Max Ernst

New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Max Ernst, 1961, no. 196

Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Oeuvre-Katalog, Werke 1906-1925, Cologne, 1975, no. 420, illustrated p. 214

Executed on photopaper laid down on cream wove paper. Cream wove sheet is hinged to a mount at two places along the top edge of the verso; this support sheet is slightly time-darkened and bears a number of pencil inscriptions of unknown hand. Cream wove paper shows some minor foxing and studio stains. The extreme edges of the photopaper sheet show minor discoloration from foxing. There is a 1-inch diagonal repair across the upper right edge. There are a few very gentle soft crease marks along the right edge. Overall the work is in very good condition.
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By 1919 Max Ernst had devoted himself almost completely to collage. As is apparent in the present work, his macabre juxtapositions and seamless photographic sutures produce a world of uncanny, unsettling and darkly humorous characters. Ernst's collages run the gamut from Dada's mechanical amalgams to the sensual body studies of Surrealism. Vanity Fair straddles both of these phases. Its androgynous subject, curvaceous and immodest, strikes an invisible pose beneath a tightly-clasped suit of armor. An enigmatic object of desire, Ernst's "knight" is a rare and beautifully articulated example of the artist's keen eye for fantastic recombination.  

As Werner Spies explains, Ernst's collages signaled crucial developments in the early stages of Surrealism: "Ernst played a prominent role in the Surrealist circle from the start. The encounter with his collages in 1921 at his exhibition in the Paris gallery Au Sans Pareil was one of the pivotal experiences for the writers and artists gathered around [André] Breton. Looking back, Breton asserted that in those works the postulates of Surrealist painting were 'already fully developed,' adding: 'In fact, Surrealism found immediate confirmation in [Ernst's] collages from 1920, which reflect a completely new concept of visual organization.' In November 1922, in Barcelona, Breton issued a scathing judgment on what he called the inadequacy of Dadaism. The stars he introduced to remedy the situation were Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, and Max Ernst" (Werner Spies, "Nightmare and Deliverance," in Werner Spies & Sabine Rewald, eds., Max Ernst, A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), New York, 2005, p. 11). Vanity Fair is thus exemplary of a critical moment in Max Ernst's career, and, even more significantly, in the history of collage, Surrealism and the avant garde. 

Fig. 1 Max Ernst in Paris, 1934. Photograph by Man Ray.