Ohne Titel

Executed circa 1933, Ohne Titel is a jewel-like work that showcases the delicacy of Max Ernst’s semi-automatic painterly techniques. The pair of multi-coloured, fluid forms recall the artist’s fleurs coquillages or shell-flowers, which had first emerged as an unconscious product of Ernst’s nuanced process of grattage. Layering different paints atop one another, the artist would place his sheet or canvas over a textured surface, and then scrape back the pigments to expose an array of spontaneous, suggestive patterns that served as prompts for his imagination. For Ernst, this technique acted as an important catalyst, allowing him to paint directly from his unconscious, ‘augmenting the hallucinatory capacity of the mind, so that “visions” could occur automatically’ (quoted in W. Camfield, Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, exh. cat., The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1993, p. 157). Here, Ernst uses a mixture of gouache and oil to generate these intriguing forms, playing with the different consistencies and density of his materials to achieve richly varied textural effects.
Ohne Titel was acquired directly from the artist in 1934 by the Swiss architect, Karl Egender, who was a keen champion of modernism and a representative of the Neues Bauen or New Building in Switzerland between the wars. According to Ernst, when it came to organising transport for the piece, the work was entrusted to the care of his close friend, Alberto Giacometti, whose younger brother, Bruno, worked with Egender. In a letter to the Swiss art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker, dated 30 April 1935, Ernst reported that Giacometti was leaving for Zurich that evening, and would carry several items intended for her, along with Egender’s painting. The work arrived safely in Switzerland, and was subsequently acquired for the Renker Collection in 1966.