MAX ERNST (1891-1976)


Oiseau signed 'Max Ernst' (upper right)oil on sandpaper laid down on panel9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in (24 x 19 cm)Painted in 1925
|ProvenanceGalerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris.Private collection, France (acquired prior to 1929, and sold: Sotheby's, London June 22, 2004, lot 194).Acquired at the above sale.LiteratureW. Spies, Max Ernst, Oeuvre-Katalog, Werke 1925-1929, Cologne, 1976, no. 1048 (illustrated p. 133).From 1924 to 1925, Max Ernst focused on a major series of artworks examining the theme of caged birds. Executed in the latter year, Oiseau belongs to one of the most creative and groundbreaking periods of his oeuvre. In the present work, Ernst plays with pattern and tactility, creating the illusion of ruffled bird feathers by layering thick oil paint on the gritty sandpaper ground and repeatedly pressing a flat object into the wet paint surface to create a textured relief. In Oiseau, a solitary bird is confined in a schematic cage delineated by flat vertical and horizontal lines. The rectangle of the cage just barely contains the form of the bird, creating a claustrophobic, enclosed environment. The palette is muted, composed of grays and ochres, and the mood is somber and foreboding. The caged bird may be emblematic of the artist's own oppressive feelings or may represent the suffering of humanity—or even both. The symbol of the caged bird appears over and over in Ernst's body of work, and many of these paintings and drawings are dark and nightmarish; some works are fragmentary and divorced from spatial context, as in Oiseau, other times integrated into a large, complex dreamscape, such as in Ernst's Forêt et dove. He explored the motif of the imprisoned bird through numerous permutations, sometimes depicting two birds confined to one small cage. Whether the bird is solitary or paired in captivity seems to significantly alter the tone and meaning.Oiseau and its attendant melancholy series may be interpreted as Ernst's response to the first world war. Ernst and his artistic milieu were savagely disrupted by the Great War; he was drafted and described this period of his life as a temporary death. His friends, the German Expressionists August Macke and Franz Marc, were killed during the war. Ernst emerged from this dark chapter of violence and trauma by redoubling his focus on the visual arts, making the 1920s a prolific time of innovation in his artistic career. He created his first collages in 1919 and began to concentrate on painting in 1920. It was during this decade that Ernst immersed himself in the philosophy and tenets of Surrealism, becoming a forerunner of the movement.Ernst mined collective myth and personal memory to create Oiseau. Ernst reflected upon a childhood confusion between avian and human life as a pivotal, early formative experience, recounting: "A friend by the name of Horneborn, an intelligent piebald, faithful bird dies during the night; the same night a baby, number six, enters life. Confusion in the brain of this otherwise quite healthy boy (the young Ernst) - a kind of interpretation mania, as if the newborn innocent, sister Loni, had in her lust for life, taken possession of the vital fluids of his favorite bird. The crisis is soon overcome. Yet in the boy's mind there remains a voluntary if irrational confounding of the images of human beings with birds and other creatures, and this is reflected in the emblems of his art," (M. Ernst, quoted in Max Ernst (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthaus Zurich, 1962-63, p. 23). He utilized Surrealist production methods of chance, passivity, and exploration of the unconscious to depict a motif not only important to him, but also a profound collective symbol. The techniques used to build the surface textures and patterns of Oiseau speak to Ernst's deep involvement in Surrealism, but the subject matter is both deeply personal and universal.