馬克斯·恩斯特

Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris (in 1966)

Galleria Blu, Milan

The New Arts, Houston

Acquired circa 1983-84

London, Hanover Gallery, Max Ernst, 1965, no. 25, illustrated in the catalogue

New York, The Jewish Museum, Max Ernst: Sculpture and Recent paintings, 1966, no. 16

Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Max Ernst, Oltre la pittura, 1966, no. 20 (as dating from 1960)

Roslyn Harbor, Nassau County Museum of Art, Surrealist: A Cross Cultural Perspective, 2000-01, illustrated in catalogue

Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Werke 1954-1963, Cologne, 1998, no. 3545, illustrated p. 257

Excellent condition over all. The artist has applied his medium directly to a wooden panel prepared with gesso. The extreme periphery shows evidence of frame abrasion. Under UV light, there are twops of retouching at the top two corners, and a short, thin horizontal line at the bottom right. Also evident are what appear to be small spots of pooled varnish, which cannot be seen in natural light.
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In Haut et bas from 1959, Ernst presents a highly abstracted vision of an orb evaporating into a kaleidoscopic haze.  He had returned to Paris from America in the early 1950s with a renewed optimism triggered by Europe's post-war recovery, and the present work can be interpreted in this spirit. 

In this richly colorful composition, Ernst employed the technique of grattage that he had created during the early days of the Surrealist movement.  This process is most evident near the sharp edges delineating where the palette knife had smoothed and scraped the wet paint, sometimes revealing a darker color beneath the top layer of pigment.  As is the case for the present work, Ernst's paintings of the post-war era exhibited a stylistic duality of composition and disintegration - a suitable metaphor for the times.  According to Werner Spies, his mood during this period "was an ambivalent one, which [Ernst] paraphrased as follows: 'From "The Age of Anxiety" to "The Childhood of Art" only half a rotation of the orthochromatic wheel is required. Between the "Massacre of the Innocents" and "Stepping Through the Looking-Glass" lies an interval merely of one luminous night' ... 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" (Werner Spies, Max Ernst, A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), London, 1991, p. 252).

The present work was completed around the time the artist settled down in France after an intermittent, decade-long hiatus in Arizona with Dorothea Tanning. The fantastic quality and the opulence of color Ernst witnessed in the mountains and deserts of the American West during the 1940s and early 1950s made a strong impression on him, and he continued to incorporate the aesthetic of desert moonrises and sunsets in the compositions completed after he returned to France.