Le bijoutier du ciel

1954 was a seminal year for the Max Ernst. He and his wife Dorothea Tanning had returned to France the previous year, having spent a decade living in Arizona. Awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale of 1954, the artist now gained major public recognition and a series of important retrospective exhibitions followed. Painted during this momentous period, Le bijoutier du ciel was exhibited at Ernst’s solo show of 1955, held at the prestigious Galerie Beyeler in Basel.

It was after his return to Europe that Ernst’s paintings began to exhibit more decorative qualities, apparent in the fractured prismatic planes, varied textures and shimmering surface of Le bijoutier du ciel. Layer upon layer of paint has been applied and then partially scraped off in a grattage-like painterly technique, creating an effect of translucency, revealing grains and patterns which served as stimuli for Ernst’s ever-fertile imagination. As with a number of paintings executed during the mid-to-late 1950s, enigmatic animal forms appear alongside humanoid features to create a mysterious portrait, the ‘jeweller of the sky’ as the title indicates. In this multi-faceted, jewel-like astral landscape, the central form and that to right of it are suggestive of birds – a perennial motif in Ernst’s work, birds played a profound role in his imagination, representing liberty, spiritual freedom and often symbolizing the artist himself.

The more central and larger bird-like form is also evocative of a radiant celestial body, the ‘eye’ like a glowing sun surrounded by curving lines which suggest stellar motion. It was during this period that Ernst became increasingly concerned with depicting and interpreting the cosmos. The artist’s celestial landscapes, such as Le bijoutier du ciel, spoke to the same sense of visionary imagination he had explored in his mountainous landscapes, fantastical forests and primordial rock formations of the preceding years in Arizona. ‘When you walk through the woods keeping your eyes fixed on the ground, you will doubtless discover many wonderful, miraculous things,’ Ernst explained. ‘But when you suddenly look upwards into the sky, you are overcome by the revelation of another, equally miraculous world. Over the past century the significance of the suns, moons, constellations, nebulae, galaxies and all of outer space beyond the terrestrial zone has increasingly entered human consciousness, as it has taken root in my own work and will very probably remain there’ (Ernst, quoted in W. spies, 'An Aesthetics of Detachment,’ in W. Spies, ed., Max Ernst: A Retrospective, exh. cat., London, 1991, p. 10).