Exposition Max Ernst @ Aix-en-Provence : Hôtel de Caumont-Centre d’art - Max Ernst, Mondes magiques, mondes libérés

Max Ernst, 

Mondes magiques, mondes libérés

Hôtel de Caumont-Centre d’art, 

Aix-en-Provence

4 mai - 8 octobre 2023

MAX ERNST

MONDES MAGIQUES, MONDES LIBÉRÉS

Affiche de l'exposition

Artiste érudit et prodigieux expérimentateur, MAX ERNST (1891-1976) traverse le siècle des avant-gardes avec une insatiable soif de création et laisse derrière lui une oeuvre complexe et très personnelle. Artiste associé au groupe dada et au surréalisme, il suit un itinéraire personnel en se détachant des modalités du groupe et réalise des oeuvres visionnaires et pleines de lucidité. À travers près de 120 oeuvres, cette exposition revient sur les traces de ce génie créateur en tant que personnalité libre et singulière, et mettra notamment à l’honneur le lien étroit qu’il entretenait avec la nature, le jeu, la magie et la liberté.

Si la portée de son oeuvre reste encore méconnue du grand public, l’extravagance et la polysémie de la production de Max Ernst sont impressionnantes. Né en Allemagne, il crée en 1919 une communauté Dada à Cologne avant de rejoindre Paris où il participe dès le départ au développement du surréalisme d’André Breton. Il crée de nombreux collages et invente de nouvelles techniques, comme le frottage - qui consiste à passer une mine de plomb sur un papier posé sur des surfaces rugueuses. Après avoir été interné au début de la seconde guerre mondiale non loin de l’Hôtel de Caumont (au Camp des Milles d’Aix- en-Provence), Max Ernst fuit la France et se réfugie aux Etats-Unis. Il rentrera en France en 1953 et continuera de travailler intensément la peinture, le dessin, la sculpture et l’orfèvrerie.

Max Ernst n’aura eu de cesse de se réinventer tout au long de sa carrière. Son oeuvre est nourrie de philosophie, de psychanalyse, de science, d’alchimie, de l‘histoire de l’art, de littérature et de poésie. Cette exposition se concentrera sur les grands thèmes des mondes créés par Max Ernst en illustrant la récurrence des thématiques qui traversent son oeuvre. Une section centrale de l’exposition fait recours aux quatre éléments – l’eau, l’air, la terre et le feu – qui, selon la tradition philosophique ancienne et l’alchimie, composent l’ensemble de la matière du monde naturel.

L’univers de l’artiste déconcerte et étonne. Grand intellectuel et artiste humaniste – au sens néo-Renaissance du terme -, il défie continuellement la perception en combinant la logique et l’harmonie formelle avec des énigmes insondables, tandis que l’onirisme et le fantastique coexistent pour créer des paysages aux mystères impénétrables. Forêts de pierres, animaux chimères, masques incarnés ou oiseaux anthropomorphes, la beauté énigmatique et parfois même ironique des oeuvres de Max Ernst nous plongera dans l’extravagance de ses mondes, magiques et libérés.

Cette exposition bénéficie notamment de prêts exceptionnels du Centre Pompidou, de la Tate, du Guggenheim Venise, du Musée Cantini, du Max Ernst Museum de Brühl et de nombreux collectionneurs privés souhaitant garder leur anonymat.

HÔTEL DE CAUMONT CENTRE D'ART

3 rue Joseph Cabassol, 13100 Aix-en-Provence

www.caumont-centredart.com

Max Ernst @ Phillips, London - Maximiliana: Max Ernst from the Collection of Peter Schamoni

Maximiliana: Max Ernst from the Collection of Peter Schamoni

Phillips, London

14 and 15 October 2021

MAX ERNST

Pyramid Lake, 1946

Estimate: £550,000-750,000

Photo courtesy of Phillips

Phillips announces ‘Maximiliana: Max Ernst from the Collection of Peter Schamoni’. Through his close friendship with Max Ernst, renowned film director and screenwriter Peter Schamoni assembled an exceptional collection that serves as a lasting memento of one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. Over 80 works of art will be offered, starting with the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day and Evening sales in London on 14 and 15 October, followed by New York in November. The sale of the collection will culminate in December with a dedicated online-only sale of works on paper, editions, photographs and ephemera.

Cheyenne Westphal, Global Chairwoman, Phillips, said, “The relationship between Peter Schamoni and Max Ernst, an artist who welcomed him into his home, studio and life for close to two decades, is at the heart of this esteemed collection. Having been on loan to the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, the pedigree and art-historical significance of the works here is exceptional, but it is the deeply personal dimension of the collection which truly sets it apart. We are incredibly honoured and excited to present this to a global audience across our sales this season.”

Tobias Sirtl, 20th Century & Contemporary Art Specialist, Germany, said, “It is such a rare and magnificent opportunity to offer a collection which truly spans the entire oeuvre of an artist, from the early years to the late period. It represents a great depth of collecting, with works of the highest quality and carrying exceptional provenance.”

Max Ernst and Peter Schamoni

Photograph by Viktor Schamoni

Courtesy of Phillips

A Tale of Two Artists

Peter Schamoni was born in Berlin in 1934 as the son of the filmmaker Peter Schamoni and the actress and screenwriter Maria Vormann. Peter Schamoni first met Max Ernst in the 1960s, a young filmmaker travelling to the French Touraine to start work on his first documentary about the artist that had so captivated him. This marked the start of a long friendship and various artistic collaborations. Peter Schamoni’s films explored and excavated Max Ernst’s unique visual language, drawing on key themes and motifs that preoccupied the artist throughout his career, and which are well represented across the present collection.

Highlights from the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, London

Spanning the early 1920s to the 1970s, the collection highlights Max Ernst’s relentlessly experimental approach to material and technique, bringing together paintings, drawings, sculpture, collage, prints, and his innovative frottages.

A leading highlight of the sale, Pyramid Lake is a record of both Max Ernst’s time in Sedona, Arizona, and of the filmmaker’s later retracing of his footsteps. After the war, Max Ernst settled in Sedona with Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning in 1946, the same year that Pyramid Lake was completed. The home they built together was visited by avant-garde luminaries Lee Miller, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, among others. Schamoni’s 1991 feature-length documentary Max Ernst: Mein Vagabundieren – Meine Unruhe records this period, incorporating photographic images of the bare timber bones of their house erected against the surreal emptiness of the landscape. Hovering between dream and reality, the highly textured surface of Pyramid Lake is the result of Max Ernst’s experimentation with materials and process, a breath-taking example of his celebrated frottage works and decalcomania techniques.

MAX ERNST

Matin et soir, 1930

Estimate: £200,000-300,000

Photo courtesy of Phillips

Matin et soir resided in Max Ernst’s personal collection for four decades, until it was acquired by Schamoni. From his early Dada days, Max Ernst had demonstrated an interest in scientific and technical instruments. Executed in 1930, Matin et soir pushes this into new territory with the playful inclusion of a pyrometric watch, a conical tool used to ensure consistency in a kiln’s temperature. The pyrometric watch stands as a visual metaphor for the passage of morning into night referenced in the work’s title. A key theme running through Max Ernst’s oeuvre and fundamental to Surrealism, Matin et soir uses a characteristic quick-wittedness to explore ideas around mutability and metamorphosis, condensed in the figure of his Bird-Familiar, Loplop. The present work has been widely exhibited and was included in the major 1979 Max Ernst retrospective in Munich.

Max Ernst had a long-standing fascination for the categorisations of natural history, and scientific motifs are threaded through the collection. Alongside a sustained interest in the instruments and tools of scientific inquiry that unities the works presented here, we also find more specific references to the practices of cartography in Euklid, 1950 (estimate: £200,000-300,000), and in Homme (Spezialpreis für die Kurzfilmtage in Oberhausen), 1960 (estimate: £65,000-85,000).

Highlights from the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, New York

MAX ERNST

Ohne Titel (les hommes ne le sauront jamais), circa 1921

Estimate: $600,000-800,000

Photo courtesy of Phillips

MAX ERNST

Kachina, le chien de Peggy Guggenheim, circa 1942

Estimate: $280,000-350,000

Photo courtesy of Phillips

London Auctions

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Auction: 15 October 2021

Auction viewing: 6-15 October

Location: 30 Berkeley Square, London

Click here for more information: 

https://www.phillips.com/auctions/auction/UK010921

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

Auction: 14 October 2021

Auction viewing: 6-14 October

Location: 30 Berkeley Square, London

Click here for more information: 

https://www.phillips.com/auctions/auction/UK010721

PHILLIPS LONDON 

30 Berkeley Square, London W1J 6EX

www.phillips.com

Max Ernst: Collages @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Max Ernst: Collages

Kasmin Gallery, New York

January 23 - February 29, 2020

Kasmin prsents an exhibition of paper collages by German surrealist MAX ERNST (1891–1976). Staged in collaboration with the Destina Foundation, Collages features approximately forty collages on paper, ranging in both scale and subject matter, and spanning 1920 to 1975. Many of the works, with a focus on the 1960s and 70s, have never before been exhibited.

According to art historian Werner Spies, nearly everything in Max Ernst’s oeuvre can be traced back to collage. Bringing the fracture and disassociation of post-World War I existentialism into pictorial form, collage complements Ernst’s equally novel adoption of frottage and assemblage. The uniquely illusionistic quality and contextual depth of Ernst’s collages speak to his ability to seamlessly create new realities formed upon the Dada and Surrealist tenets of poetry, imagination, and dream.

Using source materials that include illustrations, periodicals, catalogs, newspapers, and scientific journals, these collages are often further altered using painting and drawing. They reveal fundamental aspects of Ernst’s art-making—the uncanny juxtaposition of unassociated forms and images. The exhibition consists of early works such as Loplop présente (1931), a superb example of Ernst’s use of indirect self-portraiture through his alter ego Loplop, who appears for the first time during the early 1930s and recurs throughout his oeuvre. Loplop is recognizable by his division into head, showcard, and feet, and calls to mind the structure of the cadavre exquis, the exquisite corpse.

A selection of collaged lettrines, or drop-caps, created by Ernst primarily for inclusion in artist books, are a focal point of the exhibition and demonstrate the artist’s range and fluidity of style within the medium of collage. Originating in European medieval illustrated manuscripts, lettrines acted to introduce a decorative flourish to the text and to indicate the beginning of a new chapter. In Lettrine D (1948) the forking branches of a tree intersect with an eel and a prehistoric winged creature to form the body of a Frankensteinian figure that frames the capital D. This particular lettrine was made for inclusion in a limited-edition catalogue designed by Ernst and published on the occasion of his 1949 retrospective at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills.

Eight of the works on display were originally presented at Alexander Iolas’ Paris gallery in 1971, the same year in which Max Ernst celebrated his eightieth birthday. Titled Lieux Communs, the exhibition featured twelve original collages and eleven poems by Ernst, highlighting his aptitude as an artist of both images and words. The collages and poems were also published as a limited edition print portfolio. Lieux communs translates directly to “truisms,” or more generally to “banalities,” or “trivialities,” reflecting the quotidian nature of the imagery selected by Ernst. Utilizing repeating patterns and dense cross-hatching, the artist folds the curvilinear shapes of the natural world—including animals such as Loplop—into scenes defined by the geometric structures of both classical and modern architecture. His composition of intimate domestic interiors, household objects, and indicators of bourgeoisie living are subtly unsettling. For example, Les Filles La Mort Le Diable (1970), translated as “Girls, Death, and the Devil,” can be demarcated into three vertical columns. Whilst at first glance the contents signal legibility, on closer inspection, it is clear that they misalign: the world has been rearranged by Ernst.

As articulated by Werner Spies, “Collage is the thread that runs through all of his works; it is the foundation on which his lifework is built. Once we have realized this, Max Ernst takes on the stature of an artist who opened the collage process—the combining of existing visual material—to possibilities that completely transformed its meaning, both technically and ideologically.”

Timothy Baum and Dr. Jürgen Pech contribute to the research and preparation of the exhibition.

MAX ERNST (1891–1976) was a German painter, sculptor, poet, and printmaker celebrated as one of the primary pioneers of Dada and Surrealism. Working in Europe during the heyday of Modernism, and in the US from 1941 to 1953, Ernst developed a style that melds metaphor, mythology, and memory, and draws upon the depths of the irrational and unconscious mind. His masterful illusionistic techniques and uncanny juxtapositions transform impossible compositions into unsettling realities. Whilst the menacing atmosphere of both world wars loom large in his work, Max Ernst's oeuvre is more accurately defined by an abundant life-force born out of a combination of the fanciful logic of dreams, the recurring and dynamic presence of animals, and Ernst’s enduring biting humor.

KASMIN

297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001

www.kasmingallery.com

_______________

Impasse Ronsin @ Paul Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Impasse Ronsin
Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York
October 28, 2016 - January 14, 2017

Paul Kasmin Gallery announces the forthcoming exhibition, Impasse Ronsin, which will be on view at 515 West 27th Street from October 28th – December 23rd, 2016.  Taking as its focus the historic Parisian alley once home to the studios of Constantin Brancusi, William N. Copley, Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Les Lalanne, Larry Rivers, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and numerous other seminal 20th-century artists, the exhibition will include work by these artists in an elaborate installation designed to embody the collaborative atmosphere of the Impasse Ronsin.

At the heart of the original Impasse Ronsin complex, as well as in this exhibition, stands Constantin Brancusi, who moved into the Impasse in 1916 and would remain there until his death in 1957. During those forty-one years, countless seminal artists made the pilgrimage to the Impasse Ronsin in hopes of meeting the artist, whom Marcel Duchamp famously referred to as “The Queen Mother of the Impasse Ronsin” .  The exhibition will feature a bronze edition of Princess X, one of Brancusi’s most iconic forms, as well as a selection of the artist’s vintage photographs depicting the studio and its contents.  Brancusi’s studio as it was arranged at the time of his death was later meticulously reconstructed opposite the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it has been open to the public since 1997.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, the Impasse Ronsin was an area closely associated with Dada and Surrealism.  While neither had permanent studios in the Impasse, both Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp were fixtures at the complex.  Included in the exhibition is a vintage photograph of Brancusi and his dogs taken at the Impasse by Man Ray, as well as an original set of Duchamp’s “Rotoreliefs” and his film Anemic Cinema, 1926, in which they were used.

This Surrealist spirit would remain at Ronsin through the 1950s and 1960s, when artists such as William N. Copley, Max Ernst and Les Lalanne would inhabit studios.  Max Ernst’s Dancers Under the Starry Sky, 1951, a painting aptly characteristic of this spirit, will be on view for the first time in sixty-four years.  Also executed in 1951 is William N. Copley’s Steroptic Nude, one of the artist’s most important early paintings and last exhibited in the artist’s 1980 retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern.  The renowned collaborative duo Francois-Xavier Lalanne and his wife Claude Lalanne first met at the Impasse Ronsin in 1952, where iconic works such as Mouton de Laine and Choupatte were initially conceived, and which will be included in the exhibition.

More than anything else, collaboration and perpetual dialogue defined the Impasse Ronsin. In 1961, it was the locale in which Niki de Saint Phalle famously staged her “Shooting Paintings” with the help of Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein and Pierre Restany.  On view in Impasse Ronsin will be Tir (Fragment de Dracula II), 1961 – one of the most substantial and important works from the series.  Also included is Turning Friendship Model from the same year – a kinetic sculpture made by Larry Rivers with the help of Jean Tinguely.

In the rear gallery The Noguchi Museum will create an installation that evokes the ‘Brancusi-like’ studio Isamu Noguchi established just south of Paris, in Gentily, in 1927, after serving as the Romanian’s assistant. As the only artist to have come out of Brancusi’s studio, Noguchi’s insights into that Modernist Eden of ambiguity- where traditional craft met the avant-garde, object became indistinguishable from base, and art was life-are of particular interest.

The cooperative, convivial environment of the Impasse Ronsin has never been adequately articulated in the history of 20th-century art, but today, with sprawling artist communities thriving in Beijing, Berlin, Brooklyn, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, etc., its story has never been more relevant.

A comprehensive monograph including an essay by Jerôme Neutres, extensive archival images and texts, and a selection of interviews conducted by independent curator and art historian Adrian Dannatt will accompany the exhibition.

PAUL KASMIN GALLERY
http://paulkasmingallery.com

Max Ernst, Rétrospective, Albertina, Vienne

Max Ernst, Rétrospective
Albertina, Vienne
23 janvier - 5 mai 2013

Scroll down the page for english version

L’Albertina accueille en ce moment la première rétrospective autrichienne consacrée au grand inventeur d’images Max Ernst. L'exposition présente une importante sélection de 180 peintures, collages, sculptures et exemples évocateurs issus de documents et livres illustrés. La multiplicité des oeuvres présentée permet de rassembler toutes les phases de travail, les découvertes et les techniques de l’artiste. 

Il ne fait pas de doute que Max Ernst fait partie des plus grands maîtres ayant marquée l'histoire de l'art du 20e siècle, aux côtés de Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, and Andy Warhol. 

Protagoniste précoce du dadaïsme, pionnier du surréalisme et inventeur de nombreuses techniques raffinées d’un nouveau genre, Max Ernst a créé une oeuvre qui échappe finalement aux catégories. 

La richesse innovatrice qu’il associe à ses techniques d’image et d’inspiration, les ruptures marquant ses nombreuses phases de création et la variété des thèmes déconcertent.

L’unique constante reste la persistance des contradictions.

English text:

In devoting an exhibition to Max Ernst, the ingenious inventor of images, the Albertina presents the artist’s first retrospective in Austria. With a selection of 150 paintings, collages, and sculptures, as well as impressive examples of illustrated books and documents, the show will cover all of the artist’s periods, discoveries, and techniques, while tracing his life and oeuvre in a biographic and historical context.

There is no doubt that Max Ernst ranks among the leading figures in twentieth-century art history, together with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, and Andy Warhol. 

He was an early protagonist of Dadaism, a pioneer of Surrealism, and the deviser of such techniques as collage, frottage, grattage, decalcomania, and oscillation, so that his oeuvre defies easily graspable definition. His inventiveness in handling imagery and inspiration, the breaks marking his numerous creative phases, and his changing back and forth between subjects cause irritation. 

What remains constant is the invariability of his contradiction.

ALBERTINA
Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Vienne
www.albertina.at