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Lot Essay
Epiphanie or Dream Landscape is one of the last paintings Max Ernst painted in Europe before escaping Nazi-Occupied France for America in 1941.
Employing the technique of decalcomania which had recently prompted a new boost of creativity in Ernst's art, Epiphanie, as its title suggests, depicts a figure wandering in a fantastical landscape and experiencing a moment of revelation.
Epiphanie was painted during a period of intense uncertainty and upheaval in Ernst's life. As a German citizen living in France he had first been interred as an "enemy alien" by the French authorities at the outbreak of war in September 1939. After the Nazi victory of May 1940 Ernst - a "degenerate" artist and German exile - was in danger from the Nazi authorities and the new Vichy government. Throughout 1940 he was interned, then managed to escape and returned to his home in Saint-Martin, only to be denounced by a deaf and dumb citizen of the town. He was re-arrested but escaped once again only to find that his petition for release had been granted and he was declared legally free. Finding that during his absence, his lover Leonora Carrington had panicked and fled their home, selling it for a bottle of wine, and, under the threat of re-arrest at any time, Ernst, like many others, fled to Marseille in the hope of finding a passage to America.
In the midst of this turmoil, he found time to paint a number of outstanding paintings that gave a new expression to his fertile imagination. While interned by the French in 1939, along with fellow German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, the two artists had experimented with the decalcomania technique that had been pioneered by Oscar Dominguez in 1936. Using as a prompt, the random patterning of Rorsach-like marks made by pressing a smooth surface such as glass against thinned oil paint, Ernst found in this technique a new freedom of invention. As with frottage in the 1920s, decalcomania gave Ernst's art a new intensity and vigour. Weird and wonderful creatures poured forth onto his canvases in a series of works that re-invent his forest paintings of the late 1920s. At that time Ernst's forests had been related to his childhood visions of the forest around his home in Brühl and to his haunted memories of his time in the trenches during the First World War. As with the art of Caspar David Friedrich, which Ernst once commented, had remained "more or less consciously in (his) mind, almost from the day I started painting", Ernst also declared in his autobiography to always experiencing "mixed feelings when he first went into a forest: delight and oppression and what the Romantics called 'emotion in the face of Nature'". In his decalcomania paintings, Ernst returned once again to this key theme, at a time of war, this time expressing these same emotions in a more full and articulate way than ever before. Breathing life into the chance patterns of the decalcomania, the wartime climate and the stress of the threat to his security must have helped to stimulate the character of the amazing Bosch-like creatures that seem to grow out of the surface of these remarkable paintings. A strange blend of magic, mystery, beauty and foreboding is conjured by these works and it is particularly these qualities that are encapsulated in Epiphanie
In this work, dominated by a mystic moon and a green sky that not only lends the work a Romantic air but also seems to echo the dark mystery of the great forest paintings of the 1920s, nature seems to have come alive at the touch of a lone male wanderer. Seeming to grow out of the coagulated vegetal forms laid down by the decalcomania, mysterious, mythological-looking creatures with observant eyes seem to have awoken to share their secret with the wandering human. At the same time that they emerge from the dark chthonic depths of the jungle of forms, the figure seems to be becoming encrusted and enclosed in a fossilized form of his own. This apparent encrustation is mirrored on the right of the painting by a mother-goddess-type whose dark almost oriental facial features can be seen slowly emerging from an impenetrable cave-like enclosure. Dismounting from a strange mythological creature half bull half ass, this male figure (rare in Ernst's decalcomania paintings) can be seen as a visual metaphor for the Ernst's own path of discovery amidst the natural labyrinth of decalcomania. This figure, like Ernst, seems, through his touch, to have awoken life from the natural forms around him, and in a moment of revelation, captured by this moonlit scene, seems to have had revealed to him a wondrous though also disturbing vision of the true character of the forces of nature.
Employing the technique of decalcomania which had recently prompted a new boost of creativity in Ernst's art, Epiphanie, as its title suggests, depicts a figure wandering in a fantastical landscape and experiencing a moment of revelation.
Epiphanie was painted during a period of intense uncertainty and upheaval in Ernst's life. As a German citizen living in France he had first been interred as an "enemy alien" by the French authorities at the outbreak of war in September 1939. After the Nazi victory of May 1940 Ernst - a "degenerate" artist and German exile - was in danger from the Nazi authorities and the new Vichy government. Throughout 1940 he was interned, then managed to escape and returned to his home in Saint-Martin, only to be denounced by a deaf and dumb citizen of the town. He was re-arrested but escaped once again only to find that his petition for release had been granted and he was declared legally free. Finding that during his absence, his lover Leonora Carrington had panicked and fled their home, selling it for a bottle of wine, and, under the threat of re-arrest at any time, Ernst, like many others, fled to Marseille in the hope of finding a passage to America.
In the midst of this turmoil, he found time to paint a number of outstanding paintings that gave a new expression to his fertile imagination. While interned by the French in 1939, along with fellow German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, the two artists had experimented with the decalcomania technique that had been pioneered by Oscar Dominguez in 1936. Using as a prompt, the random patterning of Rorsach-like marks made by pressing a smooth surface such as glass against thinned oil paint, Ernst found in this technique a new freedom of invention. As with frottage in the 1920s, decalcomania gave Ernst's art a new intensity and vigour. Weird and wonderful creatures poured forth onto his canvases in a series of works that re-invent his forest paintings of the late 1920s. At that time Ernst's forests had been related to his childhood visions of the forest around his home in Brühl and to his haunted memories of his time in the trenches during the First World War. As with the art of Caspar David Friedrich, which Ernst once commented, had remained "more or less consciously in (his) mind, almost from the day I started painting", Ernst also declared in his autobiography to always experiencing "mixed feelings when he first went into a forest: delight and oppression and what the Romantics called 'emotion in the face of Nature'". In his decalcomania paintings, Ernst returned once again to this key theme, at a time of war, this time expressing these same emotions in a more full and articulate way than ever before. Breathing life into the chance patterns of the decalcomania, the wartime climate and the stress of the threat to his security must have helped to stimulate the character of the amazing Bosch-like creatures that seem to grow out of the surface of these remarkable paintings. A strange blend of magic, mystery, beauty and foreboding is conjured by these works and it is particularly these qualities that are encapsulated in Epiphanie
In this work, dominated by a mystic moon and a green sky that not only lends the work a Romantic air but also seems to echo the dark mystery of the great forest paintings of the 1920s, nature seems to have come alive at the touch of a lone male wanderer. Seeming to grow out of the coagulated vegetal forms laid down by the decalcomania, mysterious, mythological-looking creatures with observant eyes seem to have awoken to share their secret with the wandering human. At the same time that they emerge from the dark chthonic depths of the jungle of forms, the figure seems to be becoming encrusted and enclosed in a fossilized form of his own. This apparent encrustation is mirrored on the right of the painting by a mother-goddess-type whose dark almost oriental facial features can be seen slowly emerging from an impenetrable cave-like enclosure. Dismounting from a strange mythological creature half bull half ass, this male figure (rare in Ernst's decalcomania paintings) can be seen as a visual metaphor for the Ernst's own path of discovery amidst the natural labyrinth of decalcomania. This figure, like Ernst, seems, through his touch, to have awoken life from the natural forms around him, and in a moment of revelation, captured by this moonlit scene, seems to have had revealed to him a wondrous though also disturbing vision of the true character of the forces of nature.