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Lot Essay
Max Ernst executed Orobas in the first months of 1942 when he was living in New York, having managed to escape war-torn Europe just the previous summer. This dystopian, fantastical scene resonates with the climate of war, political instability and turmoil of the time. As Arthur Miller wrote on the occasion of the artist's first solo exhibition in America that featured Orobas alongside such works as Napoleon in the Wilderness (1941) (The Museum of Modern of Art, New York) and The Antipope (1941-2) (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), 'in the figures and landscapes employed by Max Ernst we see the vestigial traces of a suprasensual world which, like our own sorry world, appears to be on the brink of collapse' (H. Miller, 'Another Bright Messenger', View, series II, no. 1, April 1942, p. 17).
The petrified forests, jungle landscapes and mysterious citadels that Ernst had painted in the 1920s and 1930s find echoes in the strange world of Orobas. Here, however, these primeval-like forms were created through the transfer technique of decalcomania. This was a process first used by the Surrealist artist Oscar Dominguez in 1936 and which Ernst began to exploit in the late 1930s. Spreading diluted oil paint over parts of the canvas, Ernst would then press a smooth surface such as glass or sheet of paper against it. When this was lifted, revealing the imprint of mottled paint, Ernst would manipulate and embellish the shapes and forms which took on the appearance of calcified, porous landscapes haunted with emerging, organic creatures.
In this oneiric realm, a demonic winged figure - presumably the titular Orobas - emerges from a blood-red coloured pool. At the edge of this pool, a large bird of prey, seeming almost to grow out of the tufa-like rock itself, perches in front of a threatening beast. In some respects, this painting may be considered as a contrasting pendant piece to his Swampangel of 1940 (Fondation Beyeler, Basel) where the figure of an 'angelic' woman hovers beside a pool of brightly coloured water. The title Orobas comes from The Lesser Key of Solomon, a book of demonology, where he is one of the fallen angels described as 'a great and Mighty Prince ... His Office is to discover all things Past, Present, and to Come ... He giveth True Answers of Divinity, and of the Creation of the World. He is very faithful unto the Exorcist, and will not suffer him to be tempted of any Spirit' (A. Crowley, ed., The Book of the Goetia of the Solomon The King, 1904, p. 29). Orobas was a figure that morphed from a horse into the image of man, an appropriate subject for Ernst's paintings where, he explained, 'everything [there] is anthropomorphic' (Ernst, quoted in W. Spies, 'Max Ernst in America: "Vox Angelica"', in W. Spies & S. Rewald, Max Ernst: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 2005, p. 71). In this decaying, awe-inspiring landscape, surmounted by a somewhat sinister, silhouetted structure, it is the demon Orobas who reflects the timelessness of the surrounding universe, synthesising past, present and future.
The petrified forests, jungle landscapes and mysterious citadels that Ernst had painted in the 1920s and 1930s find echoes in the strange world of Orobas. Here, however, these primeval-like forms were created through the transfer technique of decalcomania. This was a process first used by the Surrealist artist Oscar Dominguez in 1936 and which Ernst began to exploit in the late 1930s. Spreading diluted oil paint over parts of the canvas, Ernst would then press a smooth surface such as glass or sheet of paper against it. When this was lifted, revealing the imprint of mottled paint, Ernst would manipulate and embellish the shapes and forms which took on the appearance of calcified, porous landscapes haunted with emerging, organic creatures.
In this oneiric realm, a demonic winged figure - presumably the titular Orobas - emerges from a blood-red coloured pool. At the edge of this pool, a large bird of prey, seeming almost to grow out of the tufa-like rock itself, perches in front of a threatening beast. In some respects, this painting may be considered as a contrasting pendant piece to his Swampangel of 1940 (Fondation Beyeler, Basel) where the figure of an 'angelic' woman hovers beside a pool of brightly coloured water. The title Orobas comes from The Lesser Key of Solomon, a book of demonology, where he is one of the fallen angels described as 'a great and Mighty Prince ... His Office is to discover all things Past, Present, and to Come ... He giveth True Answers of Divinity, and of the Creation of the World. He is very faithful unto the Exorcist, and will not suffer him to be tempted of any Spirit' (A. Crowley, ed., The Book of the Goetia of the Solomon The King, 1904, p. 29). Orobas was a figure that morphed from a horse into the image of man, an appropriate subject for Ernst's paintings where, he explained, 'everything [there] is anthropomorphic' (Ernst, quoted in W. Spies, 'Max Ernst in America: "Vox Angelica"', in W. Spies & S. Rewald, Max Ernst: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 2005, p. 71). In this decaying, awe-inspiring landscape, surmounted by a somewhat sinister, silhouetted structure, it is the demon Orobas who reflects the timelessness of the surrounding universe, synthesising past, present and future.