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Lot Essay
Max Ernst executed Etamines et marseillaise de Arp at the height of his involvement with the Dada movement in Cologne. This work is a deft example of the artist’s celebrated “overpainting” technique—collage-type works in which the artist painted over printed illustrations recycled from an assortment of scientific and mechanical material. Through this method, Ernst granted pictorial forms to his enigmatic, preternatural visions, crafting inexplicable worlds filled with hybrid creatures assembled from automated plants and anthropomorphized machines.
In 1936, Ernst recalled the experience which inspired these works: “On a rainy day in 1919… a teaching aid catalogue caught my attention. I saw advertisements for all kinds of models—mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, and paleontological—all elements of such a differing nature that the absurdity of their being gathered together confused my eyes and my mind, calling forth hallucinations which in turn gave the objects represented new and rapidly changing meaning… All that was needed to capture this effect was a little color or a few lines, a horizon here, a desert there, a sky, a wooden floor and so on” (“What is the mechanism of collage?” in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 427).
Etamines et marseillaise de Arp was one of a select number of these early “overpaintings” to feature in Ernst’s landmark solo show at the Galerie Au Sans Pareil in Paris in 1921, an exhibition which introduced the artist to the Parisian avant-garde. The work was previously owned by Ernst’s close friend and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, the pioneering French poet Paul Eluard. It was later acquired by the Swiss-American Surrealist artist Kurt Seligmann, at whose wedding Ernst was a witness together with Jean Arp. Indeed, the title of the present work is a playful reference to Arp, an active member of the Zurich Dada group whose friendship was one of the many forces which drew Ernst into the movement.
In 1936, Ernst recalled the experience which inspired these works: “On a rainy day in 1919… a teaching aid catalogue caught my attention. I saw advertisements for all kinds of models—mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, and paleontological—all elements of such a differing nature that the absurdity of their being gathered together confused my eyes and my mind, calling forth hallucinations which in turn gave the objects represented new and rapidly changing meaning… All that was needed to capture this effect was a little color or a few lines, a horizon here, a desert there, a sky, a wooden floor and so on” (“What is the mechanism of collage?” in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, 1968, p. 427).
Etamines et marseillaise de Arp was one of a select number of these early “overpaintings” to feature in Ernst’s landmark solo show at the Galerie Au Sans Pareil in Paris in 1921, an exhibition which introduced the artist to the Parisian avant-garde. The work was previously owned by Ernst’s close friend and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, the pioneering French poet Paul Eluard. It was later acquired by the Swiss-American Surrealist artist Kurt Seligmann, at whose wedding Ernst was a witness together with Jean Arp. Indeed, the title of the present work is a playful reference to Arp, an active member of the Zurich Dada group whose friendship was one of the many forces which drew Ernst into the movement.