Jeune homme traversant une rivière prenant par la main une jeune fille et en bousculant une autre

‘A human being drifts through time like an iceberg, only partly floating above the level of the consciousness. It is the aim of the Surréaliste, whether a painter or as poet, to try and realise some of the dimensions and characteristics of his submerged being’ - Herbert Read

‘Max Ernst died on August 1, 1914. He came back to life on November 11, 1918, as a young man who wanted to be a magician and to find the myth of his era’ - Max Ernst

‘Wherever man hopes to take the mysteries of nature by surprise, he finds only his own image reflected in the mirror. No diver knows, before he goes down, what he is going to bring up’ - Max Ernst

Among the very earliest works that Max Ernst made using his revolutionary grattage technique in 1927, Jeune homme traversant une rivière prenant par la main une jeune fille et en bousculant une autre (Young man crossing a river taking one girl by the hand and jostling another) is a richly atmospheric and prophetic vision. Applying the logic of frottage to paint, Ernst scraped pigment across canvas laid over a textural surface to conjure organic, semi-automatic forms, which he defined and enhanced with subsequent hand-painting. The present work’s three characters march across a churning, honeycombed river, silhouetted against a yellow-lit pale blue sky. The man pulls one girl behind him, while lifting his leg to shove another girl in front. Twining strokes of red, yellow and green highlight muscular contours within their dark, frieze-like outlines. Their eyes are blank apertures onto the sky. This image of marauding and barbarism is closely related to works like La horde (Spies, no. 1132; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and La famille nombreuse (Spies, no. 1129; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) of the same year: improvising on the reliefs impressed onto his canvas, Ernst dredged up nightmarish memories of the First World War from his subconscious. His post-War anxieties manifested as primordial, mythic marauders resurrecting themselves from the Flanders mud. In retrospect, these craggy, sinuous presences are premonitory of the even greater disaster that would build in Europe over the next decade. Like the glorious poisoned paradises of Ernst’s ‘forests’, the grattage paintings were forged through a unique meeting of the artist’s internal emotional landscape and the ‘found’ material reality taken from the surfaces he used. Intricate, primal and menacingly beautiful, the present work is a darkly Romantic dream of the end of civilisation.

Responding to the suggestive forms on his relief-imprinted canvas, Ernst developed his grattage compositions through a blend of chance and design. Jeune homme traversant une rivière prenant par la main une jeune fille et en bousculant une autre was one of the first he made using this method, conceived during the winter of 1927 when he was staying in the French Alpine town of Megève. As he explained, ‘these medium-format pictures … were the first specimens of a new technique akin to frottage. It consisted of first preparing a canvas with light colours, placing it on an uneven surface (a piece of string, for instance) and then causing lines in transparency to appear on it with the aid of a bricklayer’s trowel smeared with darker colours. Simplicity itself! But in this optical game one still has to know how to find signs leading to unforeseen interpretations’ (M. Ernst, ‘1927: A piece of string found on my table’, in E. Quinn, ed., Max Ernst, London, 1977, p. 138). Beyond the formal radicalism of this technique – just one of many non-traditional approaches he would adopt in his quest to go au-delà de la peinture, or ‘beyond painting’ – the ‘unforeseen interpretations’ Ernst found through frottage and grattage imbued his works with a rich ambivalence and psychological density. Neither working to represent nature nor presenting found objects as unadorned fact, he invented a hybrid mode that derived its essential forms from nature – wood-grain, twine, woven straw, rough bark – while also plumbing the hidden depths of his own interiority. True to the Surrealist principle of automatism, the images he lit upon were often multiple, ambiguous or contradictory, and alive with the hallucinatory, dream-like edge of divination. ‘Wherever man hopes to take the mysteries of nature by surprise,’ Ernst said, ‘he finds only his own image reflected in the mirror. No diver knows, before he goes down, what he is going to bring up’ (M. Ernst, quoted in ‘Où va la peinture? Conversation avec Max Ernst’, Commune: Revue littéraire de la culture, 2 : 21, May 1935, pp. 956-57).

Even as a child, Ernst had mixed feelings towards the forest that surrounded his home in Brühl. He recalled a dual sensation of ‘delight and oppression, and what the Romantics called “emotion in the face of nature.” The wonderful joy of breathing freely in an open space, yet at the same time distress at being hemmed in on all sides by hostile trees. Inside and outside, free and captive, at one and the same time’ (Ernst, quoted in E. Quinn, ed., Max Ernst, London, 1977, p. 142). This ambiguity is palpable in the present work, whose filigree of textures is both enticing and unnerving, and suggestive at once of forest, reef, rocky or swampy terrain, swirling liquid or even gaseous substances. The mutable, heraldic figures are uncanny, appearing like no beings on earth even as they are induced by structures inherent to natural matter. Monstrous faces, bodies and dangerous growths shift in and out of focus. Ernst himself is directly implicated in this fantastical twilight zone of imagination; the bird-like head of the pillaging jeune homme seems to anticipate the arrival of his avian alter-ego Loplop, who would first appear in his collage-novel of 1929, La femme 100 têtes. Such mercurial guises were important to Ernst, who summarised his experience of the First World War as one of death and rebirth. ‘Max Ernst died on August 1, 1914. He came back to life on November 11, 1918, as a young man who wanted to be a magician and to find the myth of his era’ (M. Ernst, ‘Some Data on the Youth of M. E. as Told by Himself’, View, 2nd Series, No. 1, April 1942, p. 30). The present painting sees him using that divinatory magic to bring to light the monsters that stalked his memories, while also creating a picture of the collective unconscious of his time: the ‘myth of his era’, found through an unprecedented approach to the interface between painting, the subconscious and the physical world.