Ohne titel

1939 was a year of momentous change for Ernst. At the beginning of the year he moved to a run-down seventeenth century farmhouse in Saint-Martin d'Ardèche in the south of France. On a visit to London a few months later he met the English painter Leonora Carrington - a "soul-mate" whom he described as his "bride of the wind" - and she moved with him into his new home. During this time also he disassociated himself with the Surrealist movement after a disagreement with Breton who had had the presumption to order him to try to "sabotage" his old friend Paul Eluard's poetry. Towards the end of the year, after the outbreak of war, Ernst was interned as an enemy alien.
During his internment Ernst shared a room with fellow German Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Here both artists tried their hands at the technique of decalcomania that had been first pioneered by Oscar Dominguez in 1935. This technique involved covering the canvas with a thinned layer of oil paint and then pressing onto it with a smooth surface such as a pane of glass. As the glass is pulled off it creates a myriad surface pattern out of which Ernst's vivid imagination divined fantastic but recogniseable creatures which he heightened into magical striations of form and colour. In Untitled the decalcomania technique has prompted Ernst to create the silhouettes of two mysterious personages - one supposedly male the other clearly female - who are seemingly frozen and fossilized into magical anthropomorphic rock formations reminiscent of the caves and grottos that Ernst had discovered with Carrington shortly before his arrest.