Max Ernst

The present work is part of the La Mer series that Ernst executed around 1925. During the summer of 1925 Ernst worked by the sea at Pornic in Brittany, and it was probably during this trip that inspired the sea imagery. This was a particularly eventful year for the artist: he signed his first commercial contract, which provided him the financial freedom to devote his time entirely to painting and experimentation; he participated in the first Surrealist group exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, and he developed the frottage technique, one of the most consequential inventions of career. Frottage consisted of placing paper over objects such as leaves or uneven surfaces, particularly those with wood graining, and rubbing the sheet over those forms and textures. This technique resulted in fantastical images that ignited the artist's imagination, and involved the element of chance, the key concept in Surrealist thought. This scraping techique reveals the image rather than painting it onto canvas, resulting in random, chance imagery. In this way, Max Ernst was the first to invent a way of applying automatism, previously practiced by the Surrealists in a literaty medium, to painting.

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. In the present work, he probably incised the wet oil surface with a comb, creating elegant, undulating lines that evoke the effect of currents and waves on the water surface. 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' (W. Spies, Max Ernst. A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 148).

The frame for this work was designed by Pierre Legrain (1889-1929), one of the pioneers of Art Deco, famous for his furniture design and bookbinding, which he transformed into a medium of playful and dazzling experimentation and craftsmanship. The refined simplicity and boldness of his style had a revolutionary effect on modern design. Among the brilliant array of his innovative bookbindings are ones made especially for works by Colette, Paul Verlaine, André Gide, Guillaume Apollinaire, Stephane Mallarmé and Michel Leiris, as well as for the collection of rare books and manuscripts from the library of Jacques Ducet. The unique frame he designed for this oil by Max Ernst shows his affinity with an abstract, linear style with a strong architectural component. The sharp horizontal and vertical lines of the wooden frame follow the rectangular shape of the canvas, while the circle echoes the curving lines of the grattage in the foreground.