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Lot Essay
‘It is not to be despised, in my opinion, if, after gazing fixedly at the spot on the wall, the coals in the grate, the clouds, the flowing stream, if one remembers some of their aspects; and if you look at them carefully you will discover some quite admirable inventions. Of these the genius of the painter may take full advantage, to compose battles of animals and men, of landscapes or monsters, of devils and other fantastic things which bring you honour. In these confused things genius becomes aware of new inventions’
(Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting).
La mariée du vent (The Bride of the Wind) was a key theme in Ernst’s art during the mid-1920s. The first of a number of works on this theme executed in 1927, this painting is arguably the finest of six celebrated frottage-type paintings where the subject matter of the painting has been determined by the textures of natural forms. Like his other major series of works from this period the Hordes, the precise nature of the imagery in La mariée du vent originated in the grained patterns of the frottaged background. Following the inventive technique first suggested by Leonardo, Ernst has intuitively followed the forms he found emerging in his mind from the prompt of the patterns in the grain of a series of wood-rubbings that served as the starting point for his painting. ‘It is as a spectator that the author assists, indifferent or passionate, at the birth of his work and watches the phases of its development,’ Ernst maintained of these paintings, ‘Even as the role of the poet...consists in writing according to the dictates of that which articulates itself in him, so the role of the painter is to pick out and project that which sees itself in him’ (Max Ernst, ‘On Frottage’ 1936 in Hershell. B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, CA, 1968, p. 429).
In Histoire Naturelle, Ernst’s ‘Natural History’ book of frottage images published in 1926, the image of a horse had repeatedly arisen in a variety of guises. This image, along with the repeated theme of twinning that also runs through much of Ernst’s work of this period (from paintings like Castor and Pollution and Long Live the Charming Countryside to his pictures of mirroring and struggling couples such as The Fall of the Angel), here, in the La mariée du vent paintings, becomes one of a polarised struggle of cosmic flux. The title of these paintings, Windsbraut/La mariée du vent, refers to a poetic German name for a storm-wind that translates literally as ‘bride of the wind’. Windsbraut was also the title of Oskar Kokoschka’s famous 1914 painting of an erotically charged tempest in which he and his lover Alma Mahler were shown caught up in a whirlwind of elemental passion and tempestuousness.
Ernst’s image of two horses struggling with one another amidst a mystical landscape that, to some extent, anticipates the vistas of Arizona where Ernst would settle in the 1940s, symbolises a similarly elemental and tumultuous union. Like a struggling yin and yang, the two horses in Ernst’s own Windsbraut paintings seem to both oppose and unite with one another in a manner that is reminiscent of Leonardo’s famous equestrian battle scene, The Battle of the Anghiari. This feature is made more explicit in this particular painting through the careful symmetry of the two horses heads, the mirroring of their eyes (correlating to the division of earth and sky), and the mystic atmosphere generated by the cosmic disc (sun/moon) that has been neatly positioned between the horses’ two bodies. These features infuse the work with an overt sense of mysticism that helps to suggest that the horses are mythical manifestations of some powerful and ultimately united cosmic force.
‘I was surprised,’ Ernst later remarked of the images that emerged from his unconscious in such paintings, ‘by the sudden intensification of my visionary capacities and by the hallucinatory succession of contradictory images superimposed, one upon the other, with the persistence and rapidity characteristic of amorous memories. My curiosity awakened and astonished, I began to experiment indifferently and to question, utilizing the same means, all sorts of materials to be found in my visual field; leaves and their veins, the ragged edges of a bit of linen, the brushstrokes of a ‘modern painting, the unwound thread of a spool, etc. There my eyes discovered human heads, animals, [and] a battle that ended with a kiss’ (ibid., pp. 429-431).
(Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting).
La mariée du vent (The Bride of the Wind) was a key theme in Ernst’s art during the mid-1920s. The first of a number of works on this theme executed in 1927, this painting is arguably the finest of six celebrated frottage-type paintings where the subject matter of the painting has been determined by the textures of natural forms. Like his other major series of works from this period the Hordes, the precise nature of the imagery in La mariée du vent originated in the grained patterns of the frottaged background. Following the inventive technique first suggested by Leonardo, Ernst has intuitively followed the forms he found emerging in his mind from the prompt of the patterns in the grain of a series of wood-rubbings that served as the starting point for his painting. ‘It is as a spectator that the author assists, indifferent or passionate, at the birth of his work and watches the phases of its development,’ Ernst maintained of these paintings, ‘Even as the role of the poet...consists in writing according to the dictates of that which articulates itself in him, so the role of the painter is to pick out and project that which sees itself in him’ (Max Ernst, ‘On Frottage’ 1936 in Hershell. B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, CA, 1968, p. 429).
In Histoire Naturelle, Ernst’s ‘Natural History’ book of frottage images published in 1926, the image of a horse had repeatedly arisen in a variety of guises. This image, along with the repeated theme of twinning that also runs through much of Ernst’s work of this period (from paintings like Castor and Pollution and Long Live the Charming Countryside to his pictures of mirroring and struggling couples such as The Fall of the Angel), here, in the La mariée du vent paintings, becomes one of a polarised struggle of cosmic flux. The title of these paintings, Windsbraut/La mariée du vent, refers to a poetic German name for a storm-wind that translates literally as ‘bride of the wind’. Windsbraut was also the title of Oskar Kokoschka’s famous 1914 painting of an erotically charged tempest in which he and his lover Alma Mahler were shown caught up in a whirlwind of elemental passion and tempestuousness.
Ernst’s image of two horses struggling with one another amidst a mystical landscape that, to some extent, anticipates the vistas of Arizona where Ernst would settle in the 1940s, symbolises a similarly elemental and tumultuous union. Like a struggling yin and yang, the two horses in Ernst’s own Windsbraut paintings seem to both oppose and unite with one another in a manner that is reminiscent of Leonardo’s famous equestrian battle scene, The Battle of the Anghiari. This feature is made more explicit in this particular painting through the careful symmetry of the two horses heads, the mirroring of their eyes (correlating to the division of earth and sky), and the mystic atmosphere generated by the cosmic disc (sun/moon) that has been neatly positioned between the horses’ two bodies. These features infuse the work with an overt sense of mysticism that helps to suggest that the horses are mythical manifestations of some powerful and ultimately united cosmic force.
‘I was surprised,’ Ernst later remarked of the images that emerged from his unconscious in such paintings, ‘by the sudden intensification of my visionary capacities and by the hallucinatory succession of contradictory images superimposed, one upon the other, with the persistence and rapidity characteristic of amorous memories. My curiosity awakened and astonished, I began to experiment indifferently and to question, utilizing the same means, all sorts of materials to be found in my visual field; leaves and their veins, the ragged edges of a bit of linen, the brushstrokes of a ‘modern painting, the unwound thread of a spool, etc. There my eyes discovered human heads, animals, [and] a battle that ended with a kiss’ (ibid., pp. 429-431).