Paysage avec Lune

Ernst fled Europe during the Second World War, settling in Sedona, Arizona, with the artist Dorothea Tanning for nearly ten years. Upon Ernst's return to France in 1953, his paintings developed a particularly dreamlike aura that was marked by a poetic and symbolic vision in the tradition of German Romanticism. Painted in 1964, Paysage avec Lune was one of an increasing number of Ernst's paintings from this period to invoke a mystical sense of cosmology, combining fantasy and poetry by providing a composition that functions as an autonomous solar system. Although he was never an abstract painter by definition, Ernst embraced during this period a certain degree of abstraction and displayed an understanding of its principles in his work. In conjunction with this tendency and perhaps also as a response to the developments in astronomy and space travel at this time, Ernst began to paint pictures of the earth and the heavens, which culminated in the publishing of his visually scintillating book, Maximiliana: The Illegal Practice of Astronomy in 1964. With its stained-glass-like mandala representing the moon, rich coloration and abstraction of the landscape, Paysage avec lune successfully marries his interest in the cosmos with a deep sense of mysticism.