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Artist or Maker: Max Ernst (1891-1976)
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Provenance: Iolas Gallery-Brooks Jackson, Inc., New York.
Anonymous sale, Christie's, New York, 15 May 1997, lot 419.
Private American collection, by whom acquired at the above sale; sale, Christie's, New York, 4 November 2003, lot 34.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owners.
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Exhibited: Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Max Ernst: Oltre la pittura, June - October 1966, no. 56.
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Notes: Property from a Private American Collection
From the early 1960s, Ernst began to explore new avenues in his art. Instead of placing his imagery in a deep, illusionistic space, or using geometry or elements of cubism to compose the picture plane, Ernst increasingly adopted the practice of American postwar abstraction in treating the canvas as an absolutely flat surface on which the artist posited marks or signs. This may also reflect the impact of the artist's cumulative experience of the vast and desolate spaces of the American West, with which he had become closely familiar during the past two decades, and deeply loved.
The route to this new sense of flatness and a decentralized, 'all-over' composition came by way of techniques that he developed in the 1920's--collage and frottage. He collected border-strips of wallpaper and other flat objects in local markets, which he attached to flat, painted surfaces, creating a series of large, elegantly composed panel collages that form an interesting counterpart to Robert Rauschenberg's rougher and more sprawling combine paintings. He further developed his method of frottage, the practice of creating an impression of the texture and configuration of a flat object by placing it beneath the paper sheet and rubbing the surface with charcoal or pencil. He invented this technique in 1925, and had already adapted it to painting on canvas, which entailed 'the scraping of pigments upon a ground prepared in colors and placed on an uneven surface' (from 'On Frottage', trans. D. Tanning, in H.C. Chipp, ed.,Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 429). This practice is also related to the technique of intaglio etching, in which the artist incises the image through a thin coat of the etching ground applied to a metal plate. Around the time of present painting, Ernst was working on his etchings for the book Maximiliana, ou L'exercice illégal de l'astronomie (published in Paris, 1964; W. Spies, Max Ernst, Das Graphische Werk, no. 95), and the use of the etcher's needle may have once again suggested to the artist the idea of scraping the canvas.
La vie des animaux was done by preparing the entire canvas with a yellow ground, and then applying a coat of blue paint over it. The canvas was then placed painted side up over what appears to be pieces of wire mesh. Ernst then scraped away the still wet blue paint, revealing the grid of the wire mesh in a ghostly light-greenish yellow pattern. The contours of the bird shapes were then drawn into the drying painted surface.
Ernst had utilized animal imagery, and bird forms especially, throughout his career, from his earliest pre-surrealist paintings.
In Ernst's conception the animal world stands apart from our own, pure and free from the folly of human ambition, and serves as a dream-like memory of a paradise lost. Ernst wrote:
'The world throws off its cloak of darkness, it offers to our horrified and enchanted eyes the dramatic spectacle of its nudity, and we mortals have no choice but to cast off our blindness and greet the rising suns, moons and sea levels: Be it with awe and controlled emotion, as with the Indians of North America, corralled into their reserves, Be it with song, sonority and music-making by such as the blackbird, thrush, finch and starling (and the whole host of poets)' (quoted in Histoire naturelle, Cologne, 1965).
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