06/01/2026
Paysage-effet d'attouchement - Max Ernst - 1934-1935
“The last superstition and final sad vestige of the myth of Creation remaining to western culture was the legend of artistic creativity. It was one of the first revolutionary acts of Surrealism to have attacked this myth with straightforward means and in the sharpest manner, and presumably to have destroyed it forever, by absolutely insisting on the purely passive role of the "author" in the mechanics of poetic inspiration and by exposing every type of "active" control through reason, morality or aesthetic considerations as inimical to inspiration”
In 1934, the same year that he published this forceful acclamation of automatism in art, Max Ernst undertook a series of profoundly inventive paintings that have their basis in photographs and illustrations documenting experiments with the flow of air and water around various objects, which caused the current to deviate from its straight course into dynamic, wave-like patterns. In these scientific images of physical forces at work – of energy visualised – Ernst found a fresh way of seeing, in the present work the rhythmic waves can be construed as both eddies of water and strata of earth deposited over time. A white, wedge-shaped object slices into the landscape at the left, possibly derived from a diagram of an aircraft wing in transverse section, showing airflow over its surface. Sailing above this imaginative vision is a larger, more brilliantly coloured bird, this one constituting an alter-ego for the artist himself. Since 1930, Ernst had featured in his work a hallucinatory, avian surrogate known as Loplop, Superior of Birds – ‘a private phantom very much attached and devoted to me’, he explained. Birds, with their ability to pass between the realms of earth and sky, have long served in religious lore as messengers and prophets; Loplop, likewise, functioned as a shamanic guide to Ernst’s imagination and creative process.
Christie’s, London
Oil on canvas
100 x 81 cm (39 3/8 x 31 7/8 in.)
