(Brühl 1891 – 1976 Paris)
Nocturne, signed and dated Max Ernst 49, titled, signed and dated Max Ernst 49 on the reverse, oil on board on wood panel, 26.8 x 21.7 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galleria Galatea, Turin
Galleria Einaudi, Milan
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Bologna, Max Ernst, Galleria de’Foscherari in collaboration with Iolas Gallery New York, Paris, Milan, Geneva, November - December 1970, exh. cat. no 3, ill.

Literature:
Werner Spies / Sigrid und Günter Metken: Max Ernst Werke 1939 -1953, Köln 1975, n° 2695, page 206, ill. page 206

In accordance with Surrealism’s demand for a “renunciation of the mastery of logic, thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by reason”, Max Ernst, seeking out new possibilities of expression, rediscovered and set to work numerous indirect methods of image-making. One of his methods was the décalcomanie used in the picture here. In this method, thinly applied oil paint is pressed flat with a pane of glass, a sheet of paper or a piece of fabric. When this is removed, different surface structures appear through incidental bubbles and variations, which open up, through play with chance, numerous interpretative possibilities for the unconscious mind.

The small-format image Nocturne was completed in exile in America. A few years earlier, Max Ernst and his third wife Dorothea Tanning had moved from New York to Sedona, in the desert of Arizona. The fantastic rock formations of the desert landscape and the sparkling colours of its layers of rock and their occasional green lichens, repeatedly inspired this Surrealist artist to make his images. There arise visionary landscapes which take form in large compositions but also frequently in small formats.

What is unusual about the image here is its fragmentary character and purely abstract quality. The dark, blue-green palette, the transparent complexity and the variety of structures are condensed into an encoded image world. Whilst Max Ernst usually used the structures created through chance as inspiration from which to develop horizontal lines, colourful figures or creatures, here he allows the extremely suggestive patch-formation to fill the image, so that its mysterious and ghostly character primarily emerges from the tactile allure of the surface.