Lot Essay
1914 was an eventful year for Max Ernst. This was the year he first met Hans Arp, forming a friendship that would last half a century, but in this same year another close friend, August Macke, was killed. The outbreak of the First World War was to turn Ernst's world upside-down. Arp fled to France and in August Ernst was conscripted into the Germany army. He later claimed that at this moment he himself had died, only to be resurrected four years later in 1918.
Möbelbemalung, executed during this turbulent time, is powerful testimony to the artist's life thus far. It is significant not only as an example of his earliest works, but also because oil paintings from 1914 to 1917 are inevitably extremely rare.
Ernst had first come into contact with the avant-garde through August Macke, who introduced him to the poet Apollinaire, and artists such as Delaunay and Kandinsky. Ernst absorbed the spirit and style of these artists, experimenting with the formal principles of the cubists and expressionists but singularly avoided identifying with any one group.
Certain features of Möbelbemalung were clearly evolved from these contacts. The prismatic window-life configuration of the towers suggest the influence of Delaunay, but it is really the influence of Arp which dominates the piece with its semi-cubist forms and the jutting diagonals. These traits recur in later works such as his Laon in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. However, in terms of imagery, Ernst is unique. He was deeply influenced by the fantasies of the great Flemish masters Bosch and Breughel, and the painters of his native Rhineland, such as Grünewald. The phantasmal architecture he creates in this triptych attest to his imaginative powers. In the central piece of Möbelbemalung the distorted forms of the buildings appear almost like mechanical parts, with bolder forms on the panels on either side.
The piece is in some senses prophetic of the artist's later work in the way that he contemplates the dream-like aspects of architecture and the cubistic structures used also anticipate the constructivist tendancy and the collages that would recur consistently as the years went by.
Möbelbemalung, executed during this turbulent time, is powerful testimony to the artist's life thus far. It is significant not only as an example of his earliest works, but also because oil paintings from 1914 to 1917 are inevitably extremely rare.
Ernst had first come into contact with the avant-garde through August Macke, who introduced him to the poet Apollinaire, and artists such as Delaunay and Kandinsky. Ernst absorbed the spirit and style of these artists, experimenting with the formal principles of the cubists and expressionists but singularly avoided identifying with any one group.
Certain features of Möbelbemalung were clearly evolved from these contacts. The prismatic window-life configuration of the towers suggest the influence of Delaunay, but it is really the influence of Arp which dominates the piece with its semi-cubist forms and the jutting diagonals. These traits recur in later works such as his Laon in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. However, in terms of imagery, Ernst is unique. He was deeply influenced by the fantasies of the great Flemish masters Bosch and Breughel, and the painters of his native Rhineland, such as Grünewald. The phantasmal architecture he creates in this triptych attest to his imaginative powers. In the central piece of Möbelbemalung the distorted forms of the buildings appear almost like mechanical parts, with bolder forms on the panels on either side.
The piece is in some senses prophetic of the artist's later work in the way that he contemplates the dream-like aspects of architecture and the cubistic structures used also anticipate the constructivist tendancy and the collages that would recur consistently as the years went by.