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Lot Essay
Like so many swirling tendrils, the various appendages that are linked to Ernst's Tête d'homme, painted in 1934, have little of the human about them, and yet the various forms meet and merge to create an unmistakably anthropomorphoid shape. There is an organic feel to this work, with the various shapes somehow loosely imitating nature, leaves and stalks. The nose appears as a strange stamen, the face in parts resembling an exaggerated lily, the forms reminiscent of some alien, liminal sexual act. Paradoxically, the smooth white that dominates much of the figure and the horn shapes jutting up and downwards respectively evoke a bull's skull. This painting thus manages to merge a sense of animal, vegetable and human all in one, creating an otherworldly image of man that hovers quietly on the very borders of recognition.
It was in 1934 that Ernst travelled to Switzerland, and there met and collaborated with Alberto Giacometti. This marked the beginning of Ernst's adventures in sculpture which would so mark much of the rest of his career. It seems small coincidence that the head in Tête d'homme has horns, like several of his later sculptures, especially during his time in Colorado. Paradoxically, considering its organic and diaphanous nature, Tête d'homme is also marked by an intensely sculptural feel. Even the handling of the paint gives a sense of smooth solidity to parts of the painting, showing Ernst's increasing interest in the three-dimensional art forms.
During his stay in Switzerland, one of Ernst's activities with Giacometti was to seek river-smoothed stones from rivers and incorporate them in his sculptures. This idea of chance as the basis of a work of art was crucial to Ernst, who could almost not begin work on a blank canvas. He needed a prompt of some sort, the merest hint of an image to jar and jostle his mind into some form of recognition, as the artist began to perceive the picture he would seek to create. Chance was therefore a form of inspiration for Ernst. In Tête d'homme, the freely swirling shapes that form the armature for the head bear all the hallmarks of being chance lines, used by Ernst as guides to revelation, a means of finding the vision he sought. This process of basing his art on an almost subconscious sense of recognition, using his mind's suggestions to conjure up his subject, was at the very heart of Surrealism. It was a means of tapping into the hinterland world of the unknown, a world of infinite mystery and possibility that exists around the viewer and yet rests just beyond our grasp. In the same way, the solid yet wispy, skull-like yet vegetal Tête d'homme intrudes upon the viewer's mind, confusing all our judgements and understandings of the world around us, introducing a new realm of possibilities to the darkest nooks of our consciousness. This work was purchased directly from the Artist who kept it in his collection for over 35 years.
It was in 1934 that Ernst travelled to Switzerland, and there met and collaborated with Alberto Giacometti. This marked the beginning of Ernst's adventures in sculpture which would so mark much of the rest of his career. It seems small coincidence that the head in Tête d'homme has horns, like several of his later sculptures, especially during his time in Colorado. Paradoxically, considering its organic and diaphanous nature, Tête d'homme is also marked by an intensely sculptural feel. Even the handling of the paint gives a sense of smooth solidity to parts of the painting, showing Ernst's increasing interest in the three-dimensional art forms.
During his stay in Switzerland, one of Ernst's activities with Giacometti was to seek river-smoothed stones from rivers and incorporate them in his sculptures. This idea of chance as the basis of a work of art was crucial to Ernst, who could almost not begin work on a blank canvas. He needed a prompt of some sort, the merest hint of an image to jar and jostle his mind into some form of recognition, as the artist began to perceive the picture he would seek to create. Chance was therefore a form of inspiration for Ernst. In Tête d'homme, the freely swirling shapes that form the armature for the head bear all the hallmarks of being chance lines, used by Ernst as guides to revelation, a means of finding the vision he sought. This process of basing his art on an almost subconscious sense of recognition, using his mind's suggestions to conjure up his subject, was at the very heart of Surrealism. It was a means of tapping into the hinterland world of the unknown, a world of infinite mystery and possibility that exists around the viewer and yet rests just beyond our grasp. In the same way, the solid yet wispy, skull-like yet vegetal Tête d'homme intrudes upon the viewer's mind, confusing all our judgements and understandings of the world around us, introducing a new realm of possibilities to the darkest nooks of our consciousness. This work was purchased directly from the Artist who kept it in his collection for over 35 years.