Star struck

Max Ernst (1891-1976) was a traveller. History batted him about the globe like a tennis ball. From place to place he wandered, from country to country, technique to technique, woman to woman. Born near Cologne in 1891, he was the perfect age to be conscripted into the German infantry when World War I broke out, and served first on the Western Front, then on the Eastern. World War II saw him escaping across the Atlantic from Paris to New York, where he arrived in 1941, but couldn’t settle. Having landed in Manhattan, on the glitzy East Coast, he spent his best American years in Sedona, Arizona, on the wild and western side of the Great Plains. Like the star-fuelled comet that he went on to paint, Ernst was always on the move.

His art was just as restless. Looking through the fidgety oeuvre he produced in a career that spanned 70 years, it is impossible to trace a route map. Has any indisputably important artist changed styles, approaches, materials and methods as freely as Ernst? I don’t think so. He painted, he sculpted, he made films and mounted performances, wrote books, took photographs and produced images in a dizzying array of manners.

Seeking always to blindside his own creativity, his passion for technical experiment saw him rubbing, scraping, squeezing and tracing, in frottages, grattages, décollages and collages. Even in the small selection of works coming up for auction at Bonhams in The Mind’s Eye: Surrealist Sale, it’s clear that Ernst was a questing artist who sought always to surprise himself. Which brings us to his women. With his piercing blue eyes, his Buddhistic skinniness and predatory German intelligence, Ernst never had any difficulty finding women.

The difficulty came with keeping them. Married four times, he managed also to involve himself in some of surrealism’s most uneasy affairs.

Max Ernst (1891-1976) Apaisement bronze with a green patina 67.5cm (26½in) high Estimate: £70,000 - 100,000 ($100,000 - 140,000)

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning

The ménage à trois he formed with Paul Éluard and his wife Gala was one of the most talked about relationships of the Parisian 1930s. The unfortunate English surrealist Leonora Carrington, 20 years his junior, encountered him at a party in London in 1937 and was terminally dazzled. Ernst left his wife for her, and then left Carrington in turn for Peggy Guggenheim, who had helped him escape from France to America, and whom he also married.

A few months later, he met Dorothea Tanning; a week after that, moved in with her. It was Peggy Guggenheim who inadvertently brought them together by asking Ernst to find some female artists for a show at her Art of This Century gallery, called 31 Women. Guggenheim later quipped she wished it had been 30.

Tanning was also married and had just turned 30. Ernst was 50. When he got to her studio, he found she’d completed only two paintings in her fledgling psychosurrealist career. One of them was an unsettling selfportrait in which she stands in an empty room with a pet dragon at her feet, dressed in a weird surrealist costume made of silks and seaweed that exposed her breasts. The work didn’t have a title. Ernst christened it Birthday.

Tanning was a chess player. So was he. They played. It got intimate. And that was that. She stayed with him till his death, and gave him the best years of her life. Her 30-year relationship with him was a meeting of soulmates and proved that if you throw enough mud at a window, one piece will eventually stick.

Max Ernst (1891-1976) Comète (Painted in 1951) oil on canvas 61.2 x 101.5cm (24⅛ x 39in) Estimate: £120,000 - 180,000 ($170,000 - 250,000)

But it wasn’t until after his death that her own career was finally able to take off. The Tanning retrospective at Tate Modern in 2019 was one of the artistic highlights of the year. After his death, she remembered the way he overshadowed her in a poignant poem:

Many years ago today
I took a husband tenderly.
This simple human gentle act
Seen as a hard decisive fact
By all who dote on category.
Did stain my work indelibly?
I don’t know why that is
For it has not stained his

In 1949, Ernst, who had been having trouble with his American papers, returned to France with Tanning, and from 1953 they were based there. The works that are coming up at Bonhams were in her personal collection and are, therefore, charged with an intimate importance. It was in France that he made the sculptures in the sale, notably La Tourangelle, originally conceived as a trophy for the winner of the Short Film Festival held in Tours from 1960 to 1962. After his death, Tanning kept it in her home. As with so much of Ernst’s post-war sculpture, La Tourangelle can be imagined as the offspring of a union between a chess piece and a native American totem of the kind Ernst had encountered frequently in Sedona.

Another reason for moving there was the clear and beautiful night sky that loomed above the Arizona desert. Ernst had been conspicuously interested in astronomy since the 1920s. Many of his surrealist works bear elusive, astronomical titles – Lunar Asparagus, Moonmad, The Phases of the Night – and chief among his astronomical heroes was a self-taught German skywatcher called Ernst Wilhelm Tempel (1821-1889).

Tempel was a prolific discoverer of comets, perhaps the most prolific there has ever been. In all, he found 21 of them, including Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, now known to be the parent body of the Leonid meteor shower, and 9P/Tempel, the target of the NASA probe Deep Impact in 2005. He even had a crater on the moon named after him.

Max Ernst (1891-1976) La Tourangelle (aussi Trophée de Tours) Polished brass 26.3cm (10in) high Estimate: £40,000 - 60,000 ($55,000 - 85,000)

Max Ernst (1891-1976) De la terre à la lune (Executed in 1966) collage on paper 78.7 x 57.1cm (31 x 22½in) Estimate: £35,000 - 55,000 ($50,000 - 75,000)

Max Ernst (1891-1976) L’œil du peintre (Executed in 1965) oil and collage on paper 78.1 x 57.2cm (30¾ x 22½in) Estimate: £50,000 - 70,000 ($70,000 - 100,000)

Tempel’s methods fascinated Ernst. He made frequent reference to them in his art. “The significance of the sun, moons, constellations, nebulae, galaxies and space… has steadily taken root during the last century in my work”, he wrote in explanation. The process reached an extraordinary conclusion in 1964 when he produced an ambitious illustrated book called Maximiliana: the illegal practice of astronomy: hommage à Dorothea Tanning.

Maximiliana was the name of a planetoid discovered by Tempel in 1861, and named after Maximilian II, king of Bavaria. For Ernst, it formed a cosmic pattern that left him determined to play a part.

There was another reason he was interested in Tempel. As an amateur, Temple was notorious for using the most basic equipment to discover his comets. “It is not great telescopes that make great astonomers,” he quipped. It was a view that chimed perfectly with Ernst’s own opinions about the importance of observation. As a child, whenever he was asked what he most enjoyed doing, he always replied: “Looking.”

The painting called La Comète – made in 1951, soon after his return to France from the United States – never left his personal collection, and later passed to Tanning. In the swirls of a night sky, a peripatetic comet, arrived from somewhere far away, looms above an undulating desert. The comet has human features: two eyes, a nose, and a twisty mouth.

Is that a smile playing on its face? I reckon it is. Should we see it, perhaps, as some kind of self-portrait? I reckon we should.

Waldemar Januszczak writes for The Sunday Times.