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Artist or Maker: Max Ernst (1891-1976)
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Provenance: Galleria Galatea, Turin (no. 2073).
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1969.
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Exhibited: Honolulu, Hawaii, Academy of Arts, Max Ernst, 1952.
Turin, Galleria Galatea, Max Ernst, October - November 1969 (illustrated).
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Literature: W. Spies, S. & G. Metken, Max Ernst, Werke 1939-1953, Cologne, 1987, no. 2503 (illustrated p. 111).
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
Depicting the geometric figure of a young girl emerging like an apparition from a dense decalcomania jungle of vague but suggestive form, Portrait of a Girl with Mexican Earrings is an exquisite work from the high point of Ernst's years in Sedona.
Ernst and Dorothea Tanning settled in what was then the small village of Sedona in Arizona in the spring of 1946. There amidst the ancient rich red-rock landscape of the South Western United States, they built their own house and studio and, very much in love, settled into a life of peaceful isolation. Ernst, a lover of native American culture since his boyhood days reading the novels of Karl May, sought out all aspects of the American Indian culture that, in his new home, was now all around him. He became friends with many local native Americans and with them sought out many of the ancient sites and ruins of the Asanazi, Hohokam and Sinagua cultures that were just beginning to be explored and excavated at this time. Indeed, Ernst immersed himself in all of the so-called 'primitive' culture of the area. He had begun to collect the Katchina dolls of the Hopi Indians in 1941, and in conjunction with this ever-increasing collection of figures, Ernst began to decorate his new home with mythological figures and faces drawn from the spirits and gods of the ancient native cultures all around him.
Like much of his work from this period, Portrait of a Girl with Mexican Earrings is a pictorial embodiment of many of the new themes and influences that surrounded Ernst in his new life in Arizona. Capturing the unique crystal clarity of the starry light of an Arizona desert night, the strange but seemingly benevolent figure of the young girl in an Indian red dress seems luminous against the mythic shadows of an impenetrable decalcomania forest. Clearly an apparition from the spirit world of Ernst's ever-fertile unconscious mind, the form of this figure is simplified into sharp geometric shapes in a new manner that was just beginning to emerge in Ernst's art at this time and which would culminate in paintings like Chymical Nuptials of 1947-8.
Figures emerging from or disappearing into the dark impenetrable forest populate Ernst's art from the early 1920s onwards. It was after all, where his mysterious alter-ego Loplop had come from. As a child Ernst had grown up next to a forest and in Sedona his house looked out onto the magnificent forest-like rock formations of the ancient Arizona landscape - a landscape that recalled for him the fantastic rocks of his paintings of the 1930s and of Ardèche, where he had lived in the South of France. No wonder that Ernst felt that his move to Arizona was some kind of mystic homecoming. The figure of this girl with her outsize earring suspended like a mystic moon over this timeless landscape seems to be an unambiguously benevolent figure who, smiling from the moonlit undergrowth of the rocky forest landscape bestows peace and serenity on all who see her.
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