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Lot Essay
A Maiden, A Widow and a Wife is one of Max Ernst's most important paintings from 1956. It was listed as such by the artist in his autobiographical notes along with the paintings Albertus Magnus now in the Menil Collection, Houston, and Messalina as a Child. As the English titles of these works suggest, all three of these paintings were executed in Sedona, Arizona where Ernst and his wife Dorothea Tanning spent the winter of 1956.
Ernst and Tanning had left the United States to return to Europe in 1953 and had settled in Huimes near Chinon in the Touraine in 1955. Their temporary return to Sedona in the winter of 1956 was as a prelude to an important exhibition of Ernst's work held at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York in the spring of 1957. A Maiden, A Widow and a Wife belongs to a group of works from this period that, like his great painting Father Rhine of 1953 for example, which Ernst painted on the occasion of his first return to Germany since the war, are a fusion of flat flowing form and richly-textured decalcomania reminiscent of his earlier paintings of the red-rock Arizona landscape.
In A Maiden, A Widow and a Wife three distinct decalcomania forms appear isolated against the flat planes and lilting flowing, water-suggestive lines of a landscape-like background to establish a bizarre organic world seemingly populated by strange and complex amoeba-like forms. In many respects an abstraction, created in America at height of the New York School's popularity, this painting is, however, so rooted in nature through the Arp-like shapes of its forms and the myriad of strongly organic detail defined by its decalcomania imprints, that it evokes a clearly figurative, if distinctly otherworldly reality.
As Max Ernst famously said of his art, 'My work is like my conduct: not harmonious in the sense of the classical revolutionaries. Rebellious, heterogeneous, full of contradictions, it is unacceptable to the specialists - in art, in culture, in conduct, in logic, in morality. But it does have the ability to enchant my accomplices: the poets, the pataphysicians, and a few illiterates' (Max Ernst quoted in Max Ernst Dream and Revolution, exh. cat, Lousiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen, 2009, p. 260).
Ernst and Tanning had left the United States to return to Europe in 1953 and had settled in Huimes near Chinon in the Touraine in 1955. Their temporary return to Sedona in the winter of 1956 was as a prelude to an important exhibition of Ernst's work held at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York in the spring of 1957. A Maiden, A Widow and a Wife belongs to a group of works from this period that, like his great painting Father Rhine of 1953 for example, which Ernst painted on the occasion of his first return to Germany since the war, are a fusion of flat flowing form and richly-textured decalcomania reminiscent of his earlier paintings of the red-rock Arizona landscape.
In A Maiden, A Widow and a Wife three distinct decalcomania forms appear isolated against the flat planes and lilting flowing, water-suggestive lines of a landscape-like background to establish a bizarre organic world seemingly populated by strange and complex amoeba-like forms. In many respects an abstraction, created in America at height of the New York School's popularity, this painting is, however, so rooted in nature through the Arp-like shapes of its forms and the myriad of strongly organic detail defined by its decalcomania imprints, that it evokes a clearly figurative, if distinctly otherworldly reality.
As Max Ernst famously said of his art, 'My work is like my conduct: not harmonious in the sense of the classical revolutionaries. Rebellious, heterogeneous, full of contradictions, it is unacceptable to the specialists - in art, in culture, in conduct, in logic, in morality. But it does have the ability to enchant my accomplices: the poets, the pataphysicians, and a few illiterates' (Max Ernst quoted in Max Ernst Dream and Revolution, exh. cat, Lousiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen, 2009, p. 260).