Solo exhibition
Lawrence Rubin·Greenberg Van Doren·Fine Art is pleased to present a selection of paintings and collages by Max Ernst (1891 - 1976), on view from February 1 – February 26, 1999. This exhibition will include over twenty pieces spanning five decades, from Ernst’s earliest forays into Surrealism in the 20s through late work from the 70s. Ernst was an innovator whose constant experimentation with media and imagery created parallel universes informed by contemporary circumstances.
As a founding father of Dada and Surrealism, Max Ernst is one of the seminal figures in the history of modern art. The artist’s early contributions were the subject of The Museum of Modern Art’s 1993 exhibition ‘Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism’. This exhibition will largely begin where the Museum’s exhibition ended, with works from the mid to late 1920s. From 1925 comes an original frottage drawing, L’Arbre, reproduced in Ernst’s 1926 publication Histoire Naturelle. Also featured is the important oil on canvas of a fantastic beast, Hermaphrodite from 1934. Equally visionary is the figure in the 1953 painting Le Sénégal which originally hung as a mural in a Parisian bistro. Ernst’s lifelong fascination with appropriating and transforming existing images is apparent in the 1929/30 collage Le R.P. Dulac Dessalé, one of a series of collages done for his second collage novel Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulu entrer au Carmel, and the hand-colored collages Ou donner la bobine and La vie quotidienne, both from 1971.