Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Painted in 1928 Fleurs is a strange Romantic landscape populated by weird hybrid organic forms that belongs to Ernst's "shell/flower" series of paintings.

In pictorial terms the "shell/flower" paintings were the unconscious product of a new painterly technique of scraping the painted surface of the canvas with a knife to expose grains and patterns that, as with frottage, served as prompts for Ernst's ever-fertile imagination and creativity. At the same time the overt prettiness of these shell/flowers, their deliberate and undeniable charm and the romanticism of the weird landscapes and gardens that they generated in Ernst's art can be seen as a reflection of the deep contentment in Ernst's personal life at this time.

In 1928 Ernst, who had only recently been able to devote himself full-time to his art, was finally settled into a new life with his second wife Marie-Berthe Aurenche. Ernst had met the young (in fact under-age) Marie-Berthe shortly after she had left her convent tuition the previous year and amidst great controversy and her parents outrage, carried her off to be his bride. He was of course supported in his actions by his Surrealist friends who were always ready to champion the cause of l'amour against the moral strictures of French society.

Ernst, whose art was often dark and foreboding in its visionary power, seemed as surprised as anyone in the new direction his art took in 1928. His Biographical Notes records for the year 1928 the following description: "Flowers appear Shell flowers, feather flowers, crystal flowers, tube flowers, Medusa flowers. All of his friends were transformed into flowers. All flowers metamorphosed into birds, all birds into mountains, all mountains into stars. Every star became a house and every house a city" ('Biographical Notes: Tissue of Truth, Tissue of Lies', in exh. cat., Max Ernst, Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 303).

Inhabiting a strange almost lunar-like landscape, the flowers that populate this painting generate an unworldly atmosphere, like that to be found on another planet or at the bottom of the sea. In this, the work resembles the bizarre mental landscapes that Yves Tanguy had begun to paint at the same time. In particular the strong shadows that accompany many of the 'shell flowers' in this work seem to recall the monolithic semi-abstract constructions of Tanguy's undersea landscapes. Infused with a sense of painterliness and organic growth that is absent in Tanguy's petrified art however, it seems from this painting that Ernst's art is actively blooming and giving birth to a whole new world of imagination and fertility.

Special Notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium