Hanns Hülsberg, Hagen
Galeria Gissi, Turin
Private Collection, Germany
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Torino, Galeria Gissi, Le sillabe mute dell' immaginazione, 12 maestri del surrealismo, 1971

Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Œuvre-Katalog, Werke 1925-1929, Köln, 1976, no. 1008, illustrated p. 112

The canvasboard is sound. There is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. Apart from some very faint paint shrinkage in the lower half of the canvas, this work is in very good original condition. Colours: the reds and greens are much brighter and stronger in the original and there is more colour contrast especially toward the centre of the original work.
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The present work is part of the La Mer series that Ernst executed around the mid-1920s. During the summer of 1925 Ernst worked by the sea at Pornic in Brittany, and it was probably during this trip that inspired the sea imagery. This was a particularly eventful year for the artist: he signed his first commercial contract, which provided him the financial freedom to devote his time entirely to painting and experimentation; he participated in the first Surrealist group exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, and he developed the frottage technique, one of the most consequential inventions of career. Frottage consisted of placing paper over objects such as leaves or uneven surfaces, particularly those with wood graining, and rubbing the sheet over those forms and textures. This technique resulted in fantastical images that ignited the artist's imagination, and involved the element of chance, the key concept in Surrealist thought. This scraping technique reveals the image rather than painting it onto canvas, resulting in random, chance imagery. In this way, Max Ernst was the first to invent a way of applying automatism, previously practiced by the Surrealists in a literary medium, to painting.

Adapting this practice to the medium of oil painting, Ernst would cover the canvas with layers of paint and place it over an uneven surface or an object. He would then scrape the pigment off the surface, and complex patterns would emerge. In the present work, he probably incised the wet oil surface with a comb, creating elegant, undulating lines that evoke the effect of currents and waves on the water surface. Discussing this grattage technique, Werner Spies wrote: 'Max Ernst laid his canvas over various objects with raised textures - pieces of wood and string, grates, textured glass panes - and, drawing the paint over them with a palette knife, brought forth the most vivid effects. In the course of the following years - years which William Rubin has called the 'heroic epoch of Surrealist painting' - this technique, known as grattage, led to astonishingly innovative imagery. The pictures became more abstract in effect, their formats larger. The dramatic force of these paintings, the richness of their scintillating colour, made them high points of imaginative Surrealist art in the late 1920s' (W. Spies, Max Ernst. A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 148).