Max Ernst

Alongside Picasso, Miró, Matisse and Kelly, the great ‘painter-sculptors’ in the Fondation Beyeler also include Max Ernst, three of whose sculptures are represented in the collection. The earliest of these is the bronze Oiseau-tête (Bird-head), which consists of a flat face on ‘legs’ – a cephalopod, in other words. Projecting from its forehead is the head of a bird with an open beak. The work resembles a bizarre hybrid creature from the realm of fantasy that has suddenly materialized in front of us. Ernst was acquainted with such visitors from ‘beyond’ and frequently kept company with a bird figure called Loplop, which he described as his ‘private phantom’. In combining a flat base panel with a face in low relief and a three-dimensional bird’s head, Oiseau-tête describes the transition from the flat surface of the picture to the spatial volume of sculpture and thereby highlights the process by which the creature assumes increasing form.

Moonmad was created in 1944 in America, following Ernst’s escape into exile, and was originally modelled in plaster. A number of years later it was then cast in bronze. The figure is made up of forms that show the moon in various phases. The surreally somnambulant state of ‘moon madness’ thus becomes a figuration that embodies this mental disposition.

Naissance d’une galaxie (Birth of a galaxy) was created in the year of the first moon landing. Man had conquered the lunar symbol of the yearnings of Romanticism (a cultural epoch so important for Ernst) and found only empty, rocky silence. As if by way of a replacement, Ernst allows a new galaxy, its circular disc patterned with dots, to arise out of the nebula of primeval forms inhabiting the lower border of the picture. This galaxy is located in the imagination – and in the picture seen here. Entirely in keeping with Ernst’s fantastical natural history, the eternal, ethereal realm and the here and now of artistic invention converge in the moment of this picture.