Max Ernst

The wide, open landscapes of the American West had a significant influence on Max Ernst’s art during the late 1940s and 1950s. Arizona represented a Promised Land for Ernst, and the beauty of the forms and colours of nature apparently untouched by man were an unexpected discovery for him.

His work acquired a new vitality, and he began to make paintings on a tiny scale, to which he gave the name ‘Microbes’. They demonstrate a marked development when compared to the dark, haunted landscapes of the late 1930s, and show the direct impression made on him by the Arizona landscape. Nature appears to make a direct contribution to his work, but in miniature. Their colours are extraordinarily subtle, much like the colours of the desert under changing light, and theirs forms reminiscent of the rock formations typical of the mountains and canyons near Ernst’s home. Though some of these works may represent particular, recognisable parts of the land, they are mostly generalisations, reductions and abstractions of his own visual experiences.

In his own Biographical Notes, Max Ernst recalled the genesis of his Microbes paintings in 1946: ‘Another stay in Arizona (for health reasons) with Dorothea Tanning. They bought a plot of land and built a house on the hill… On the occasion of a brief stay in the desert state of Nevada, painted “Microbes”’ (quoted in Werner Spies, Max Ernst, A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 324).