Maximiliana

 

The title for this special collection of Max Ernst works offered across Phillips Fall Sale Season is taken from a short 1966 film collaboration between Peter Schamoni and Ernst, Maximiliana oder die widerrechtliche Ausübung der Astromomie (Maximiliana and the illegal practice of astronomy). The film and the 1964 book collaboration between Ernst and the poet-publisher Iliazad on which it was based takes as its subject the German amateur astronomer and lithographer Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel (1821 – 1889), whose discoveries were not properly recorded because his practice as an amateur was deemed to be ‘illegal’. Suffering persecution and humiliation, Tempel nevertheless discovered an asteroid which he named ‘Maximiliana’, a symbol around which Ernst and Schamoni would orient their deep friendship and many collaborations together.

 

Overview

'The joy in every successful metamorphosis conforms […] with the intellect’s age-old energetic need to liberate itself from the deceptive and boring paradise of fixed memories and to investigate a new, incomparably expansive areas of experience, in which the boundaries between the so-called inner world and the outer world become increasingly blurred and will probably one day disappear entirely.'
—Max Ernst

From his early days as a Dadaist Max Ernst demonstrated a deep interest in the precision and specificity of scientific and technical instruments, a line of artistic enquiry that he explored on a technical and thematic level. Executed in 1930, Matin et soir pushes fascination this into new territory with the playful inclusion of a pyrometric watch, a conical tool used in the ceramic firing process to ensure consistency in the kiln’s temperature. Specifically used to measure heatwork, or the relationship between time and temperature, the pyrometric watch stands as a visual metaphor for the passage of morning into night referenced in the work’s title. While the alchemical qualities of the firing process would have undoubtably appealed to Ernst, the cone itself undergoes a transmutation of sorts during its use, softening as it reaches maturation, its tip bending and rounding down as we see in Matin et soir. A key theme running through Ernst’s entire oeuvre and fundamental to Surrealism, the present work uses a characteristic quick-wittedness to explore ideas around mutability and metamorphosis, condensed in the figure of his bird-familiar, Loplop.

 

Presenting Loplop 

 

Although the sturdy rectangular form propped up on two, flat feet that dominates the composition shares the bulky silhouette of a ceramic kiln with which Ernst would have certainly been familiar, in fact the motif appears again and again in Ernst’s works from the early 1930s, significantly in his Loplop Presents series. All featuring variations of a beaked creature peering over a rectangular canvas, Ernst produced several of these works through the 1930s, when Loplop, ‘Superior Among Birds’ emerged as a concrete figure in Ernst’s work, and as an avian avatar for the artist himself.

The totem symbol of Ernst’s Surrealism, Loplop was part avatar, part shamanic guide, presiding over the leaps into the unconscious and juxtaposition of strange, dream-like images that preoccupied his work during this period.

 

Birds had long held powerful sway over Ernst’s imagination, the artist often recounted the apocryphal tale when, on a cold January morning in 1906, his beloved childhood cockatoo expired at the very moment his sister's birth was announced. Forever conflating these two momentous events, the young Ernst believed that his bird’s life had been given over for his sister’s, a foundational moment for the artist’s close personal identification with the animal, and his ‘voluntary if irrational confounding of the images of human beings with birds and other creatures’.ⁱ'Above the clouds the midnight is wandering. Above the midnight the unseen bird of day is soaring. A little higher than the bird the ether is growing and the walls and the roofs are floating away.' —Max Ernst A protean character, shifting between male and female, bird and human form, Loplop made his debut in 1929 with the first of three innovative collage novels, La femmes 100 tetes, where reproductions of popular 19th-century engravings were carefully cut and recombined in startling new forms. By the time the present work was executed the following year, Loplop was a fixture, as the artist describes: ‘By 1930, after having furiously and methodically composed my novel La femme 100 tetes, I was visited almost daily by Loplop, Bird Superior, a private phantom very much attached and devoted to me.’ⁱⁱ

 

The Artist, and Metamorphosis

'A painter is lost if he finds himself. Max Ernst considers his sole virtue to be that he has managed not to find himself.' —Max Ernst Embodying hybridity and metamorphosis, Loplop carries with him a kinetic energy that animates the present work. Breaking through the body of the bold, static, and flattened planes of colour dominating the composition, his familiar beak twists to the left, while a strange, curved line emerges from the protrusion of the pyrometric watch. Impossibly tail-like, Loplop, it would appear is undergoing a metamorphosis of his own, measured by the pyrometric watch.

Unique in its biomorphic elements, Matin et soir departs from usual presentation of Loplop. The figure itself seems to morph between bird, mammal, human, and machine forms, Matin et soir speaking not only to alchemical and temporal change, but to the unstable and shifting nature of art and identity itself, reminding us, in André Breton’s words of other possible worlds ‘where former lives, actual lives, future lives melt together into one life; the life utterly depersonalised.’ⁱⁱⁱ

Exhibited widely and included in the artist’s major 1979 retrospective in Munich, Matin et soir is a striking example of Ernst’s work from the 1930s, remaining in Ernst’s personal collection until it was acquired by Peter Scahamoni in the 1970s.

 

Max Ernst Among the Stars:  Astrophysicist Ravit Helled examines 20th century breakthroughs in planetary science alongside contemporary works by Max Ernst.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    This unique collection of Max Ernst works comes directly from the personal collection of renowned filmmaker Peter Schamoni. The two worked closely together on several collaborative projects, including the short 1966 film Maximiliana oder die widerrechtliche Ausübung der Astromomie. Representing the depth of their personal and professional relationship, the collection also includes works that were made especially for these film projects and were gifted directly to Schamoni by Ernst.

 

•    The collection reflects key moments in the artist’s career and personal life, encompassing a range of works in a variety of mediums from the 1920s through to the 1960s. It also highlights Ernst’s consistent interest in scientific modes of inquiry and discovery, with works borrowing ideas from the disciplines of mathematics and astronomy.

 

•    Exhibited extensively and previously on long-term loan to the Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR, the works were also included in the internationally renowned 2013 exhibition Entdeckungsfahrten zu Max Ernst Die Sammlung Peter Schamoni.

 

•    A highly significant artist of the 20th century avant-garde, Max Ernst’s works are frequently included in definitive accounts of Dada and Surrealism, and his works are held in the most important institutional collections worldwide.

ⁱ Max Ernst, ‘Biographical Notes’, cited in Max Ernst (exh. cat), Zurich, 1962, p. 23. 
ⁱⁱ Max Ernst, quoted in Cahiers d’Art, Max Ernst Edition, Paris 1937, p. 24
ⁱⁱⁱ André Breton, introduction to Max Ernst, La femme 100 tetes