Hallucination

The day will come when a forest, until then the friend of dissipation, will decide to frequent only well-behaved places, macadamized roads, and Sunday strollers. She will live on pickled newspapers. Overcome by virtue, she will correct the bad habits of her youth. She will become geometric, conscientious, dutiful, grammatical, judicial, pastoral, ecclesiastical, constructivist and republican...It will be a bore. Will the weather be fine? Of course! We'll go on a presidential hunt.' (Max Ernst, quoted in John Russell, Max Ernst, London, 1967, p. 113).

So wrote Max Ernst in Minotaure in May 1934 in response to the question, 'What will be the death of forests? In this painting from the same year, Ernst has seemingly fused the strange organic world of the forest and the cold rationalism of man-made geometric forms in a work appropriately entitled Hallucination. Set against a high dark and sharply perspectival background owing much to the strangely angled townscapes and metaphysical constructions of Giorgio de Chirico's finest work, Ernst presents a collation of brilliantly coloured forms, part astral flowers, part seed-pods or mysterious planets, seemingly floating over this hard rational 'interior landscape' and casting dark shadows. Echoing also to some extent the bizarre alien landscapes with their high horizon lines that fellow Surrealists Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali had begun to paint in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in this work Ernst's coquillage flowers and other bizarre organic forms seem like planetary apparitions in the heavens to articulate the space, bringing magic, order and meaning to this otherwise bleak and severe sharp-edged geometric landscape.

In pictorial terms Ernst's shell/flowers were the unconscious product of a grattage-like painterly technique of scraping the painted surface of the canvas with a knife to expose grains and patterns that served as prompts for Ernst's ever-fertile imagination and creativity. At the same time the overt prettiness of these shell/flowers, their deliberate and undeniable charm and the romanticism of the weird landscapes and gardens that these forms often generated in Ernst's art were originally seen by the artist as a reflection of the deep contentment in his personal life.' Flowers appear' he wrote in his biographical notes for the year 1928 when these images first appeared in his work, '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' (Max Ernst, 'Biographical Notes: Tissue of Truth, Tissue of Lies' quoted in exh. cat., Max Ernst, Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 303).

In contrast to the easy beauty of his earlier coquillage paintings, in this work, like Interieur et paysage, a similar painting made at this time, Ernst has employed the grattage-coquillage technique to generate a strange sense of hallucinatory strangeness, mystery and unease. Set in direct contrast to the hard geometry and almost militaristic-looking background, this painting seems to invoke a sense of foreboding which, like the resurrection in his work of his Barbarian hordes at this time, appears to reflect the artist's growing unease about the Fascist menace then domination his homeland. A powerful study in contrasts therefore, with its radiant fossilized-looking forms drifting through a severe landscape of ominous angles and sombre shadows, Hallucination is a dreamscape that, as in the work of de Chirico, Dali and Tanguy, gives a unique insight into the artist's mind during this tempestuous decade.