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Lot Essay
With its Bosch-like vision of mythic creatures metamorphosing from an inpenetrable jungle of jagged forms, Creatures of the swamp is a rare work from 1945 that powerfully expresses Ernst's Romantic concept of the unconscious as a world of possibility lying beyond the constraints of civilization.
The painting has been executed using the decalcomania technique that Ernst first experimented with in 1940 during his internment by the Vichy government. This technique, first employed by Oscar Dominguez in 1935, involves the creation of a myriad of fractal-like coloured forms by smearing thinned paint onto the canvas and then pressing onto it with a flat plane such as a sheet of glass. The resulting forms and colour variations encourage unconscious visions of new forms to take place within the painter's mind. Ernst's decalcomania paintings take this process a stage further by transforming these patterns into the images of fantastic imaginary creatures that are themselves transforming from vegetable into animal life.
In Creatures of the swamp Ernst has painted a dense jungle of form that, like his mystic forest paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, is intended as a metaphor for the richness of the unconscious mind. For Ernst the enigma of the forest represented an escape from civilization and all it stands for. Inspired by the proliferation of life he had seen in the jungles of Indonesia in 1924, Ernst's forests and jungles symbolised, as they did for many of the Surrealists, the exploration of the terra incognita of the human mind.
Similarly, the alien nature of the microcosmos, the sexual practices of creatures like the praying mantis and above all the transformatory power of insects to metamorphose into vastly different forms fascinated the Surrealists, and it is to this aspect that Creatures of the swamp addresses itself. Executed in New York in the last year of the Second World War, the subject of Creatures of the swamp is transformation and change. The whole surface of the work seems alive with a metamorphic growth that can be seen to reflect Ernst's own personal transition during this period; a transition that was a move away from the horrors that so-called civilization had wrought in Europe and towards the establishing of a new life in America.
The painting has been executed using the decalcomania technique that Ernst first experimented with in 1940 during his internment by the Vichy government. This technique, first employed by Oscar Dominguez in 1935, involves the creation of a myriad of fractal-like coloured forms by smearing thinned paint onto the canvas and then pressing onto it with a flat plane such as a sheet of glass. The resulting forms and colour variations encourage unconscious visions of new forms to take place within the painter's mind. Ernst's decalcomania paintings take this process a stage further by transforming these patterns into the images of fantastic imaginary creatures that are themselves transforming from vegetable into animal life.
In Creatures of the swamp Ernst has painted a dense jungle of form that, like his mystic forest paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, is intended as a metaphor for the richness of the unconscious mind. For Ernst the enigma of the forest represented an escape from civilization and all it stands for. Inspired by the proliferation of life he had seen in the jungles of Indonesia in 1924, Ernst's forests and jungles symbolised, as they did for many of the Surrealists, the exploration of the terra incognita of the human mind.
Similarly, the alien nature of the microcosmos, the sexual practices of creatures like the praying mantis and above all the transformatory power of insects to metamorphose into vastly different forms fascinated the Surrealists, and it is to this aspect that Creatures of the swamp addresses itself. Executed in New York in the last year of the Second World War, the subject of Creatures of the swamp is transformation and change. The whole surface of the work seems alive with a metamorphic growth that can be seen to reflect Ernst's own personal transition during this period; a transition that was a move away from the horrors that so-called civilization had wrought in Europe and towards the establishing of a new life in America.