Ernst began this painting in France but completed it in Santa Monica, California, soon after escaping war-torn Europe. For the base layer he used decalcomania, a semi-automatic technique in which paint is applied with a sheet of glass or paper to create unexpected textures. He subsequently inverted the composition and used the same process to manipulate the landscape and its strange inhabitants, which evoke a world of flux and decay. The finished painting, Ernst wrote, was “possibly an unconscious expression of my feelings at the time; for its central figure is not a triumphant Napoleon but a Napoleon in the wilderness on St. Helena in exile and defeat.”
Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018.
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Peggy Guggenheim, Venice. Acquired from the artist.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired from Peggy Guggenheim by exchange, 1942
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Max Ernst
French and American, born Germany. 1891–1976 234 works onlineA key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to both personal memory and collective myth.
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Art of This Century
Gallery 522In the 1940s the New York City art world expanded with the arrival of European émigrés escaping World War II.
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