.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Golden Eye is one of a sequence of decalcomania-based paintings from 1948 in which Max Ernst depicts a radiant sunlit flower shining a light through a forest landscape to reveal strange, monstrous creatures emerging from the patterns of its dense foliage. Figures emerging from or disappearing into the dark impenetrable forest were ones that had populated Ernst’s art from its beginnings in the 1920s. As a child Ernst had grown up next to a forest and imagined the mysterious creatures that lived therein. In the 1940s a combination of his experiments with decalcomania and memories of the jungles of Indo-China were to bring this feature of his work to the fore.
Ernst had first experimented with decalcomania during his internment by the Vichy government in France in 1940, but it was during his years in America that the technique came to dominate the creation of some of his greatest works. First employed by Óscar Domínguez in 1935, decalcomania involves the creation of a myriad of fractal-like coloured forms by smearing thinned paint onto the canvas and then pressing onto it with a flat plane such as a sheet of glass. The resulting forms and colour variations encourage unconscious visions of new forms to take place within the painter’s mind. Ernst then took this process a stage further by transforming these suggestive patterns into clearly defined images of fantastic imaginary creatures that are themselves often, as in this work, shown to be in the process of transforming from vegetable into animal life.
Processes of metamorphosis and of bizarre transformation, along with the idea of a hidden, or monstrous nature lying beneath the surfaces of civilization and human consciousness were all concepts that appealed greatly to the Surrealists throughout the 1930s. From mythical monsters such as the Minotaur to the alien microcosmic nature of the insect world with its murderous sexual practices of creatures like the praying mantis, fascinated the Surrealists who saw in such things a natural mirror to their own attempts at mining the unconscious mind.
Golden Eye was painted in Sedona, Arizona in 1948 where once again Ernst had found himself living in a house that looked out onto a magnificent forest-like wall of imagery in the form of the startling rock formations of a landscape that recalled for him the rocks of the Ardèche region in France where he had spent much of the 1930s. Looking in part like an illuminated detail from his great 1944 masterpiece L’oeil du silence (now in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis), Golden Eye, (along with at least two other paintings entitled Halleluiah from 1948), belongs to a sequence of animated forest paintings from this period. In almost all of these works the illuminating light of a sun-like eye or flower is shown to be shining on the forest in such a way as to reveal, or perhaps bring to life, a mysterious otherworldly creature who appears at the bottom of each painting with beady eyes, claw-like horns, and an apparently friendly face.
Ernst had first experimented with decalcomania during his internment by the Vichy government in France in 1940, but it was during his years in America that the technique came to dominate the creation of some of his greatest works. First employed by Óscar Domínguez in 1935, decalcomania involves the creation of a myriad of fractal-like coloured forms by smearing thinned paint onto the canvas and then pressing onto it with a flat plane such as a sheet of glass. The resulting forms and colour variations encourage unconscious visions of new forms to take place within the painter’s mind. Ernst then took this process a stage further by transforming these suggestive patterns into clearly defined images of fantastic imaginary creatures that are themselves often, as in this work, shown to be in the process of transforming from vegetable into animal life.
Processes of metamorphosis and of bizarre transformation, along with the idea of a hidden, or monstrous nature lying beneath the surfaces of civilization and human consciousness were all concepts that appealed greatly to the Surrealists throughout the 1930s. From mythical monsters such as the Minotaur to the alien microcosmic nature of the insect world with its murderous sexual practices of creatures like the praying mantis, fascinated the Surrealists who saw in such things a natural mirror to their own attempts at mining the unconscious mind.
Golden Eye was painted in Sedona, Arizona in 1948 where once again Ernst had found himself living in a house that looked out onto a magnificent forest-like wall of imagery in the form of the startling rock formations of a landscape that recalled for him the rocks of the Ardèche region in France where he had spent much of the 1930s. Looking in part like an illuminated detail from his great 1944 masterpiece L’oeil du silence (now in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis), Golden Eye, (along with at least two other paintings entitled Halleluiah from 1948), belongs to a sequence of animated forest paintings from this period. In almost all of these works the illuminating light of a sun-like eye or flower is shown to be shining on the forest in such a way as to reveal, or perhaps bring to life, a mysterious otherworldly creature who appears at the bottom of each painting with beady eyes, claw-like horns, and an apparently friendly face.