Visitors Quide "Max Ernst" PDF (351 KB) - Fondation Beyeler

VISITORS GUIDE E
FONDATION BEYELER

MAX ERNST
26 May – 8 September 2013
Whenever this symbol appears on the information panel
accompanying an exhibit, it means you will find the work of
art discussed in detail under the corresponding number in
this Visitors Guide.
CAUTION: Please do not touch the works of art!
2

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 4
FOYER 5
ROOM 1 6
ROOM 2 7
ROOM 3 8
ROOM 4 8
ROOM 5 10
ROOM 6 12
ROOM 7 13
ROOM 8 15
ROOM 9 16
ROOM 10 18
ROOM 11 20
ROOM 12 22
Information / Catalogue 23
Room Plan 24
Peter Schamoni’s documentary film
Max Ernst. Mein Vagabundieren – Meine Unruhe
will be showing in the Winter Garden during the exhibition.
3

INTRODUCTION
Max Ernst
Max Ernst (1891–1976) was one of modernism’s most versatile
artists. After starting out as a rebellious Dadaist in Cologne, in
1922 he moved to Paris and soon became one of the leading
lights of Surrealism. In 1941, he escaped to the USA, where
he provided inspiration for the generation of young American
artists. Returning to war-devastated Europe a decade later,
Max Ernst found himself back in relative obscurity, before
being rediscovered as one of the most fascinating artists of the
20th century.
A continual inventor of innovative figures, forms, and techniques,
such as collage, frottage, grattage, decalcomania, and
oscillation, Max Ernst was constantly turning his attention in
new directions. The result was a unique body of works that
resists any clear stylistic definition. The artist’s eventful life and
changing abodes in Europe and America were crucial shaping
factors in the development of his oeuvre. Full of enigma and
contradiction, his pictures seem to have arisen out of (nightmarish)
dreams in which surreal landscapes are populated by
strange, disturbing, and erotic figures.
Comprising an outstanding selection of over 160 paintings,
collages, drawings, sculptures, and prints, the extensive Max
Ernst retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler presents every
phase of the artist’s career. For the first time in Switzerland
since Ernst’s death, visitors have the opportunity to experience
the multi-facetted oeuvre of this seminal artist in all its rich
diversity.
The exhibition was conceived by guest curators Werner Spies
and Julia Drost and organized in collaboration with the
Albertina in Vienna. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler is
curated by Raphaël Bouvier.
4

FOYER
1 • Capricorne, 1962/1964
Capricorn
Capricorn is a work open to many interpretations, a majestic
‘family seat’ comprising a bull seated on his throne, a nix-like
female companion standing beside him, and a small creature
perched on its father’s massive lap. Max Ernst has drawn
upon archaic imagery for this sculpture: in Greek mythology,
Aigokeros (Latin: Capricornus) is a hybrid being who was half
goat, half fish. He aided Zeus in the battle against the Titans
and was rewarded with a place in the heavens as the zodiacal
sign of Capricorn. Surrealism took up such mythical beings
with interest and gave them new life.
Max Ernst created the first version of this work—his largest
free-standing sculpture—in 1948, while living in exile in
America. Having fled Europe in 1941, Ernst and his wife, the
paintress Dorothea Tanning, withdrew to the wild, desert landscape
of Arizona. They built themselves a small house in a
secluded spot named Capricorn Hill. Capricorn stood sentinel
outside their new home like a cosmic guard.
The massive bronze version in the Fondation Beyeler foyer is
today here to welcome visitors as they embark on their fascinating
tour through Max Ernst’s pictorial cosmos.
5

ROOM 1
2 • Stadt mit Tieren, 1919
City with Animals
Max Ernst was 28 years old when he produced this painting
and had only recently come home following the end of the
First World War. He experienced his return from the war as
a rebirth. Talking about himself in the third person, he wrote:
“Max Ernst died on 1 August 1914. He was resurrected on 11
November 1918 as a young man who wanted to be a magician
and find the myth of his time.”
In City with Animals, Max Ernst portrays a deceptive idyll.
Three animals are resting peacefully before a city whose colorful
houses are threatening to collapse. The city’s inhabitants
are behaving mysteriously: on the left of the picture, a man
wearing a black hat is waving into empty space. To his right, a
woman in a white dress moves as if sleepwalking. Above her
dangles a pulley without a rope, suggesting a gallows and a
hanging. The mood is oppressive. The three animals in the foreground,
with their large, melancholy eyes, seem almost human
and recall the imagery of the Russian painter Marc Chagall.
3 • Oedipus Rex, 1922
Max Ernst’s creativity was sparked by a wealth of different
sources: natural phenomena and technical inventions, myth
and his own inner life, the cosmic and the intimate alike.
Oedipus Rex can be considered a programmatic work in which
the artist has channeled the richness of his abundant imagination
into a multi-layered whole. It arose out of Ernst’s intense
preoccupation, around 1922, with the theories of Sigmund
Freud, the subject of dreams, mythology, and the surreal. The
title is an allusion to the story of Oedipus, which tells of patricide
and the fateful love between mother and son.
A large hand protruding out through a window opening is
holding a walnut, which is pierced—like the thumb and index
finger holding it—by a metallic device of some kind. How are
the trapped couple (a bird and a bull), the pierced fingers, and
the walnut to be interpreted?
6

ROOM 2
4 • Katharina ondulata, 1920
Max Ernst gave this picture, whose distinctive frame he found
at a flea market, the title Katharina ondulata. The name calls
to mind Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was broken on the
wheel and died a martyr in the fourth century. The curious
epithet ondulata (meaning ‘wavy’) warns us, however, not to
expect a classic depiction of a saint. The apparitions in the
sky and the seemingly artificial structure in the empty landscape
do not combine into a ‘pictorial narrative’, but present
themselves as a disjointed assembly of isolated elements. The
artist was familiar with traditional representations of saints
through his Catholic family upbringing and his studies of art
history. Here he uses irony to break with that tradition, leaving
only enigmatic hints and fragments.
Max Ernst created this picture in 1920, on a sheet already
containing a bold printed pattern. Although he has painted
over most of the print, Ernst has left some parts exposed. This
creates the misleading impression that the rigid figure dominating
the scene has been cut out of wallpaper and pasted on.
Max Ernst simulates a collage by cleverly concealing the
original pattern in some places and allowing it to show through
in others. Instead of creating a new pictorial whole from individual
fragments, as in a collage, he intervenes in an existing
image. At the time, this was an entirely new approach.
7

ROOM 3
5 • la puberté proche… (les pléiades), 1921
Approaching Puberty… (The Pleiades)
For this work, Max Ernst has cut out the figure of a reclining
female nude from an existing picture, rotated it though 90
degrees and pasted it onto the painted ground. Although the
woman’s face is missing, we can imagine her gazing pensively
at the stone below her. Her right arm is raised to her head,
while her left arm passes like a sword through a dark disc.
The artist has integrated the French caption as a component of
equal importance. Like the picture, it offers unlimited scope for
associations. In a language rich with allusions, Ernst seems to
be equating the woman with the Pleiades, a constellation
named after a group of virgin nymphs in a Greek myth. They
were transformed into stars by Zeus to save them from the
hunter Orion. Virginity and lasciviousness, the celestial and the
earthly, floating and falling, grace and destruction—in this
intriguing work Max Ernst holds a wealth of opposites in
balance.
ROOM 4
6 • à tout oublier, 1925
To Forget Everything
From: Histoire naturelle, folio 32
Max Ernst created his Histoire naturelle (Natural History) series
using materials that he found in nature, such as leaves and
pieces of wood. He placed them underneath a sheet of paper
and made an impression of their shape and texture by rubbing
the paper with a pencil. This technique is known as ‘frottage’,
a term derived from the French verb frotter, to rub. The artist
developed the resulting impressions into fantastical pictures.
In allusion to the history of creation and evolution, they show
primarily plants, animals, and humans. These frottage drawings
infuse the inanimate objects with new life and lend them a
different and at times strange meaning. Here, for example,
wood grain becomes the skin and mane of a hybrid beast: a
primitive horse or an elephant.
8

ROOM 4
Max Ernst discovered frottage in 1925 while visiting Brittany.
In his essay “Beyond Painting”, he describes falling into a kind
of visionary state, which led him to make rubbings on paper of
the floor-boards and other objects in his lodging. These rubbings
revealed visual structures, yielded purely by chance,
that conjured up a whole new world.
7 • leçon d’écriture automatique (l’aimant est proche
sans doute), ca. 1923
Lesson in Automatic Writing (The Magnet Is Close, No Doubt)
Heads without bodies, bodies without heads, a fantasy world
with mountains, castles, and lightning… Max Ernst transports
us into an imaginary landscape. Individual scenes ‘play out’ as
if in a cinematic sequence across the panoramic landscape
format. The artist is here conducting an exercise in automatic
writing. This technique was originally used by Surrealist writers
to circumvent the control of the conscious mind. In a hand
that to a certain extent wrote faster than they could think, they
rapidly jotted down the free flow of their spontaneous and
uncensored thoughts.
Ernst transferred this technique to the visual arts by recording
such streams of information not in words, but in drawings.
Language plays a key role here nonetheless. In the left-hand
side of the picture, the large upper half of a woman’s head with
brow band carries an inscription in French: “L’AIMANT EST
PROCHE SANS DOUTE”. This can be translated as: “The lover
is close, no doubt.” But aimant is also the French word for
‘magnet’—which in turn recalls Les champs magnétiques (in
English: The Magnetic Fields), the ground-breaking volume
of Surrealist poetry by André Breton and Philippe Soupault.
It was the first attempt by the two authors to write using automatic
techniques.
In 1922, a year before the genesis of the present drawing,
Max Ernst moved to Paris in order to join the group of artists
centered around Breton. He rapidly became one of the most
important members of the Surrealist movement.
9

ROOM 5
8 • Personnages dont un sans tête, 1927
Figures, One Headless
In this work from 1927, several schematic figures, defined by
black lines, either stand in front of the two-color background
or merge with it to form a single entity. Against the bright blue
plane of sky, we can see the silhouetted shape of a head. Does
it belong to the dark body in the center of the composition?
Or is this figure the headless one mentioned in the title?
Max Ernst employed a very particular technique to make this
picture: he dipped cords into paint and let them fall onto the
canvas, which lay flat on the floor. This produced a tangle of
lines, which the artist then developed into the interwoven figures.
With their art, the Surrealists sought to penetrate the
realm of the psyche, which lies beyond logic and reason: the
world of dreams, unfiltered thoughts and emotions. Unlike
other Surrealists associated with André Breton, Ernst never
completely surrendered intellectual control. He reserved the
right to direct the creative process to a certain extent—as with
the cord technique employed here.
9 • La Vierge corrigeant l’enfant Jésus devant trois témoins :
André Breton, Paul Éluard et le peintre, 1926
The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus before Three
Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Artist
The three witnesses to this extraordinary scene are grouped
on the far side of a small window opening: André Breton, Paul
Éluard, and—with his eyes open—Max Ernst. The theoretician
of Surrealism and his friends, the poet and the painter, are
not the only spectators, however: we, the viewers, are also
witnesses to this unprecedented sight. Facing towards us,
seated on a plinth in an energetic, tensed pose, the Virgin—
dressed in blue and red and crowned with a halo—is smacking
her child. The boy is lying naked on his stomach across his
mother’s lap, his curly blonde head lower than his legs. His
buttocks are flushed red from the force of the blows and the
fingers of his left hand are curved in pain, while his halo lies
like a profane object on the edge of the plinth below. It is not
the Virgin in her fury, but the Infant Christ who has lost his
nimbus. This latter now encircles the artist’s signature—a further
provocative displacement within this pictorial composition
in a stage-like setting beneath an open sky.
10

ROOM 5
10 • Au premier mot limpide, 1923
At the First Limpid Word
(Former mural from Paul Éluard’s house in Eaubonne)
This picture is dominated by a reddish-brown wall that largely
obscures the view of the blue background. A feminine hand
reaches through one of two narrow window openings. With
fingers crossed, it holds a red ball or fruit. Attached to this is
a thread, which is suspended by nails from the wall, forming
the letter ‘M’. Together with the ‘X’ shape of the fingers this
can be interpreted as Max Ernst’s signature, like a monogram.
At the same time, the motif of the fingers, which is taken from
the illustration of a magic trick, also suggests a woman’s legs
crossed—in conjunction with the red berries, an allegory of
seduction. Pulling on the other end of the thread is a praying
mantis, a symbol of aggressive sexual behavior.
The representation, conceived as a magical picture puzzle,
originally belonged to a series of murals that Ernst carried
out in the home of the poet Paul Éluard in 1923. In them, the
artist created a work that is permeated by a personal, erotic
symbolism. He had begun a love affair with Éluard’s wife,
Gala, while still living in Cologne, and the motifs and content
of the mural cycle in Eaubonne probably contain allusions to
the triangular relationship that continued between them in
France.
The Eduards’ house was later sold. It was not until the late
1960s that the paintings, which had been papered over, were
rediscovered, detached from the walls, and transferred to
canvas. The titles that they bear today are taken from poems
by Max Ernst, who in addition to his artistic oeuvre also left an
extensive body of literary work.
11

ROOM 6
11 • Vision provoquée par l’aspect nocturne de la porte
Saint-Denis, 1927
Vision Induced by the Nocturnal Aspect of the Porte
Saint-Denis
The title of this work implies that the artist was inspired by the
sight of the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris at night. The monument
was built as a triumphal arch, and in the painting we are shown
hints of sculptures and architectural decoration. The natural
world and a man-made edifice seem to have merged with each
other.
This picture was created using grattage—an artistic technique
that Ernst devised as a ‘semi-automatic’ process. He began by
applying several coats of paint to his canvas in order to build
up his ground. He then placed objects such as a section of
wire mesh or a piece of wood underneath his prepared canvas,
in such a way that their surface pressed into the underside.
In order to transfer an impression of their relief structures to
the canvas, he scraped off the top layers of paint. The term
‘grattage’ is derived from the French verb gratter, meaning ‘to
scrape’. In a final step, Ernst reworked and re-interpreted the
patterns that had come to light.
12 • Forêt, 1927
Forest
With his forest pictures of 1927, Ernst continued—as he himself
said—the tradition of what the German Romantics called
‘inner landscapes’. Few statements encapsulate the mindset
of this Surrealist artist as aptly as these words by Caspar David
Friedrich, the ultimate Romantic painter:
“The painter should not just paint what he sees before him,
but also what he sees in himself. If he sees nothing in himself,
however, then he should forebear to paint what he sees before
him.”
In Max Ernst’s painting Forest, bare, dead tree stumps rise
against the blue night sky. The scenery is gloomy and ominous,
as though after a devastating fire. The forest motif has
aspects that Max Ernst found liberating, but also frightening.
Describing an early childhood memory in the third person, he
wrote of: “Mixed feelings when he enters the forest for the first
time: delight and oppression. And what the Romantics spoke
of as ‘being at one with Nature’. Wonderful joy in breathing
freely in an open space, but also anxiety at being encircled by
hostile trees. Outside and inside at the same time, free and
trapped.”
12

ROOM 7
13 • Cinq jeunes filles et un homme traversant
une rivière, 1927
Five Young Girls and a Man Crossing a River
Bizarre creatures are splashing through a river in a frenzied
dance. Their shapes are partly human, partly animal—bodies
undergoing a transformation. Max Ernst has represented his
figures in vigorous motion. With arms flung up and hair or
manes streaming out, they give an impression of unbounded
power and energy, forming a marked contrast to the peaceful,
pale blue sky.
Five Young Girls and a Man Crossing a River belongs to Max
Ernst’s series of so-called Horde pictures, which appeared as
a new theme within the Surrealist’s oeuvre as from 1927. The
horde seems to embody the wild, destructive forces that are
inherent in the human psyche. This irrepressible vitality fits
seamlessly into Surrealist criticism of modern civilization, a
world governed by technology and reason. Ernst’s hordes thus
represent a movement that wishes to free itself from all constraints
and leave conventions far behind.
14 • Fleurs de neige, 1929
Snow Flowers
The bright, colorful forms zipping across the canvas call to
mind scattered flowers or scraps of fabric. Several clusters of
flowers are attached to brown stems. The subtle shading and
color gradients give the individual flowers an almost sculptural
presence. Max Ernst here conveys the transition from two-
dimensionality to the illusion of spatial depth in masterly
fashion.
The picture is playing with our perceptions, however, because
what we interpret as the background is, in fact, the foreground.
In other words: the artist has not placed his colorful forms
on top of a dark background, but has covered a gaily painted
canvas with areas of dark green, black, and blue. The floral
shapes are ‘remnants’ of this originally brightly colored ground.
The ‘snow flowers’ left visible exhibit surfaces of all different
kinds—another means by which Max Ernst skillfully and
deliberately makes his pictorial surface blossom.
13

ROOM 7
15 • Après nous la maternité, 1927
After Us, Motherhood
An entire flock of birds inhabits this dark painting with its
dramatic lighting. At the center, a mother bird holds its young
one close—an intimate gesture that makes her seem almost
human. Max Ernst is here citing the Christian pictorial type
of the Holy Family, but in this case has transferred a sacred
narrative into a gloomy scene enacted by animal-like creatures.
More birds are flitting around the central pair, and
contours and silhouettes suggest the presence of others in the
background.
The title After Us, Motherhood is a play on the words famously
spoken by Madame de Pompadour “After us, the deluge”,
meaning that we do not care what happens when we are gone,
but it also heralds the rebirth of something new. Birds play
an important part in Ernst’s work. The artist felt related to them
in some mysterious way. This fascination was triggered by a
childhood experience in 1906. In his autobiographical work
Tissue of Truth, Tissue of Lies, he writes of himself in the third
person: “First contact with occult, magical and enchanting
forces. One of his best friends, a very intelligent and affectionate
pink cockatoo, died in the night of 5 January. It was a terrible
shock for Max when he found the dead bird in the morning,
at the same moment as his father told him of the birth of
his sister, Loni. The boy’s consternation was so great that he
fainted. In his imagination, he linked the two events and made
the baby responsible for extinguishing the bird’s life. A series
of psychological crises and depressions followed. A dangerous
amalgamation of birds and human beings became firmly
established in his mind and later found expression in his
paintings and drawings.”
14

ROOM 8
16 • Un peu de calme, 1939
A Moment of Calm
The panorama of a densely wooded landscape unfolds before
our eyes. We can make out the schematic figures of giant
birds, wild beasts, and other animals. Above the hard, sharpedged
forest backdrop hangs a slightly distorted moon, bathing
the entire scene in a pale light. A cloud in the shape of a
tortoise seems to be fleeing out of the picture on the left. The
monumental canvas generates a strange atmosphere: we can
practically sense disaster looming. The title, A Moment of
Calm, downplays this smoldering tension while at the same
time evoking the proverbial calm before the storm. We are
looking at a natural world that has turned threatening and
sinister. In hindsight, the catastrophe to which Max Ernst is
alluding is all too easy to recognize: the picture was painted
on the eve of the Second World War, whose outbreak would
spell internment, flight, and exile for the artist. In 1939 the
world presents itself as an impenetrable thicket offering no
avenues of escape.
Max Ernst painted A Moment of Calm for the walls of his living
room in southern France. After rediscovering the picture, which
was long believed lost, he extensively reworked it.
17 • La ville entière, 1935/36
The Entire City
In his magnificent painting The Entire City, Max Ernst shows
us a mysterious landscape with an imposing city that is laid
out on several levels across a hillside. A powerful yellowish
green star hangs in the sky and an impenetrable jungle of grass
spreads across the foreground. In this picture, Max Ernst not
only combines extreme close-up with distant views, but also
different layers of time. The city calls to mind antique ruins
and the ancient temples built by lost civilizations. Perhaps the
artist is also conjuring a vision of the future. Whatever the
case, this is a city of the imagination and an architecture found
in the realm of dreams.
15

ROOM 9
18 • Loplop, le supérieur des oiseaux (Oiseau de neige), 1928
Loplop, Superior of the Birds (Snow Bird)
Towards the end of the 1920s, a fictional character called
‘Loplop’ appears in the work of Max Ernst. This imaginary birdlike
creature acts as the artist’s alter ego. In this imposing
painting from 1928, titled Loplop, Superior of the Birds (Snow
Bird), the white shape of a bird shines against a black background,
spreading its wings like a heraldic beast. The linear,
curved structures of the wings and some parts of the body
betray to us how it was made: Ernst has here worked with a
serrated palette knife. The head resembles a painter’s palette—
a clear indication that the artist identified with the figure of
the bird.
19 • Oiseau-tête (Femme-oiseau ; Cadran lunaire), 1934/35
Bird Head (Woman-Bird; Moon Dial)
The bronze sculpture Bird Head consists of a flat face on
‘legs’— a cephalopod, in other words. Projecting from its
forehead is the head of a bird with an open beak. The work
resembles a bizarre hybrid creature from the realm of fantasy
that has suddenly materialized in front of us in physical and
thus completely ‘real’ form. Ernst was acquainted with such
visitors from another ‘reality’ and cultivated conscious relationships
with them. In combining a flat base panel with a face
in low relief and a three-dimensional bird’s head, the artist
emphasizes the transition from the flat surface of the picture
to the spatial volume of sculpture and thereby highlights the
process by which the creature assumes increasing form. In the
tradition of the readymade and assemblage, Max Ernst has
incorporated found objects, such as the tongs that serve as the
bird’s beak.
16

ROOM 9
20 • Marceline Marie: « Mais pourquoi, ma chevelure,
pourquoi es-tu partout? » – La chevelure: « C’est pour mieux
te mettre à ta place, mon enfant. », 1929/30
Marceline-Marie: “But why, hair, why are you everywhere?”—
The hair: “The better to put you in your place, my child.”
From: Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel
What an eerie scene: in a burial vault whose door stands wide
open, a lifeless woman is being lifted out of a coffin. The three
figures around her have bizarre heads: while an arrangement
of flowers crowns the neck of the figure on the left, the two
others wear thick tresses of hair on their shoulders, whereby
the bun on the left resembles the head of a bird. Like Max
Ernst’s famous collage novel La femme 100 têtes (a punning
title that literally means ‘the 100-headed woman’ but when
spoken aloud sounds like ‘the headless woman’), his next
project of 1929/30, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer
au Carmel (published in English as A Little Girl Dreams of
Taking the Veil), is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic
works of Surrealism. Female figures with and without heads
appear throughout these collages, too. The artist assembled his
collages from woodcut illustrations that he took from various
nineteenth-century novels and scientific journals. He cut them
out with a scalpel so as to achieve a perfect result with precise,
clean-cut edges.
Max Ernst does not narrate a logically unfolding tale in his
‘novel’. Instead, its images and captions lead in roundabout
ways to ever more ideas, associations, and interpretations.
17

ROOM 10
21 • La nature à l’aurore (Chant du soir), 1938
Nature at Dawn (Evensong)
Luxuriant plants growing rampant, a tangle of leaves, stems,
buds, and flowers. The imagery calls to mind the work of the
French painter Henri Rousseau, which is no surprise, given
that Max Ernst greatly admired him.
Looking more closely at Nature at Dawn, we discover a variety
of life forms. Prominent on the right, for example, is a bluish
red, bird-like figure with human hands, while a second creature
robed in blue can be seen set slightly further back in the
left half of the picture. Everywhere we catch glimpses of faces,
eyes, legs, feet, and other body parts. Grasses of tree-like
stature form an impenetrable thicket, and pistils, ovules, and
petals speak of extreme fecundity. This jungle of plants is
densely populated with voracious and well-camouflaged creatures
of species strange and unknown. In his painting, Max
Ernst offers us not a natural paradise but a swathe of grass full
of animals that have yet to find their way into our biology
books.
22 • The King Playing with the Queen, 1944
Looking at the large plaster sculpture of The King Playing with
the Queen, we are instantly drawn into the game. Our opponent
is the diabolical horned king who rises from a stepped, blocklike
base. In front of him—or between him and us—lies a narrow
board, slightly raised, with seven figures. These can be easily
recognized from their arrangement as chess pieces. Between
the bishop and the queen is a large gap—where the king
would normally stand. Max Ernst has taken him off the chessboard
and set him down behind it. The chess piece now has
become the chess player. The king has grown long, thin arms
and has taken the game quite literally into his own hands! He
has already captured one piece, a pawn, and holds it hidden
behind his back. We watch, fascinated, as the game plays itself
and as the king ‘cheats’. He appears as an all- powerful strategist
manipulating everything—not just his queen—to his own
ends.
18

ROOM 10
25 • L’ange du foyer (Le triomphe du surréalisme), 1937
The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism)
“A picture that I painted after the defeat of the Republicans
in Spain is The Fireside Angel. This is, of course, an ironic title
for a rampaging beast that destroys and annihilates anything
that gets in its way. This was my idea at the time of what
would probably happen in the world, and I was right.”
In 1936, civil war had broken out in Spain. Like many members
of the Parisian avant-garde, Max Ernst was a resolute
opponent of the Spanish dictator, General Franco, who was
supported by Germany’s Nazi regime. So the savage beast in
the painting can be seen as embodying the calamity that
fascism brought not only to Spain, but to the whole of Europe.
An alternative perspective was offered by Ernst himself in
1938, when he spontaneously opted for a different title: The
Triumph of Surrealism. He thereby unceremoniously proclaimed
the painting a programmatic work of Surrealism and its revolutionary
creed.
ROOM 11
26 • Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1945
In 1945, Max Ernst took part in an unusual art contest. The
director Albert Lewin needed a picture of the Temptation
of Saint Anthony for his film, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami,
adapted from a novel by Guy de Maupassant. The work was
meant to appear in a key scene of the black-and-white movie
as a close-up in color. Max Ernst’s painting won the first prize.
Imaginative and gruesome in equal measure, Ernst’s representation
of the Saint Anthony legend draws on earlier treatments
of the theme from the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and
Symbolism. The Surrealist painter was inspired in particular
by the corresponding scene in the Isenheim Altarpiece by
Matthias Grünewald. Ernst gives a vivid depiction of the ascetic
Anthony being tormented by demons, who are seeking to lead
him astray from his life of devotion as a hermit.
20

ROOM 11
27 • Napoleon in the Wilderness, 1941
When Max Ernst fled from Portugal to the United States in
1941, his luggage included this painting: Napoleon in the
Wilderness. Once in America, he continued work on the enigmatic
picture. It shows a strange group of figures on a seashore
with flourishing vegetation: a horse-headed figure on stilt-like
legs, striking a pose reminiscent of Napoleon; a totem pole
apparently made of glass; a sea monster; and a seductive
female, whose coral-like robes reveal rather than conceal her
naked body.
In her right hand she is holding what looks like a saxophone,
in a clear reference to America and its musical culture. Ernst
got to know this at first hand on a tour of the country that
included New Orleans. The bell of the instrument has been
transformed, however, into a gargoyle with gaping jaws. Is the
siren trying to lure the protagonist to his ruin, as befell the
Greek hero Odysseus? Stranded in a foreign country, the male
figure seems lost. It is hence tempting to suppose a connection
between this image and the situation of the artist in exile.
28 • Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 1942
Surrealism and Painting
This large painting from 1942 is dominated by a most peculiar
creature. Some parts of its amorphous body, which is covered
with smooth skin, appear almost human. On the right, the
‘Darwinian’ monster has even grown an arm with which to paint
a picture, while at the same time attending with its bird’s head
to its brood.
In the picture within the picture, we encounter a different,
novel language of form. The curved lines, resembling planetary
orbits, bear witness to a new technique: oscillation. In this
process, the artist allowed the paint to drip onto the canvas
out of a can with a hole drilled in the bottom, which he swung
on a long string above the flat canvas like a pendulum.
The programmatic title of this work, Surrealism and Painting,
is also that of an essay by André Breton. In it, the author and
mentor of Surrealism calls for artistic control to be relinquished
in favor of automatic procedures, so as to get closer to the
unconscious. Oscillation offered another means of achieving
this result.
21

SAAL 12
29 • Le jardin de la France, 1962
The Garden of France
In 1953 Max Ernst left the United States and returned to
Paris. He painted The Garden of France in 1962 in Huismes
(Touraine), between the rivers Loire and Indre, where he had
bought a house for himself and his wife, the artist Dorothea
Tanning.
The artist shows his chosen home in bird’s-eye view, as it were
on a map. He has even noted down the names of the rivers and
their direction of flow, although in reality they do not flow
counter to each other. Melding with this almost factual, reduced
representation of the landscape is a naked female body—the
copy of a 19th-century nude that Max Ernst has painted over.
The snake coiled above her knee suggests that she might be
Venus, Cleopatra, or Eve. Whatever the case, in this garden of
paradise, fertility and corruption are intimately entwined.
30 • Naissance d’une galaxie, 1969
Birth of a Galaxy
In his late work, Max Ernst concentrated on cosmic themes and
the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. He depicted the
birth and death of stars and planets, even of entire galaxies.
The infinite nature of the universe served as a foil for his
imagination, while in real life space was being explored and
studied by scientists and astronauts. In 1969, the year of
the first manned landing on the moon, the artist created this
picture, Birth of a Galaxy: a sparkling star system arising out
of the blue universe. The golden celestial orbs form a perfect
pattern in the shape of a circular (perforated) disc. Ernst
employed the motif frequently as a symbol of the formation of
the universe.
For the last 23 years of his life, Ernst lived in France. During
this period, countless exhibitions, public commissions, and
awards testified to the high esteem in which his work was
now held. The artist nevertheless remained a seeker, always
ready to set out on an artistic adventure with an uncertain
outcome.
22

INFORMATION / CATALOGUE
Texts: Raphaël Bouvier and Ioana Jimborean
Editing: Valentina Locatelli
Translation from the German: Karen Williams
We look forward to hearing your feedback at
fondation@fondationbeyeler.ch
www.fondationbeyeler.ch/news
www.facebook.com/FondationBeyeler
twitter.com/Fond_Beyeler
FONDATION BEYELER
Baselstrasse 101, CH-4125 Riehen/Basel
www.fondationbeyeler.ch
A catalogue to accompany the MAX ERNST exhibition is
published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. It contains a foreword by
Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Sam Keller and texts by
Gunhild Bauer, Raphaël Bouvier, Julia Drost, Gisela Fischer,
Ioana Jimborean, Jürgen Pech, Werner Spies, Adrian
Sudhalter, Ralph Ubl, Tanja Wessolowski, and Gabriele Wix.
352 pages, 343 color illustrations, CHF 62.50
More publications on Max Ernst are available from the Art Shop
inside the museum and online: www.shop.fondationbeyeler.ch
23

Art Shop
Entrance Museum
Foyer
3
2
1
Beyeler
Collection
Max
Ernst
1 2
3 4
5 6
4
7
11
9
6
5
Alexander
Calder
8
9
Maurizio
Cattelan
10
12
8
7
Video Winter Garden Lift
Souterrain (lower oor)
BEYELER COLLECTION and works from the DAROS COLLECTION
and the BISCHOFBERGER COLLECTION
Maurizio Cattelan
Alexander Calder
20 21
22
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Franz West
Max Ernst
CAUTION: Do not touch the works of art!
Lift Souterrain