I - French Drawings - Marty de Cambiaire

Provenance:
Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf, Germany.
Galleria Sacchetti, Ascona, Switzerland.
Collection Serge Schael, Switzerland.
Private collection, France.
The Sun
25
Max Ernst
Brühl 1891 – 1976 Paris
Signed and dated max ernst 1974 (on the mount, lower right)
Collage and rubbing, pastel and gouache on paper
Composition: 235 x 162 mm. (9 1/4 x 6 3/8 in.)
With mount: 315 x 212 mm. (12 3/8 x 8 3/8 in.)
Provenance:
Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva (no. 1430).
Although he did not invent the collage process (the Cubists’ “papiers
collés” may have should him the way), Max Ernst was their
brilliant manipulator. The collage technique in fact accompanies
all of his output, feeds it, opens new ways to him, and allows
him to introduce links and citations. From the Dada years in
Cologne to his final sojourns in the south of France, Max Ernst
used collage to surprise the spectator, to incite doubts and interrogations.
He created a magical world from disparate elements.
A piece of wallpaper associated with other elements can become
a forest, or as in our drawing, glued elements and a ”rubbed” element
all of a sudden take on a new meaning by the simple fact
of their juxtaposition: a brilliant celestial body surrounded by
stars illuminates a strange desert.
In 1974, Max Ernst made a series of collages with the title of
“Configuration” which had in common without work the image
of a celestial body (Moon or Sun?) at the centre of a disturbing
sky juxtaposed with an unknown desert horizon. There is no
doubt that our work can be connected to these, both by its
iconography and technique. Because in addition to the collage,
Max Ernst has here reused the process of “rubbing” which he
had perfected in Paris in the mid 1920s. The lower area of the
work created by rubbing coloured crayons on a ribbed relief, associated
with the collage of the upper area then takes on a completely
different meaning.
From this unexpected meeting, a disturbing tension and surprising
poetic spark are born. This is the definition itself of Surrealism,
dear to André Breton, which Max Ernst illustrates here.
Béatrix Blavier
Tinguely, who was strongly influenced by the Dadaists and Marcel
Duchamp, claimed to have been obsessed for a long time by the
wish to throw a bomb at the Mona Lisa. He was thus reproducing
with the energy and violence of his time, Duchamp’s 1919 intellectual
attack on the Louvre’s icon. This violence and energy
would always be at the heart of Tinguely’s work. They incarnate
even the starting point of the creative act. In that renewing with
the iconoclastic and dynamic conception of the Futurists, Tinguely
became the herald of the Art Machine, of uncontrolled movement
and “chance in action.”
The machine, or more exactly, the mechanism, founded on an
accumulation of workings which were as useless as they were
powerful, would be Tinguely’s most constant means of expression.
And if this art of the machine, of the subject of sweepings and the
unfinished seems to bring a natural echo to the works of someone
such as Rauschenberg and the great adventure of world Pop art, it
is more towards Yves Klein, the friend who died too early, that the
true artistic conviction of Tinguely should be looked for.
Since, unlike the New-Realists, who were looking to anchor
art in reality, Tinguely conceived art as a means of dematerialising
the real: the sound and rapid movement of wheels, ungovernable
and unfinished gestures are actors in the progressive disappearance
of materiality. We know how the destruction or the self-destruction
of his works was for the artist their supreme expression (Homage
to New York, Study for an End to the World, Monstrous self-destructing
dynamic and aggressive sculpture), as if the disappearance
of the work confirmed the victory of art over the real.
In his most finished graphic works, Tinguely developed this
same aesthetic intention: here the unfolding of a box, which
moreover had been pierced, torn and stained in a hurry, stapled
with coloured wheels and incongruous drawings, then suspended
in space like a weightless object, constitutes a true dematerialisation
of the work. The eye travels across this anti-composition,
from one end of the box to the other, from top to bottom, without
finding a fulcrum, always emphasizing more the sensation of
unreality and delusion.
During this year of 1988, Tinguely made a giant sculpture,
full of these coloured wheels which he entitled “Final collaboration
with Yves Klein” which shows how much, more than twentyfive
years after the death of his closest artistic relation, the strength
of their conviction remained intact with Tinguely.
26
Jean Tinguely
Fribourg 1925 – 1991 Bern
Untitled
Signed Jean Tinguely (lower center) and dated 1988 (lower left)
Collage, acrylic and marker on card
Card: 650 x 490 mm. (25 5/8 x 19 5/16 in.)
Box: 770 x 620 mm (30 5/16 X 24 3/8 in.)
95
FRENCH DRAWINGS