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Lot Essay
Forêt sombre et oiseau ("Sombre Forest with a bird" ) is one of the great forest paintings that Ernst executed at the height of his involvement with the Surrealist movement in 1927. These paintings, incorporating Ernst's newly developed technique of frottage were the first to fully explore the motif of the forest as a metaphorical image for the unconscious mind and with their sombre colours and intimations of impending disaster, they are powerful critiques of civilization that anticipate Ernst's series of paintings of petrified cities in the 1930s.
Ernst once famously stated that it was his aim "to bring into the light of day the results of his voyages of discovery in the unconscious" and to "record what is seen... on the frontier between the inner and the outer world," (cited in The Essential Max Ernst, John Russell, London, 1972, p.105). For him, the forest was an archetypal symbol of this shadowy borderland between what is known and what is unknown. Having grown up on the edge of a forest in Brühle in the Rhineland, the forest was a particularly powerful image for Ernst who, recalling his childhood in his autobiography, wrote of "mixed feelings when he first went into a forest: delight and oppression and what the Romantics called 'emotion in the face of Nature'. The wonderful joy of breathing freely in an open space, yet at the same time distress at being hemmed in on all sides by hostile trees. Inside and outside, free and captive, at one and the same time." (cited in Ibid p.36.)
In Forêt sombre et oiseau Ernst evokes a strong sense of these ambiguous emotions by depicting the forest as a dense and impenetrable jungle of deeply textured frottage forms out of which a bird is falling. The bird - perhaps an early manifestation of "Loplop" emerging from the depths of the forest in the same way that he was later to emerge from Ernst's subconscious - seems chained to the confines of the forest and its falling seems both silent and tragic. This dark and deeply romantic depiction of the forest as a tragic and mythical arena imbued with potential human meaning recalls the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich - in particular Chasseur ('Hunter'). Indeed Ernst once commented that, "I've always had Friedrich's paintings and ideas more or less consciously in mind, almost from the day I started painting." (cited in "Ein Mittagessen mit Max Ernst" in der Monat, vol.13, n 1950, March 1960, p.70.) Yet, unlike Friedrich's paintings, the potential for redemption as represented by the warm light-giving energy of the sun is absent in Forêt sombre et oiseau. Here the scene that Ernst depicts is of a traumatised post-war landscape of the mind. A dark vision that has been formulated in the haunted psyche of a war veteran who in 1927 was, like so many artists and writers of his generation, exercising for the first time the demons of the Great War through powerful tormented images of a desolate and uncaring world.
Ernst once famously stated that it was his aim "to bring into the light of day the results of his voyages of discovery in the unconscious" and to "record what is seen... on the frontier between the inner and the outer world," (cited in The Essential Max Ernst, John Russell, London, 1972, p.105). For him, the forest was an archetypal symbol of this shadowy borderland between what is known and what is unknown. Having grown up on the edge of a forest in Brühle in the Rhineland, the forest was a particularly powerful image for Ernst who, recalling his childhood in his autobiography, wrote of "mixed feelings when he first went into a forest: delight and oppression and what the Romantics called 'emotion in the face of Nature'. The wonderful joy of breathing freely in an open space, yet at the same time distress at being hemmed in on all sides by hostile trees. Inside and outside, free and captive, at one and the same time." (cited in Ibid p.36.)
In Forêt sombre et oiseau Ernst evokes a strong sense of these ambiguous emotions by depicting the forest as a dense and impenetrable jungle of deeply textured frottage forms out of which a bird is falling. The bird - perhaps an early manifestation of "Loplop" emerging from the depths of the forest in the same way that he was later to emerge from Ernst's subconscious - seems chained to the confines of the forest and its falling seems both silent and tragic. This dark and deeply romantic depiction of the forest as a tragic and mythical arena imbued with potential human meaning recalls the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich - in particular Chasseur ('Hunter'). Indeed Ernst once commented that, "I've always had Friedrich's paintings and ideas more or less consciously in mind, almost from the day I started painting." (cited in "Ein Mittagessen mit Max Ernst" in der Monat, vol.13, n 1950, March 1960, p.70.) Yet, unlike Friedrich's paintings, the potential for redemption as represented by the warm light-giving energy of the sun is absent in Forêt sombre et oiseau. Here the scene that Ernst depicts is of a traumatised post-war landscape of the mind. A dark vision that has been formulated in the haunted psyche of a war veteran who in 1927 was, like so many artists and writers of his generation, exercising for the first time the demons of the Great War through powerful tormented images of a desolate and uncaring world.