Max Ernst

Private Collection, Brussels

Galerie Guillaume Campo, Antwerp

Roman Norbert Ketterer, Campione di Lugano

Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York

Catherine Schlumberger Jones, United States (acquired from the above in December 1968 and sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 13, 1990, lot 55)

Private Collection (acquired at the above sale and sold: Sotheby's, London, June 24, 1996, lot 71)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Campione di Lugano, Roman Norbert Ketterer, Katalog V, 1968, no. 16

Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Oeuvre-Katalog, Werke 1925-1929, Cologne, 1976, no. 1181, illustrated p. 201

The work is in excellent condition. Original canvas. The surface is in excellent state and under ultra-violet light there does not appear to be any evidence of restoration.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Executed in 1927, Le Cimetière des oiseaux belongs to one of the most creative and groundbreaking periods in Max Ernst's oeuvre, marked by a constant stream of technical experimentation and invention.  It was at this time that the artist established his personal mythology, his visual universe of themes and images that were to become central to his entire career.  Throughout 1927, Ernst's work was dominated by images of the natural world, such as forests, birds and seashells, and it was in the series of Forêt paintings of the 1920s that Ernst for the first time fully explored his newly developed grattage technique.  His experimentations with ways of applying pigment onto the surface resulted in the discovery of frottage in 1925.  Fascinated by the rich texture of the floorboards, he would place sheets of paper onto their surface and rub over them with graphite.  This would result in various relief-like forms that suggested particular images to the artist, and with a few strokes added by hand he would arrive at fantastic, unexpected compositions.

 

Adapting this practice to the medium of oil painting, Ernst would cover the canvas with layers of paint and place it over an uneven surface or an object.  He would then scrape the pigment off the surface, and complex patterns would emerge.  Discussing this grattage technique, Werner Spies wrote: "Max Ernst laid his canvas over various objects with raised textures - pieces of wood and string, grates, textured glass panes - and, drawing the paint over them with a palette knife, brought forth the most vivid effects. In the course of the following years - years which William Rubin has called the 'heroic epoch of Surrealist painting' - this technique, known as grattage, led to astonishingly innovative imagery.  The pictures became more abstract in effect, their formats larger.  The dramatic force of these paintings, the richness of their scintillating colour, made them high points of imaginative Surrealist art in the late 1920s" (Werner Spies, Max Ernst. A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 148).

 

The subject of the forest was one of Ernst's favorite subjects, to which he often returned in the mid-1920, although in the present work he gave it a more poetic title Le Cimetière des oiseaux.  Ernst's treatment of the theme of the forest certainly shows his affinity for the German Romantics, as first pointed out in 1956 by his biographer Patrick Waldberg, who argued that Ernst's link with his predecessors was not so much in the actual works, as in his attitude to life and the problems of creativity.  In her essay Max Ernst and Romanticism Karin von Maur observed:  "In the 1920s it is again not so much direct references to German Romanticism as a certain affinity of mood that is found in Max Ernst's work. This is most apparent in the 'Forest' paintings, if for no other reason than that they have recourse to a motif with a long and rich tradition in Germany [...]  This tradition, replete with mystical meanings and tied to notions of German nationhood, had been appropriated by a wave of cloying, patriotic neo-Romantic painting, and it took an artist of Ernst's unencumbered, Dadaist frame of mind to revive a motif so burdened with significance' (Karin von Maur, in ibid., pp. 342-343).

 

For Ernst, as for Caspar David Friedrich more than a century earlier (see fig. 2), the forest was a means of recording and uniting the inner and the outer worlds.  The subject of the forest, which at the same time delighted and oppressed Ernst, was a metaphorical image for the unconscious, embodying both the pleasure of liberty and the fear of imprisonment.  His earlier treatments of this theme are executed in a bright palette, but soon Ernst invested the forest with a sombre atmosphere, creating threatening landscapes that anticipate his later series of petrified cities.  In the present work, the highly stylized birds are visible on the borderline, between the bright sky and the darkness of the forest.  Whilst each of the elements within the compoosition is in itself purely abstract, when seen together they create an imaginary, fantastic landscape populated by enigmatic, tree-like forms rising vertically towards the sky.  Combining his innovative grattage technique with the theme pivotal to Ernst's Oeuvre, Le Cimetière des oiseaux shows the artist at the pinnacle of his creative powers, and exemplifies his unique and remarkable contribution to the Surrealist movement.

 

 

Fig. 1, Max Ernst, La Grande forêt, 1927, oil on canvas, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, Basel

Fig. 2, Caspar David Friedrich, Frühschnee, circa 1828, oil on canvas, Kunsthalle, Hamburg