Max Ernst - L'Ecclésiaste (Opus Dei)
Max Ernst
L'Ecclésiaste (Opus Dei)
1963
Oil, collage and two drawing pins on wood, mounted on red wooden panel. 46.7 x 38.9 cm. Signed 'max ernst' in black lower right and titled 'OPUS DEI' in black lower left. Signed, dated and titled 'max ernst 1963 L'ECCLÉSIASTE' verso in black. The second picture title 'OPUS DEI' is overpainted but legible. - In very good condition with fresh clours. Light craquelure in the orange-red areas and minor retouch on left picture margin.
With Max Ernst’s painting “L’Ecclésiaste (Opus Dei)”, a work realised in luminous colours and belonging to the artist’s late oeuvre is coming up for auction. As was often the case with Ernst in the 1960s, here he is once again working with the interaction between different pictorial techniques: oil on wooden supports, frottage, a paper collage and two drawing pins.
In 1953, when Max Ernst left the United States and returned to Paris with his wife Dorothea Tanning, they found an entirely different art scene there. The dominant “École de Paris” was focused on “Art Informel” and “Tachisme” – artists had largely turned away from surrealism. As Ernst writes in his memoirs: “I returned to Paris at a point in time […] when those ‘terrible simplificateurs’ […] were heaping praise on abstract art and condemning the art of the surrealists as too literary” (cited in: Max Ernst. Retrospektive, exh. cat. Albertina Wien/Fondation Beyeler Riehen, Ostfildern 2013, p. 279). The couple accordingly left Paris and purchased a house in Huismes, not far from Chinon in the Loire Valley. The seclusion of this village, the beauty of its surroundings and life in a country shaped by Catholicism led Ernst to wrap up the decalcomanias of his American exile and turn to new themes. “L’Ecclésiaste (Opus Dei)” is representative of this shift because, aside from its new and intense palette, it is centred around a depiction of a head crowned with a red mitre which, according to the picture’s title, is presumably that of a cleric and is connected with the Christian cross on the right. With his critical relationship to the Catholic Church, Ernst could be mockingly alluding to the “Opus Dei” here, the – for him dubious – “work of God”. This painting additionally possesses an outstanding provenance: in the early 1970s, it was owned by Alexander Iolas (1907-1987), who was the central gallerist for surrealism at that time.
Catalogue Raisonné
Spies/Metken/Pech 3869
Provenance
Galerie Alexander Iolas, Milan (label verso); Paolo Marinotti, Milan; Private collection; Galerie Cazeau & Béraudière, Paris; Galerie Salis & Vertes, Salzburg/St. Moritz (2008); Private collection, Bavaria
Exhibitions
A Coruña 2004 (Fondación Pedro Barrié de la Maza), Max Ernst y sus amigos surrealistas, p. 74, with colour illus.; Cologne 2005 (Galerie Boisserée), Malerei, Graphik, Skulpturen und Multiples sowie photographische Portraits des Künstlers Max Ernst von Edward Quinn (1920-1997), cat. no. 4, with colour illus.
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
Max Ernst
L'Ecclésiaste (Opus Dei)
1963
Oil, collage and two drawing pins on wood, mounted on red wooden panel. 46.7 x 38.9 cm. Signed 'max ernst' in black lower right and titled 'OPUS DEI' in black lower left. Signed, dated and titled 'max ernst 1963 L'ECCLÉSIASTE' verso in black. The second picture title 'OPUS DEI' is overpainted but legible. - In very good condition with fresh clours. Light craquelure in the orange-red areas and minor retouch on left picture margin.
With Max Ernst’s painting “L’Ecclésiaste (Opus Dei)”, a work realised in luminous colours and belonging to the artist’s late oeuvre is coming up for auction. As was often the case with Ernst in the 1960s, here he is once again working with the interaction between different pictorial techniques: oil on wooden supports, frottage, a paper collage and two drawing pins.
In 1953, when Max Ernst left the United States and returned to Paris with his wife Dorothea Tanning, they found an entirely different art scene there. The dominant “École de Paris” was focused on “Art Informel” and “Tachisme” – artists had largely turned away from surrealism. As Ernst writes in his memoirs: “I returned to Paris at a point in time […] when those ‘terrible simplificateurs’ […] were heaping praise on abstract art and condemning the art of the surrealists as too literary” (cited in: Max Ernst. Retrospektive, exh. cat. Albertina Wien/Fondation Beyeler Riehen, Ostfildern 2013, p. 279). The couple accordingly left Paris and purchased a house in Huismes, not far from Chinon in the Loire Valley. The seclusion of this village, the beauty of its surroundings and life in a country shaped by Catholicism led Ernst to wrap up the decalcomanias of his American exile and turn to new themes. “L’Ecclésiaste (Opus Dei)” is representative of this shift because, aside from its new and intense palette, it is centred around a depiction of a head crowned with a red mitre which, according to the picture’s title, is presumably that of a cleric and is connected with the Christian cross on the right. With his critical relationship to the Catholic Church, Ernst could be mockingly alluding to the “Opus Dei” here, the – for him dubious – “work of God”. This painting additionally possesses an outstanding provenance: in the early 1970s, it was owned by Alexander Iolas (1907-1987), who was the central gallerist for surrealism at that time.
Catalogue Raisonné
Spies/Metken/Pech 3869
Provenance
Galerie Alexander Iolas, Milan (label verso); Paolo Marinotti, Milan; Private collection; Galerie Cazeau & Béraudière, Paris; Galerie Salis & Vertes, Salzburg/St. Moritz (2008); Private collection, Bavaria
Exhibitions
A Coruña 2004 (Fondación Pedro Barrié de la Maza), Max Ernst y sus amigos surrealistas, p. 74, with colour illus.; Cologne 2005 (Galerie Boisserée), Malerei, Graphik, Skulpturen und Multiples sowie photographische Portraits des Künstlers Max Ernst von Edward Quinn (1920-1997), cat. no. 4, with colour illus.
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
