Le tilleul et le châtaignier

A mixture of trompe l'oeil watercolor, frottage and drawing, Le tilleul et le châtaignier (The Linden Tree and the Chestnut Tree) dates from an important moment in Max Ernst's career, as he began to explore the full possibilities and implications of frottage. Ernst had happened upon this semi-automatic technique during the summer of 1925 while on holiday in the seaside town of Pornic where, stuck in his hotel room one rainy afternoon, he became captivated by the rich and varied textures of the grooves in the wooden floorboards. Laying sheets of paper at random across the floor, the artist made pencil tracings of the patterns, generating a series of unplanned images that fed his artistic imagination. At this time, Ernst's art was developing along new routes under the influence of the Surrealist group, moving away from the largely cubist-orientated aesthetic of his earlier Dada paintings and collages towards one that sought to uncover the hidden alchemy of his unconscious mind. For the artist, frottage was a catalyst that prompted him to paint directly from his unconscious, with Ernst describing the process as "the technical means of augmenting the hallucinatory capacity of the mind, so that 'visions' could occur automatically, a means of doffing one's blindness" (quoted in W. Hopps, "Ernst at Surrealism's Dawn: 1925-1927" in W. Canfield, Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, exh. cat., The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1993, p. 157).