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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 quoted in W. Spies, Max Ernst, Frottages, London, 1968, p. VI).
So did Ernst describe the birth of the technique of frottage, which consisted of placing the paper on a relief surface and rubbing it with a pencil or charcoal, adding a few strokes in gouache or watercolour. It was 1925, the same year Le désert was executed, thus making it one of Ernst's earliest frottages. The new, ground-breaking method gave the artist the power to add unplanned elements to the composition, and feed his curiosity for automatic images, like the central element of this work. Set against the parched vegetation of a desolate desert, (a theme that became particularly dear to the artist from 1943, when he first encountered the wilderness landscapes of Arizona), the rectangular-shaped object is immediately reminiscent of that mahogany floorboard that had prompted the artist to start exploring the new technique.
Purchased by the present owner in the 1980s, this large scale, important drawing, has since remained in the same private hands and has never been offered on the market since.
So did Ernst describe the birth of the technique of frottage, which consisted of placing the paper on a relief surface and rubbing it with a pencil or charcoal, adding a few strokes in gouache or watercolour. It was 1925, the same year Le désert was executed, thus making it one of Ernst's earliest frottages. The new, ground-breaking method gave the artist the power to add unplanned elements to the composition, and feed his curiosity for automatic images, like the central element of this work. Set against the parched vegetation of a desolate desert, (a theme that became particularly dear to the artist from 1943, when he first encountered the wilderness landscapes of Arizona), the rectangular-shaped object is immediately reminiscent of that mahogany floorboard that had prompted the artist to start exploring the new technique.
Purchased by the present owner in the 1980s, this large scale, important drawing, has since remained in the same private hands and has never been offered on the market since.