Max en bouteille

Details

Oscar Domínguez (1906-1958)
Max en bouteille
signed and dated 'Domínguez 1939' (lower left)
oil on canvasboard
9 7/8 x 6 7/8 in. (25 x 17.5 cm.)
Painted in 1939

Provenance

Private collection, Buenos Aires, by whom acquired directly from the artist.
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1989.

Literature

Exh. cat., Oscar Domínguez, Antológica 1926-1957, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1995, p. 42 (illustrated).
E. Guigon, Oscar Domínguez, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1996, p. 94 (illustrated).

Exhibited

Madrid, Fundación Telefónica, Oscar Domínguez Surrealista, November 2001 - January 2002, no. 20 (illustrated in colour p. 108).

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Sale room notice

Please note that this work has been requested for the forthcoming Oscar Domínguez exhibition to be held at the Musée Cantini in Marseille from 25 June to 2 October 2005.

Lot Essay

Executed in 1939, Max en bouteille owes much to the visual imagery of Max Ernst's collages from the 1920s. The legs, in particular, recall those of the figure in Ernst's Jeune chimère of circa 1921 (S. 417), while the featureless, mannequin-like head is similar to the tailors dummies depicted by Ernst in the illustrations he produced for the 1922 work Les malheurs des immortels (S. 472 & 482) in collaboration with Paul Eluard, who was later to become a firm friend of the young Oscar Domínguez. Ernst and Domínguez had collaborated in the mid-1930s on the development of décalcomanies, a technique invented by Domínguez but used to great effect by Ernst throughout his career.

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