Max Ernst

The centerpiece of this exhibition, an abridged history of Max Ernst’s career, is the mural Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie (Petals in the Garden of the Nymph Ancolie), 1934. The work exemplifies Ernst’s fascination with the nymph, and here the lounging spirit presides over a tidy collection of his art with a calm vision. In the main gallery, a rock garden studded with Ernst’s stone sculpture rests between the nymph and The Tree of Life, 1927. In the mural, the nymph is depicted as an amorphous yellow body, lounging on a gray background among green leaves and red flower petals. Her limbs are ghostly flora-fauna hybrids, at once appendages and sexual organs. At the gallery’s entrance, viewers are greeted by spindly cast-bronze sculptures of anthropomorphic asparagus and a totemic devotion to the spirit of the Bastille, attestations to the German artist’s Francophilia. In the first gallery, Ernst’s early drawings, dating from 1919 to 1926, are presented alongside an expansive collection of thirty-four collotype prints from the Menil Collection. These drawings reveal Ernst’s Surrealism as a complex deconstruction of the natural world, building skyscrapers out of plant fibers. A touching inclusion is the artist’s portrait of Dominique de Menil. The youthful Dominique, 1934, was discovered by a priest in a shopwindow in Paris and brought back to the US. Balancing humor and intensity, Ernst justifies his place among the masters of modernism with intense distillations of the human condition and experimental processes. With a lust for life, he found fantastic creatures, ancient civilizations, women, machines, forests, love, and harmony all under the tip of his pencil.