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Lot Essay
In 1954, when Coloradeau de Méduse was executed, Ernst was exploring a synthesis of landscapes remembered or imagined, myth, and psychoanalytic or dream imagery. He had by then established many of the techniques (frottage, grattage, decalcomania, collage) with which he probed the unconscious and the overlaps between interior vision and observed nature. While Coloradeau de Méduse is painted in oil (rather than collage or frottage, though surface texture and layering remain important), it continues the trajectory of Ernst wrestling with both the real - light, colour, topography - and the fantastic.
Coloradeau de Méduse is a portmanteau title that combines “Colorado” and “radeau de la Méduse” (the raft of the Medusa), playing on themes of nature, navigation, disaster, myth, and perhaps survival or shipwreck. The “Colorado” reference arises from his 1946 nine-day rafting honeymoon down the Colorado River with Dorothea Tanning; both were deeply influenced by that experience (scenery, Indian culture, light) and Ernst used it later in his work. As Tanning would recall: ‘Studded with discoveries in nearby Indian caves, canyons, pueblo, aged and wise… the shiny autumn silence that listened to water, black shadow that swallowed light and hid our bobbing boat in a seeming underworld ready to be drawn by Gustave Doré, a paradise lost, no artist’s tricks needed, not even imagination; it was all right there before our eyes along with a phantom presence of Indians, eyeing us from up there on their rim or lurking in cave and cranny. Uneasily. Because it was theirs, and even at this late date we were intruding... And if we, gliding downriver in an unreal chasm, were silent and discomposed by its pristine beauty it was a thing that even in the memory is a treasure beyond words’ (Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 155, pp. 155-157).
Painted in 1954 on Ernst’s return to Europe from America, Coloradeau de Méduse can be seen not as a literal landscape, but as a poetic, even surreal assembly of impressions: natural rock formations, watery turbulence, sky and void, mythic allusions; it is a compelling work in Ernst’s mature œuvre, combining the artist’s love of myth, experiment with form, and memory of travel. In John Russell’s words, in these ‘Colorado/rafter’ paintings, Ernst stacks images ‘one on top of the other like cards on a gaming-table,’ rich colour and texture, varied painting techniques, blending real and dreamlike forms’; that these pictures demonstrate ‘the interpenetration of the conscious and the unconscious worlds’ (J. Russell, Max Ernst, Life and Work, New York, 1967, p. 158)
Coloradeau de Méduse is a portmanteau title that combines “Colorado” and “radeau de la Méduse” (the raft of the Medusa), playing on themes of nature, navigation, disaster, myth, and perhaps survival or shipwreck. The “Colorado” reference arises from his 1946 nine-day rafting honeymoon down the Colorado River with Dorothea Tanning; both were deeply influenced by that experience (scenery, Indian culture, light) and Ernst used it later in his work. As Tanning would recall: ‘Studded with discoveries in nearby Indian caves, canyons, pueblo, aged and wise… the shiny autumn silence that listened to water, black shadow that swallowed light and hid our bobbing boat in a seeming underworld ready to be drawn by Gustave Doré, a paradise lost, no artist’s tricks needed, not even imagination; it was all right there before our eyes along with a phantom presence of Indians, eyeing us from up there on their rim or lurking in cave and cranny. Uneasily. Because it was theirs, and even at this late date we were intruding... And if we, gliding downriver in an unreal chasm, were silent and discomposed by its pristine beauty it was a thing that even in the memory is a treasure beyond words’ (Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 155, pp. 155-157).
Painted in 1954 on Ernst’s return to Europe from America, Coloradeau de Méduse can be seen not as a literal landscape, but as a poetic, even surreal assembly of impressions: natural rock formations, watery turbulence, sky and void, mythic allusions; it is a compelling work in Ernst’s mature œuvre, combining the artist’s love of myth, experiment with form, and memory of travel. In John Russell’s words, in these ‘Colorado/rafter’ paintings, Ernst stacks images ‘one on top of the other like cards on a gaming-table,’ rich colour and texture, varied painting techniques, blending real and dreamlike forms’; that these pictures demonstrate ‘the interpenetration of the conscious and the unconscious worlds’ (J. Russell, Max Ernst, Life and Work, New York, 1967, p. 158)