‘My roamings, my itch, my impatience, my doubts, my beliefs, my hallucinations, my loves, my angry outbursts, my revolts, my contradictions, my refusals to submit to any discipline … have not created a climate conducive to a serene and smiling life’s work.’ These words by Max Ernst evoke something of the subversive and contradictory nature of his life and art. Ernst is frequently described as the most inventive artist associated with Surrealism but his art resists any easy classification. Steeped in private mythology and childhood memories, his work is always provocative and often disturbing. Across a career that spanned almost seventy years, Ernst saw his output as a process of enquiry, drawing inspiration from a bewildering range of sources in science, nature, psychology and from across world cultures. His abrupt and frequent changes of style and the diversity of his subjects all formed part of his persistent research into the realm of the subconscious, the dream, and the poetic power of images that are at once familiar and strange.
Ernst’s restless experimentation is well represented in our collection. These include eleven paintings and collages and an important holding of books and manuscripts, many of them from the collection of Gabrielle Keiller, bequeathed to the Gallery in 1995 as well as works acquired from the collection of Ernst’s close friend, the artist and collector Roland Penrose. Among the highlights is a series of Ernst’s collage novels; these include his famous Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), published in 1934, in which Ernst added incongruous elements to nineteenth-century engravings, creating unexpected but surprisingly convincing nightmarish images.
The painting Sea and Sun dates from 1925, a period when Ernst was closely associated with the surrealist movement. Many of Ernst’s paintings of the 1920s explore themes of decline and decay, with visions of gloomy primaeval forests and ruined ancient citadels. Other works have a more serene, less claustrophobic mood, including an extensive series of works depicting the sun and sea in simple, almost abstract compositions. These were created using techniques that relied on chance rather than design to spark the imagination. In 1925 Ernst began to use frottage, taking rubbings from floorboards and other surfaces to create marks and textures that became the basis for his drawings. This was soon extended to grattage (from the French to scrape or scratch) for paintings which were begun by placing a canvas over a hard surface and scraping through layers of wet paint with a comb or fork-like instrument. The wave-like lines and the broad striations across Sea and Sun were created using this technique. This apparently random beginning was then overlaid with the pale disc above and the dark circle beneath. Various sources for the imagery have been suggested, ranging from memories of a sea voyage that Ernst made to Indo-China in 1924 to his interest in old alchemical illustrations. Derived from a process of chance and order, the image is ambiguous and deliberately open to interpretation. The circles can be read as natural forms in a simple seascape or as emblems evoking some obscure cosmic symbolism.
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.