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Lot Essay
'It began with a...childhood memory, in the course of which an imitation mahogany board in my bed played the part of the optical provocateur in a daydream. On a rainy evening I found myself in a hotel on the French coast when I was gripped by an obsession that made me stare excitedly at the deeply grooved cracks in the floorboards. I decided to yield to the symbolism of the obsession. To sustain my potential for meditation and hallucination, I made a series of sketches on the floorboards by arbitrarily placing a few sheets of paper on them and then began to rub on them with black pencil. When I closely scrutinized the sketches thus made - 'the dark areas and other, delicately lit half-dark areas' - I was amazed at the sudden intensification of my visionary capabilities and the hallucinatory result of the contrasting pictures' (Max Ernst cited in W. Spies, Max Ernst: Frottages, London, 1986, p. VI).
So did Ernst describe the birth of the technique of frottage. Les pampas is one of the first of Ernst's frottages and formed part of his celebrated 1925 album of frottages entitled Histoire Naturelle. Ernst's Histoire Naturelle is a deliberate subversion of the whole notion of a natural history that actively calls into question the scientific concept of the world as a rational and explicable entity that can be catalogued, defined, and reduced to a lexicon of categories and types. He does this by presenting a series of portraits made from natural forms that describe a fantastical, surprising, wholly inexplicable and seemingly impossible world with exactly the same clarity, sharply observed detail and stark graphic language of a scientific periodical. One of the first mental landscapes of Surrealist art, Les pampas describes a wild, barren landscape sparsely populated by extraordinary, animistic coquillage-like baobab trees extending towards a distant horizon.
So did Ernst describe the birth of the technique of frottage. Les pampas is one of the first of Ernst's frottages and formed part of his celebrated 1925 album of frottages entitled Histoire Naturelle. Ernst's Histoire Naturelle is a deliberate subversion of the whole notion of a natural history that actively calls into question the scientific concept of the world as a rational and explicable entity that can be catalogued, defined, and reduced to a lexicon of categories and types. He does this by presenting a series of portraits made from natural forms that describe a fantastical, surprising, wholly inexplicable and seemingly impossible world with exactly the same clarity, sharply observed detail and stark graphic language of a scientific periodical. One of the first mental landscapes of Surrealist art, Les pampas describes a wild, barren landscape sparsely populated by extraordinary, animistic coquillage-like baobab trees extending towards a distant horizon.