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Lot Essay
Over the course of his career, Max Ernst explored a profoundly imaginative sculptural vocabulary, gradually evolving from direct carving on stones and rocks discovered by chance in the landscape, to inventive modelling and casting in different materials, deploying a strange array of quotidian objects and utensils he came across in his immediate surroundings to intriguing new ends. Describing the humorous, playful character of this side of his practice, the artist explained: ‘It’s like a child’s game. I play as if with sand on the beach. I place the forms in a mould and then the game of anthropomorphism begins’ (quoted in J. Pech, “Mythology and Mathematics: Max Ernst’s Sculpture,” in Max Ernst: Scultures/Sculptures, exh. cat., Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 1996, p. 51). Conceived in 1950, La Parisienne is a striking, mature expression of these ideas, combining an elegant, lithe silhouette with a series of incongruous details, to create an extraordinary, Surrealist vision of a young, Parisian woman.
While sculptural assemblage had played an important role in Ernst’s oeuvre during his DADA years, a brief sojourn to Switzerland in 1934 proved instrumental in igniting his passion for creating sculpture in the round. During this trip, he spent time with Alberto Giacometti in Maloja, and the pair worked collaboratively on a series of river-smoothed stones they had fished from a nearby stream, adding hand-carved elements and painted forms to their surfaces. This idea of chance as the basis of a work was crucial to Ernst, for whom a prompt of some sort was an essential aspect of his Surrealist vision. Upon his return to Paris, Ernst experimented with creating sculptures from found objects which lived in his studio, which he then moulded, worked over and cast in plaster, creating strange configurations as he juxtaposed and fused different elements to one another. This technique would find further expression while the artist was living in America during the 1940s, most notably during a summer trip to Great River, on the south shore of Long Island in the summer of 1944, where Ernst transformed the garage of his rented house into a makeshift sculpture studio. Through the ensuing three decades, bronze would become the principle outlet of the artist’s sculptural experiments.
Ernst had returned to Paris for the first time since the War in 1950, accompanied by his wife, the artist Dorothea Tanning. Eager to reconnect with many of his avant-garde friends, colleagues and supporters, Ernst spent several weeks travelling around, visiting comrades and confidants from Brussels through to the South of France. While he had initially planned on investigating the possibility of a permanent move back to France, Ernst encountered a completely different world to the one he had fled almost a decade prior. Paris, he felt, was at turns both unchanged and completely unrecognisable, a city scarred by destruction and poverty, yet still defiantly resilient, with a certain inextricably Parisian attitude that remained undiminished. As a result, Ernst and Tanning returned to their home in Sedona, Arizona at the end of the sojourn, where they would remain for a further three years.
While La Parisienne may have been prompted by this brief European trip, it was primarily shaped by the artist’s memories of cosmopolitan Paris and the elegant women that inhabited its streets. There is a distinct femininity to the figure, the litheness of her slender body balanced by a pair of strong, curvaceous hips, that project outwards from a slim waist. Though abstracted and pared down to her essential forms, the graceful curvature of La Parisienne accentuates the character’s poise, her elongated neck, arms and legs imbuing her figure a powerful sense of elegance. The contrast between her nipped-in waist and the volume of her hips recalls the stylish contemporary fashions that were sweeping through society at this time. Christian Dior’s iconic ‘New Look’ had debuted in Paris February in 1947, ushering in a dramatic shift in style, as the austere, masculine silhouettes of the War years gave way to a more decorative and romantic femininity. In a typically subversive gesture, Ernst disrupts the clean lines and elegance of La Parisienne’s outfit by adding a small, ruffled collar to the juncture between her neck and shoulders, its regular, rhythmic linearity resembling a metal bottle cap.
Though Paris was at the forefront of Ernst’s mind at this time, the totemic quality of La Parisienne also invokes his enduring interest in ancient art and the visual traditions of the indigenous cultures of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. In particular, there are echoes of early Cycladic statuettes and idols in the linearity and contained pose of the figure, as she stands proudly upright, gazing forthrightly out at the viewer. At the same time, other details suggest both organic and man-made sources of inspiration – as Jürgen Pech has noted, the strange, conical shape of La Parisienne’s tête simultaneously recalls the intriguing, twisting profile of a seashell and a mariner's telescope, while the presence of a clam shell on the reverse of her dress further enhances the allusion to a nautical world.
Cast in 1959, the present example of La Parisienne is recorded as 0⁄9 within the sculptural series; other casts now reside in several renowned public collections, including The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl.
While sculptural assemblage had played an important role in Ernst’s oeuvre during his DADA years, a brief sojourn to Switzerland in 1934 proved instrumental in igniting his passion for creating sculpture in the round. During this trip, he spent time with Alberto Giacometti in Maloja, and the pair worked collaboratively on a series of river-smoothed stones they had fished from a nearby stream, adding hand-carved elements and painted forms to their surfaces. This idea of chance as the basis of a work was crucial to Ernst, for whom a prompt of some sort was an essential aspect of his Surrealist vision. Upon his return to Paris, Ernst experimented with creating sculptures from found objects which lived in his studio, which he then moulded, worked over and cast in plaster, creating strange configurations as he juxtaposed and fused different elements to one another. This technique would find further expression while the artist was living in America during the 1940s, most notably during a summer trip to Great River, on the south shore of Long Island in the summer of 1944, where Ernst transformed the garage of his rented house into a makeshift sculpture studio. Through the ensuing three decades, bronze would become the principle outlet of the artist’s sculptural experiments.
Ernst had returned to Paris for the first time since the War in 1950, accompanied by his wife, the artist Dorothea Tanning. Eager to reconnect with many of his avant-garde friends, colleagues and supporters, Ernst spent several weeks travelling around, visiting comrades and confidants from Brussels through to the South of France. While he had initially planned on investigating the possibility of a permanent move back to France, Ernst encountered a completely different world to the one he had fled almost a decade prior. Paris, he felt, was at turns both unchanged and completely unrecognisable, a city scarred by destruction and poverty, yet still defiantly resilient, with a certain inextricably Parisian attitude that remained undiminished. As a result, Ernst and Tanning returned to their home in Sedona, Arizona at the end of the sojourn, where they would remain for a further three years.
While La Parisienne may have been prompted by this brief European trip, it was primarily shaped by the artist’s memories of cosmopolitan Paris and the elegant women that inhabited its streets. There is a distinct femininity to the figure, the litheness of her slender body balanced by a pair of strong, curvaceous hips, that project outwards from a slim waist. Though abstracted and pared down to her essential forms, the graceful curvature of La Parisienne accentuates the character’s poise, her elongated neck, arms and legs imbuing her figure a powerful sense of elegance. The contrast between her nipped-in waist and the volume of her hips recalls the stylish contemporary fashions that were sweeping through society at this time. Christian Dior’s iconic ‘New Look’ had debuted in Paris February in 1947, ushering in a dramatic shift in style, as the austere, masculine silhouettes of the War years gave way to a more decorative and romantic femininity. In a typically subversive gesture, Ernst disrupts the clean lines and elegance of La Parisienne’s outfit by adding a small, ruffled collar to the juncture between her neck and shoulders, its regular, rhythmic linearity resembling a metal bottle cap.
Though Paris was at the forefront of Ernst’s mind at this time, the totemic quality of La Parisienne also invokes his enduring interest in ancient art and the visual traditions of the indigenous cultures of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. In particular, there are echoes of early Cycladic statuettes and idols in the linearity and contained pose of the figure, as she stands proudly upright, gazing forthrightly out at the viewer. At the same time, other details suggest both organic and man-made sources of inspiration – as Jürgen Pech has noted, the strange, conical shape of La Parisienne’s tête simultaneously recalls the intriguing, twisting profile of a seashell and a mariner's telescope, while the presence of a clam shell on the reverse of her dress further enhances the allusion to a nautical world.
Cast in 1959, the present example of La Parisienne is recorded as 0⁄9 within the sculptural series; other casts now reside in several renowned public collections, including The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl.