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Lot Essay
Sun over the Desert is a highly inventive collage painting made by Max Ernst in 1925. A semi-abstract depiction of the disc of the sun casting a shimmering light over a desert landscape, the painting exhibits an array of new, radically inventive, and semi-automatic techniques that both anticipate and foreshadow many of Ernst’s finest works of the later 1920s and early 1930s. Created in the wake of Ernst’s sea voyage through the Suez Canal to and from South East Asia in 1924, Sun over the Desert belongs to an extensive series of elemental and archetypal landscape paintings of suns, seas, earthquakes and deserts that Ernst made repeatedly on his return to Paris and which later evolved into his epic forest scenes of 1927 and 1928.
1925 was also the transformational year in which Ernst discovered the media of frottage and grattage – the use of rubbing paint, pencil lead, or charcoal onto a paper or canvas that had been laid flat over a rough or undulating surface, generating random abstract patterns that then served as prompts for the creation of figurative pictorial ideas. Recorded by him as a moment of sublime revelation during a summer stay in Brittany in August, 1925, this discovery was to mark a major turning point in Ernst’s oeuvre. Forever afterwards Ernst was to use frottage, grattage and a variety of other such semi-automatic techniques, such as decalcomania, for example, as a starting point to stimulate what he called his ‘hallucinatory powers’ and prompt the genesis of his work.
Moving on from collage and ‘overpainting,’ Ernst was now no longer imposing his own vision upon a work, he insisted, but allowing the chance formations generated by such techniques to use him, almost like a medium, to channel other – what he believed to be – ancient, archetypal ideas through him. The magnificent series of paintings of suns, seas, deserts and earthquakes that emerged in the mid-1920s make use of both frotttage, grattage and a whole host of other techniques of scraping, rubbing, combing and scratching repeatedly to create their hauntingly atmospheric, elemental landscapes. Juxtaposing the iconic disc of the sun and the often rhythmic, organic flow of the landscape or sea beneath it, works such as Sun over the Desert are arguably the most eloquent demonstration of the magical simplicity and archetypal power of image-making that underpins all of Ernst’s work.
In Sun over the Desert, Ernst further emphasises the physical but also ideological division between earth and sky (or heaven and earth, perhaps) by isolating the ring of the sun, represented by a turquoise disc, against a raw segment of canvas that has been spared from the layers of blue paint used to denote the sky, and instead smeared with a spontaneous, criss-crossing drip-like pattern. This form is mirrored in the lower part of the work by an equally proportioned piece of card splattered with black ink that functions like a shadow on the sand beneath the sun. Appearing to emphasize the chance origins upon which his work was now based, these elements also establish an almost mystical sense of separation between earth and sky, here rendered by a hazy blue-grey pigment in the upper part of the picture and by a sequence of coloured stripes that prefigure Ernst’s Blind Swimmer-type pictures of 1934-1935.
As Robert McNab has pointed out, the elemental nature of Ernst’s sea, sun and desert landscapes of this period were evidently triggered by the kind of vistas the artist had repeatedly observed, day after day, during his long sea voyage to and from South East Asia in 1924. In addition, as he suggests, the sun rings Ernst paints or, occasionally, physically affixes to his work during this period ‘resemble not only the high-level cirrostratus halos that surround either sun or moon, but also the flat jade rings, up to 15 cm in diameter, which have been found in China in graves dating from Neolithic times to the Zhou period (900-300 BCE). By the Han period (200 BCE-221 CE) they were recognised as symbols of the sky. Such rings, known as bi, could be seen in Paris at the Musée Guimet, alongside exhibits brought back from Angkor [which Ernst visited in 1924]. The sun rings which first appear in Ernst’s Seas and Forests of the 20s may therefore share this symbolic value as emblems of the heavens, and therefore raise the Asian content of his post-voyage work. As we know, he was interested in ethnography and widely read, so we may assume he knew of bi discs after his visit to Asia. Ernst was attracted to archetypes and converted visual experience into such symbols, as we can see from the way he abstracted the sea and the forest. His suns and moons are also separate subjects in themselves, but we should not forget the part played by the voyage in fixing his taste for painting them’ (Ghost Ships, A Surrealist Love Triangle, New Haven, 2004, p. 163).
1925 was also the transformational year in which Ernst discovered the media of frottage and grattage – the use of rubbing paint, pencil lead, or charcoal onto a paper or canvas that had been laid flat over a rough or undulating surface, generating random abstract patterns that then served as prompts for the creation of figurative pictorial ideas. Recorded by him as a moment of sublime revelation during a summer stay in Brittany in August, 1925, this discovery was to mark a major turning point in Ernst’s oeuvre. Forever afterwards Ernst was to use frottage, grattage and a variety of other such semi-automatic techniques, such as decalcomania, for example, as a starting point to stimulate what he called his ‘hallucinatory powers’ and prompt the genesis of his work.
Moving on from collage and ‘overpainting,’ Ernst was now no longer imposing his own vision upon a work, he insisted, but allowing the chance formations generated by such techniques to use him, almost like a medium, to channel other – what he believed to be – ancient, archetypal ideas through him. The magnificent series of paintings of suns, seas, deserts and earthquakes that emerged in the mid-1920s make use of both frotttage, grattage and a whole host of other techniques of scraping, rubbing, combing and scratching repeatedly to create their hauntingly atmospheric, elemental landscapes. Juxtaposing the iconic disc of the sun and the often rhythmic, organic flow of the landscape or sea beneath it, works such as Sun over the Desert are arguably the most eloquent demonstration of the magical simplicity and archetypal power of image-making that underpins all of Ernst’s work.
In Sun over the Desert, Ernst further emphasises the physical but also ideological division between earth and sky (or heaven and earth, perhaps) by isolating the ring of the sun, represented by a turquoise disc, against a raw segment of canvas that has been spared from the layers of blue paint used to denote the sky, and instead smeared with a spontaneous, criss-crossing drip-like pattern. This form is mirrored in the lower part of the work by an equally proportioned piece of card splattered with black ink that functions like a shadow on the sand beneath the sun. Appearing to emphasize the chance origins upon which his work was now based, these elements also establish an almost mystical sense of separation between earth and sky, here rendered by a hazy blue-grey pigment in the upper part of the picture and by a sequence of coloured stripes that prefigure Ernst’s Blind Swimmer-type pictures of 1934-1935.
As Robert McNab has pointed out, the elemental nature of Ernst’s sea, sun and desert landscapes of this period were evidently triggered by the kind of vistas the artist had repeatedly observed, day after day, during his long sea voyage to and from South East Asia in 1924. In addition, as he suggests, the sun rings Ernst paints or, occasionally, physically affixes to his work during this period ‘resemble not only the high-level cirrostratus halos that surround either sun or moon, but also the flat jade rings, up to 15 cm in diameter, which have been found in China in graves dating from Neolithic times to the Zhou period (900-300 BCE). By the Han period (200 BCE-221 CE) they were recognised as symbols of the sky. Such rings, known as bi, could be seen in Paris at the Musée Guimet, alongside exhibits brought back from Angkor [which Ernst visited in 1924]. The sun rings which first appear in Ernst’s Seas and Forests of the 20s may therefore share this symbolic value as emblems of the heavens, and therefore raise the Asian content of his post-voyage work. As we know, he was interested in ethnography and widely read, so we may assume he knew of bi discs after his visit to Asia. Ernst was attracted to archetypes and converted visual experience into such symbols, as we can see from the way he abstracted the sea and the forest. His suns and moons are also separate subjects in themselves, but we should not forget the part played by the voyage in fixing his taste for painting them’ (Ghost Ships, A Surrealist Love Triangle, New Haven, 2004, p. 163).