Galleria Cairola, Milan
Brook Street Gallery, London
Estate of John Perry Cohn, Santa Barbara (sale: Sotheby's, New York, 3rd November 2005, lot 332)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum of Art, 1979-81 (on loan)

Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Oeuvre-Katalog, Werke 1906-1925, Houston, 1975, no. 289, illustrated p. 146

The board is stable and laid down on canvas. There is a 3cm. square area of retouching to the extreme top left corner, several intermittent spots of retouching throughout the centre right, towards the bottom right corner and intermittent spots of retouching to the animal in the lower centre. There appear to be old retouchings at intervals throughout but a thick varnish does not allow the UV light to fully penetrate. There is a light ridge running parallel to the top left edge, probably intrinsic to the medium. This work appears to be in fair condition. Colours: Overall a reasonably accurate representation in the catalogue illustration.
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Shortly after his return from military service during World War I, Ernst was swept up in Dadaism, becoming an active member of the Cologne branch of this nihilistic and reactionary movement. This work is a rare oil from this period, painted during the early stage of his involvement with Dada before he started exploring more diverse media in late 1919. Ernst here imbues an otherwise mundane scene with impressions of war that he had no doubt been subject to. With a deep and saturated palette and a Cubist-inspired technique, Ernst anthropomorphizes his subjects and the work becomes an outlet for his emotional response to the European situation.

Pferd und kühe also reveals the artist's tendency towards the effects of collage. The stiff figures in the foreground seem almost artificially imposed upon their background and an essence of collage is conveyed. Collage was to become an important medium for Ernst, offering an important realm of possibility to his oeuvre. Already in this early period he is experimenting with themes inherent to the medium. As Werner Spies writes, "Encountering Max Ernst's work, we soon realize that it is impossible to categorize his extremely diverse oeuvre in terms of style. Yet we find in everything he did a single overriding artistic concept: that of the collage. Illustrations of objects and processes that he discovered in publications from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided material he could recycle in the form of collages... Starting in 1919 he gradually felt his way into a realm he characterized as 'au-delà de la peinture,' or 'beyond painting.' Among these efforts created immediately after his return from service in World War I are monotypes, photomontages, paintings that combine Cubist and grotesque elements..." (Werner Spies, "Nightmare and Deliverance," Max Ernst: A Retrospective (exhi🏅bition catalogue), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nꦡew York, 2005, p. 3).