Max Ernst

Gypsy Rose Lee, New York (acquired directly from the artist by 1942 and until at least 1959)

Cordier & Ekstrom, New York

Acquired by February 1972 by the present owner

New York, Valentine Gallery, Exhibition Max Ernst, 1942, no. 5 (dated 1939)

New York, Cordier & Ekstrom, Bestiary, 1972, pl. 8, illustrated in color (titled Untitled and with incorrect support)

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 79, p. 140, illustrated in color

View, vol. II, no. 1, April 1942 (dated 1939)

Joseph Masheck, “The Bestiary,” Artforum, vol. 10, issue 8, April 1972, p. 88 (titled Untitled)

Sarane Alexandrian, Dictionnaire de la peinture surréaliste, Paris, 1973, p. 22, illustrated in color

Werner Spies, Sigrid Metken and Günter Metken, Max Ernst: Werke 1939-1953, Cologne, 1987, no. 2360, p. 30, illustrated (with incorrect support)

Julia Drost, Fabrice Flahutez and Anne Helmreich, et al., eds., Networking Surrealism in the USA: Agents, Artists, and the Market, Heidelberg, 2019, p. 178 (in reproduction of checklist for New York, Valentine Gallery, Exhibition Max Ernst, 1942); p. 191

J’ai bu du tabourin, j’ai mangé du cimbal is an exceptional painting created in 1940, arguably the most turbulent year in the life of Max Ernst. A vision of dark symbolism as well as surreal beauty, the captivating composition reflects the drama of the artist’s circumstances during this period as well as that of the wider political situation in Europe.

The composition is dominated by a shamanic figure, seemingly bearing two heads—one equine, the other ineffable—atop a humanoid body, a surreal permutation of the mythical centaur. The enigmatic figure floats above the clouds, surveying an apocalyptic landscape below. In a prophetic gesture, he conjures a wispy, bird-like form—perhaps an ethereal manifestation of Loplop, the bird avatar through which Ernst often inserted his presence into his work. The creature hovers as a diaphanous, spectral presence, its ghostly appearance heightening the sense of otherworldly observation, bridging the cosmic and the terrestrial, and emphasizing the painting’s dreamlike logic.

By the time he created the present work, Ernst had been living in France for nearly two decades. Yet, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he faced persecution as a German national and was twice interned by the French authorities as an enemy alien. In September 1939, only days after the outbreak of the war, he was arrested at his home in Saint-Martin d’Ardèche in the south of France. He was interned first at Largentière and subsequently at the camp of Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence, alongside fellow Surrealist Hans Bellmer, who had just emigrated from Germany and settled in Paris.

Ernst was eventually released through the efforts of several friends including Paul Éluard, with whom he had lived in a ménage à trois—along with Éluard’s wife, Gala—when he first settled in Paris in the early 1920s. Ernst was arrested again in 1940, this time by the Nazis after the occupation of France. His companion Leonora Carrington, with whom he had been living in Saint-Martin d’Ardèche, fled to Spain in desperation. Soon afterwards she suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanatorium in Santander.

Escaping his internment and the dangers of the Vichy government, Ernst eventually moved to Marseille, joining a community of avant-garde artists awaiting visas that would allow them to leave occupied France and escape to freedom. In Marseille, Ernst joined the Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization led by the American journalist Varian Fry which helped some 2,000 people to escape Nazi persecution, among them many artists and intellectualsAlong with many of his colleagues, Ernst found refuge at the Villa Air Bel, which had become an oasis of peace and whose occupants were a veritable “who’s who” of European intellectuals.

His stay in Marseille under strenuous, although creatively rich circumstances, provided an opportunity for Ernst’s reconciliation with Breton, from whom he had broken in 1938. To support himself while awaiting his visa, Ernst organized an auction of his and Carrington’s works brought with him from Saint-Martin d’Ardèche.With the help of Peggy Guggenheim, whom he would marry at the end of that year, he finally managed to leave France in July 1941, settling in the United States.

Throughout this precarious period, Ernst continued to innovate, creating several exceptional works like J’ai bu du tabourin, j’ai mangé du cimbal in which he employed the decalcomania technique. Ernst scholar Werner Spies describes decalcomania as a method “which involves the spreading of paint on a sheet, laying a second sheet on top of the first, pressing it in places, and then lifting it up to leave suggestive images... in general the images are fluid. They represent no known world but rather seem to devour one another and evolve in an endless metamorphosis, evoking some vegetal or cosmic process” (Exh. Cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Max Ernst: A Retrospective, 2005, pp. 13-14). In the present composition, Ernst employs the technique to build the craggy, lunar-like landscape and portions of the figure’s cloak.

First used in 1935 by Oscar Domínguez, decalcomania builds on Ernst’s earlier experimentations with the techniques of frottage and grattage, all grounded in the principles of automatism. Rather than carefully building a pre-conceived scene, the artist would let unexpected, often dramatic forms appear on the surface, suggestive of particular imagery around which he would then create the rest of the composition. In the group of canvases painted in the early 1940s, including the present work, Ernst used the method of decalcomania to stunning effect, often combining colorful, intricate details brought about by the rubbing technique with mysterious, menacing figures into images of sublime beauty. This group of works includes the now celebrated La Toilette de la Mariée from 1940 and culminated with the apocalyptic Europe After the Rain, started whilst the artist was still living in France and completed in New York in 1942.

It was in this transatlantic context of upheaval, exile, and continued artistic innovation that the present work found its first home with Gypsy Rose Lee, one of Ernst’s first significant American patrons. Born in Seattle as Rose Louise Hovick, Lee would become better known as a burlesque entertainer and striptease dancer under the stage name, Gypsy Rose. Also an actress, author and art collector, Gypsy Rose became one of the most colorful and flamboyant personalities of her time, embracing a decadent lifestyle and an incongruous career: as a stylish and humorous striptease dancer in New York she was beloved by audiences and frequently arrested by the authorities; in the 1930s she moved to Hollywood where she made several movies; she wrote murder mysteries, and hosted a television talk show. Lee was also politically active, supporting both the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War, and the Communist United Front in America, and was investigated for her allegedly subversive activities. Her memoir, published in 1957, was later adapted to a stage musical as well as a film Gypsy.

Gypsy Rose Lee played an active role in avant garde art circles. An amateur painter, her art was included in an exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century in 1943. She befriended many artists, both European and American, and assembled a collection including works by Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Following her purchase of Ernst’s A Maiden’s Dream about a Lake, she commissioned the artist to paint her portrait, resulting in the stunning oil Gypsy Rose Lee of 1943.