Max Ernst

Édouard Loeb, Paris
Galerie Saint Augustin, Paris
Dominique de Menil, Houston (acquired by 1970)
Thence by descent

Paris, Galerie René Drouin, Max Ernst, 1950, no. 48
Hamburg, Kunsthalle; Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft; Frankfurt, Kunstverein; Berlin, Akademie der Kunste; Koln, Kunsthalle; Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries; Marseille, Musée Cantini; Grenoble, Maison de la Culture; Strasbopurg, Ancienne Douane; Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Houston, Rice Museum; Kansas City, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery & Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts & Chicago, The Art Institute, Max Ernst, Das innere Gesicht—Max Ernst, Inside the Sight, An exhibition of Max Ernst Paintings from the Menil Family Collection, 1970-74, no. 48, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Max Ernst: A Retrospective, 1975, no. 226

John Russell, Max Ernst, Life and Work, New York, 1967, no. 85, illustrated n.p. (titled Cyprès réciproques)
Werner Spies, Sigrid & Gunter Metken, Max Ernst, Oeuvre-Katalog, Werke 1939-1953, Cologne, 1987, no. 2688, illustrated p. 203

Ernst painted Deux cyprès réciproques during the creative height of his years in the United States, a period very much informed by the influence of the expansive and geologically complex Southwestern landscape. The artist spent ample time in Arizona with his partner Dorothea Tanning, moving to Sedona in 1946. Ernst was thrilled to find that the fantastical landscapes and vegetation he had imagined in his works of the 1920s and 30s were echoed in actuality in Arizona. Discussing the significant inspiration of these surroundings for Ernst, John Russell wrote: "Arizona offered isolation, a celestial climate, a way of life that was both economical and free from suburban constraints. It offered the inspiration of supreme, natural beauty...  Few things are more stirring than the fantastic forms and the irrational colouring of the mountains around Sedona. In the mid-1940s life and landscape in that region had an uncorrupted quality which made of Arizona a Promised Land in which a new life could be begun and an old one discarded...and although Max Ernst had never been a landscape painter, in the ordinary sense, it was deeply moving for him to come upon a landscape which had precisely the visionary quality that he had sought for on canvas" (John Russell, Max Ernst: Life and Work, New York, 1967, p. 140).

This phase of Ernst’s oeuvre was dominated by the technique of decalcomania, explored in the present work to a powerful effect. Invented by Oscar Dominguez in 1935, this process immediately became as important a Surrealist technique as automatic writing, collage, frottage and grattage. The technique of decalcomania consists of covering the canvas with a layer of pigment and then pressing onto it with a smooth surface such as glass. A rich surface pattern that emerges as a result has the appearance of corals, rocks or imaginary creatures. As described in the text of the major Max Ernst retrospective at the Tate in 1991, “Decalcomania was what might be termed an intersubjective method, comparable to the automatic writing, the dream protocols and the cadavres exquis of the late 1920s. Yet with Max Ernst, the game led to a marvellous expansion of his visionary world...employed with great sophistication and supplemented by interpretative additions by hand” (Max Ernst (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 230).

Celebrated author Henry Miller wrote of Ernst's fantastical landscapes: “The chimaeras, the unearthly vegetation, the symbolic episodes, the haunting passages which lead us in the twinkling of an eye from the fabulous to the invisible and frightening realities, in the pictures which Max Ernst has been giving us for the last twenty years, are not dream images any more than they are accidents. They are the product of an inventive mind endeavoring to translate in worldly language experiences which belong to another dimension. If they are horror-laden sometimes it is not in the familiar nightmarish sense which we are accustomed to ascribe to the functional processes of the night mind. They are compact with wonder and mystery, awesomely real. A glow emanates from them which arises neither from the day world nor the night world” (Henry Miller, “Another Bright Messenger,” in View, no. 1, April 1942, New York).