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Lot Essay
1953 was the year that marked Max Ernst’s return to Europe after having lived in exile from the continent for over thirteen years. Ernst had revisited Europe briefly in 1951, seeking to make a return, but it was only in 1953 that he and his wife Dorothea Tanning were financially able to leave their home in Sedona, Arizona, and begin a new life together in France.
As a result of this, the year 1953 is distinguished in Ernst’s oeuvre by a series of paintings that mark the artist revisiting many of the central themes of his earlier work. Foremost among these perhaps is Ernst’s large painting dedicated to a reminiscence of his youth in Germany, Vater Rhein (Father Rhine) now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. As with this work, C'est assez beau comme ça is also a painting that revisits one of the central themes of Ernst’s work: the chthonic mystery of the great German forest and the emergence within it of powerful, magical and/or archetypal figures. In this case, two heroic bird-headed personages accompanied by a little bird can be discerned materialising from the vertical scrapings of a grattage ground. This stratified ground articulates a sky-scraper-like forest in a manner that seems to foreshadow the multi-layered, forest-like abstractions that Gerhard Richter would later produce in the 1990s.
As is well known, Ernst had grown up in the town of Brühl on the edge of a forest, whose impenetrable mystery coloured much of his childhood. Later in life he reflected upon the Romantic mystery of the forest and its influence upon him also pointing out his debt to one of his favourite artists, Caspar David Friedrich. ‘The fact is that I've always had Friedrich's paintings and ideas more or less consciously in mind, almost from the day I started painting,’ he said (Ernst quoted in ‘Ein Mittagessen mit Max Ernst’, in Der Monat, vol.13, no. 1950, March 1960, p.70). In C'est assez beau comme ça, the lure and mystery of Friedrich’s forests has become integrated into the grattage medium of the work itself. Here vertically scraped layers of paint and colour form an entire visual arena in which stratified columns of pigment appear to establish a distinctly urban forest into which a family of bird-people has arrived.
As a result of this, the year 1953 is distinguished in Ernst’s oeuvre by a series of paintings that mark the artist revisiting many of the central themes of his earlier work. Foremost among these perhaps is Ernst’s large painting dedicated to a reminiscence of his youth in Germany, Vater Rhein (Father Rhine) now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. As with this work, C'est assez beau comme ça is also a painting that revisits one of the central themes of Ernst’s work: the chthonic mystery of the great German forest and the emergence within it of powerful, magical and/or archetypal figures. In this case, two heroic bird-headed personages accompanied by a little bird can be discerned materialising from the vertical scrapings of a grattage ground. This stratified ground articulates a sky-scraper-like forest in a manner that seems to foreshadow the multi-layered, forest-like abstractions that Gerhard Richter would later produce in the 1990s.
As is well known, Ernst had grown up in the town of Brühl on the edge of a forest, whose impenetrable mystery coloured much of his childhood. Later in life he reflected upon the Romantic mystery of the forest and its influence upon him also pointing out his debt to one of his favourite artists, Caspar David Friedrich. ‘The fact is that I've always had Friedrich's paintings and ideas more or less consciously in mind, almost from the day I started painting,’ he said (Ernst quoted in ‘Ein Mittagessen mit Max Ernst’, in Der Monat, vol.13, no. 1950, March 1960, p.70). In C'est assez beau comme ça, the lure and mystery of Friedrich’s forests has become integrated into the grattage medium of the work itself. Here vertically scraped layers of paint and colour form an entire visual arena in which stratified columns of pigment appear to establish a distinctly urban forest into which a family of bird-people has arrived.