Max Ernst

Acquired in the 1970s

Werner Spies, Sigrid & Günter Metken, Max Ernst, Oeuvre -Katalog, Werke 1954-1963, Houston, 1998, no 3214a, illustrated p. 88

Excellent condition. The panel is sound. Under ultra-violet light, there appear to be two very small retouchings towards the upper right corner and a horizontal band of fluorescence below the moon, otherwise this work is in wonderful condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Enseigne pour une école de harengs presents a motif that recurs throughout Ernst's work, from his origins in Dada through the individual Surrealist identity he developed in later years. Though he would hardly consider himself a landscape painter, the minimalist construction of a horizon line surmounted by a floating orb appears time and again in his oeuvre. What distinguishes this motif in the present work is the collage element below the horizon line. With a use of wallpaper that harkens back to the groundbreaking synthetic cubist collages of Picasso and Braque, Ernst disrupts the fantastical landscape with a mechanically-produced object. And yet, with the title he assigns to the work, Ernst invites us to see something more organic in the repeated shapes on the pasted paper. Ernst here collapses the timeline between his Dada collage-work and his mysterious later landscapes.

Geology and astronomy were a central focus for Ernst during this period and this fascination subtly permeates the current work. He was drawn to the romanticism of the unknown, a notion that had sparked much of his artistic exploration. Several years after painting the present work, Ernst published Maximiliana ou l'Exercice illégal de l'astronomie - a series of illustrations in homage to the great nineteenth-century astronomer, Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel. Werner Spies describes this work as indicative of Ernst's complex mentality:  "Maximiliana focuses on the last twenty years of Tempel's life, when he traveled through Europe seeking an observatory in which he could pursue his work, looking into the vast realm of interstellar space in a time dominated by narrow minds. His was a life and a quest marked by war, flight, and exile, a life and a quest whose parallels with Ernst's own are obvious and strong. These parallels offered Ernst an opportunity to create a biography that was also an autobiography. In the spirals and mists of Tempel's nebulae, he discerned the Surrealist's romantic worldview expressed in Breton's term "explosante-fixe." In his homage to Tempel, Ernst drew together and united the threads of Dada protest and the Surrealists' triumph over violence" (W. Spies, "Nightmare and Deliverance," Max Ernst: A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005, p. 18.).