Lot 80
  • 80

Max Ernst

Estimate
800,000 - 1,200,000 GBP
bidding is closed

Description

  • Max Ernst
  • Le mardi la lune s'endimanche
  • signed Max Ernst (lower right); signed Max Ernst, dated 1964 and titled on the reverse
  • oil on canvas
  • 72.7 by 59.7cm.
  • 28 5/8 by 23 1/2 in.

Provenance

Alexandre Iolas, New York

Henri-Georges Doll, New York (acquired from the above in 1965. Sold: Christie’s, New York, 12th May 1992, lot 145)

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner 

Exhibited

Paris, Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Max Ernst, 1964, no. 12

New York, The Jewish Museum, Max Ernst. Sculpture and Recent Painting, 1966, no. 57, illustrated in the catalogue

Literature

John Russell, Max Ernst, Life and Work, New York, 1967, no. 130, illustrated pl. 130

Edward Quinn, Max Ernst, Paris, 1976, no. 428, illustrated p. 344

Werner Spies, Sigrid & Günther Metken, Max Ernst Œuvre-Katalog, Werke 1964-1969, Cologne, 2007, no. 3844, illustrated p. 9

 

Condition

The canvas is unlined. There is no evidence of retouching visible under ultra-violet light. Apart from two areas of raised craquelure in the upper centre, with two small associated paint losses. This work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the blue is slightly brighter and less warm in the original.
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Catalogue Note

In the decade following Ernst’s return to France in the early 1950s, he produced a series of important works – including Le mardi la lune s'endimanche - in which earlier themes intersect with a mature artistic sensibility. It was also during this period that Ernst’s fascination with astronomy reached its height and he produced a number of works influenced by his research on the subject. As part of this new interest he spent much of the early 1960s working on Maximiliana ou l’Exercice illégal de l’astronomie (fig. 2) - 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 travelled 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, in Max Ernst: A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005, p. 18).

In his paintings of the period (fig. 1), the complex shapes and patterns that he developed for these illustrations were combined with the orbs that were a recurring motif in his earliest works. Werner Spies discussed the importance of this continuity, writing: ‘Ernst remained true to his early decision to strive for a symbolic painting in which open questions, and hence the unfathomable obscurity of existence, took precedence over simplistic positivist explanations and definitive stylistic results’ (W. Spies, Max Ernst. A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Tate, London, 1991, p. 252). 

In Le mardi la lune s'endimanche the resulting stylistic duality of composition and disintegration is rendered particularly vividly through Ernst’s use of grattage. This technique, developed in the mid-1920s was a painterly version of frottage, the technique Ernst first employed in pencil and paper: ‘One rainy day in 1925 Ernst was first inspired to explore the possibilities of frottage by the look of the grooves in the well-scrubbed floor of his hotel room at the seashore in Pornic… As he developed the procedure, he used a variety of new elements to start with - stale bread crumbs, grained leather, striated glassware, a straw hat, twine - always transforming the results so that whatever lay beneath his paper experienced a metamorphosis… These works are sensual and tactile, with images of rubbed objects that appear as ghostly traces of form’ (W. Spies, op. cit., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005, pp. 12-13).