, redraws them and completes them with a white and a black dot to form bird heads. Also master of his picture title, the artist indirectly refers to Jean de La Fontaine's fable "Le Corbeau et le Renard", thus expanding the materiality of collage by a poetic dimension. Nature, the cosmos, stars, birds, forests and the sea are central themes that remain present in Max Ernst's work even after his return to France. The first depictions of landscape, horizon and sun can be found in the mid-1920s, where they are identifiable as romantic and easily identifiable pictorial motifs between more enigmatic compositions as leitmotifs. After Max Ernst returned from the USA, his central creative phase began in France. In 1953, he produced works that were significant in terms of art history, remarkable in terms of technique, as well as diverse, including "Father Rhine" (Spies/Metken 3007), "Locust Song to the Moon" (Spies/Metken 3029), and the present work (Spies/Metken 3025). After the artist was able to acquire a bundle of old wallpaper in a disused department store, he returned to sea-star collages in 1953, continuously continuing the technique of collage and oil painting on canvas that he had begun in the 1930s. With his early collage novels and the pictorial collages mentioned here, Ernst did pioneering work for 20th-century art; they continue to have an impact on central positions of post-war art such as Pop Art. "Mer agitée, soleil, nuage et maître Corbeau avec son fils" was created immediately after Max Ernst's return to France. With its recourse to the 1930s, it embodies a moment of interconnection of his artistic leitmotifs on many levels. Typical is