Coloradeau de Méduse

Appearing at auction for the first time since it was painted in 1953, Coloradeau de Méduse is one of what art historian John Russell has described as the great ‘masterpieces of 1953-1954’ that Max Ernst produced on his return to Europe from America that year (Max Ernst, Life and Work, New York, 1967, pp. 158-160). As its punning title suggests, the painting invokes precious memories of the desert home that Ernst and his American wife Dorothea Tanning had left behind in Arizona, and in particular a nine-day water-raft journey that the couple had made down the Colorado river as part of their honeymoon in 1946.
‘Precious as silicate arrowheads, of which we found several, is the memory of that nine-day river passage, eighteen miles on the torrent that cut skyscraper deep between sheer stone,’ Tanning would recall of this river journey (Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, New York, 2001, p. 155). ‘Studded with discoveries in nearby Indian caves, canyons, pueblo, aged and wise… the shiny autumn silence that listened to water, black shadow that swallowed light and hid our bobbing boat in a seeming underworld ready to be drawn by Gustave Doré, a paradise lost, no artist’s tricks needed, not even imagination; it was all right there before our eyes along with a phantom presence of Indians, eyeing us from up there on their rim or lurking in cave and cranny. Uneasily. Because it was theirs, and even at this late date we were intruding... And if we, gliding downriver in an unreal chasm, were silent and discomposed by its pristine beauty it was a thing that even in the memory is a treasure beyond words’ (ibid., pp. 155-157).
Depicting fluid, overlapping, multi-layered scenes of a visionary, rich, red, mountain landscape permeated by spirit-images and strange creatures seeming to both emerge from and disappear into the landscape vista, this painting is the largest and finest of three oils that Ernst made on the theme of this raft journey between 1953 and 1954. The other two works are an oil simply entitled Coloradeau from 1953 and now in the collection of the Musée d’art moderne de Paris (Spies, no. 3011), and a second work also entitled Coloradeau de Méduse which Ernst painted in 1954 (Spies, no. 3042; Private collection). With its Romantic, flowing decalcomania landscape appearing to invoke dream apparitions of spirit animals reminiscent of the totemic imagery of the Hopi and Zuni Indians that Ernst had so admired during his years in Arizona, Coloradeau de Méduse is one of the artist’s most poignant and evocative dream-landscape paintings of the 1950s. Centred around the concept of the journey of a river winding through the ancient Colorado landscape, the painting is one that, as John Russell has pointed out, also forms a companion piece to Ernst’s other great river-themed masterpiece of this period, Vater Rhein in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel (1953, Spies, no. 3007).
‘In the big paintings of 1953-1954,’ writes Russell, ‘there is, by contrast, an enormous ebullience. Vater Rhein takes its subject matter from one of the most powerful of all European phenomena – the pull and drive of the Rhine at its fullest and deepest – and Coloradeau de Méduse has to do with one of the great untamed forces of America: the Colorado River, which Max Ernst and Dorothea had explored at a time when it was a great deal wilder and less predictable than it is today. These are paintings in which images are stacked one on top of the other like cards on a gaming-table, colour is rich and resourceful, and the paint is put on a dozen different ways... [to give]... the best possible illustration of what Caspar David Friedrich meant when he said: “The artist should paint what he sees within himself, and not only what he sees in front of him…” What this means, in the present context, is that Max Ernst did not simply describe the river-bed, or describe the Colorado mountains, any more than Friedrich was showing off his command of architectural draughtsmanship when he painted his ruined cathedral in the snow. Something of the peaks, something of the shadowed gullies, something of the many-fathomed whirlpools in question contributed to the imagery of Coloradeau de Méduse and Vater Rhein just as the atmosphere of the two paintings owes something, in the one case to the swathed mists of early morning and, in the other, to the hooded light of underwater. But the real subject of these paintings is the interpenetration of the conscious and the unconscious worlds’ (op. cit., 1967, pp. 158-160).
‘In particular,’ Russell continues, ‘they have to do with the artist’s ability to raid the unconscious and come back alive… [In Coloradeau de Méduse] we cannot... be sure that what we take to be mountains, clouds and rocks in the river bed are not simply metaphors… This is true equally of the astral phenomena… where the ambiguity extends to what we at first take to be atmospheric variants of the mountainside. Are these above water or below? Surfaces exposed to normal vision, or cross-sections cut deep into petrified matter? Areas shadowed by the passage of the sun, or hollowed and darkened by the movement of imperious waters? It is impossible to say, and the thraldom of the picture lies in this very impossibility. The inward and the outward worlds overlap, inter-penetrate, and coalesce’ (ibid., p. 160).