Fleurs

Painted in 1928, Max Ernst’s Fleurs belongs to a series of canvases on the theme of flowers executed between 1927 and 1929, at a time when the artist was at the height of his recognition as one of the leading Surrealist artists in Paris. Using a subtly luminous and painterly combination of flat planes of colour and textured geometric forms, Fleurs is modelled by Ernst’s iconic grattage technique. Produced by placing a stretch of canvas on a textured surface, and then scraping the painted surface with a palette knife to expose grains and patterns, Ernst would use these as visual prompts from which he would conjure his otherworldly specimens. These abstract forms were then given shape by the elegant touches of the artist’s brush. As with Ernst’s earlier pencil rubbings, known as frottage, these ambiguous organic forms pour forth from spontaneous patterns, a coloured rendering of the mysterious world he first observed and detailed in his series, Histoire Naturelle.
In 1928 Ernst, who had only recently been able to devote himself full-time to his art, had settled into a new life in Meudon, outside of Paris, with his second wife Marie-Berthe Aurenche. The two had met the previous year and, in the face of her parents’ outrage and amidst great controversy, quickly married. Ernst, whose work often took on a dark and foreboding tone, was surprised with the direction his art took during this period of great contentment. His Biographical Notes records for the year 1928 include the following description: ‘Flowers appear. Shell flowers, feather flowers, crystal flowers, tube flowers, Medusa flowers. All of his friends were transformed into flowers. All flowers metamorphosed into birds, all birds into mountains, all mountains into stars. Every star became a house and every house a city’ (‘Biographical Notes: Tissue of Truth, Tissue of Lies,’ in Max Ernst, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 303).
The result is a scene of primordial beauty, in which a highly evocative landscape is drawn from an otherworldly and seemingly nocturnal realm. The unique treatment of the ammonite-like flower occupying the foreground, as though perched on the depths of the ocean floor or populating another plane entirely, lends the work a palpable complexity and subtle abstraction. Its simplified ethereal form is depicted in quietly vivid planes of colour alongside smaller, equally enigmatic bright forms scattered across the canvas. Ernst’s chosen technique imbues these elements with a tactile existence and transposes the setting beyond the natural, and into a dream-like realm. Despite their tangibility, they are defined not by any basis in reality, but by their emergence from the artist’s semi-automatic techniques and processes, which lend the work a mysterious and playful quality.