The Mayor Gallery, London
Baron Léon Lambert, Brussels
Private Collection, London
Crane Kalman Gallery, London
Guy Heytens, Monaco (acquired from the above in October 1997. Sold: Sotheby's, London, 28th June 2000, lot 206)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Creuzevault, Max Ernst, 1958
New York, Museum of Modern Art & Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Max Ernst, 1961, no. 135
London, Tate Gallery, Max Ernst, 1961, no. 180
London, Mayor Gallery, Max Ernst, 1973, no. 8

John Russell, Max Ernst, Life and Work, London, 1967, no. 111, illustrated
Werner Spies, Max Ernst: Œuvre-Katalog, Werke 1954-1953, Cologne, 1998, no. 3306, illustrated p. 134

The canvas is unlined. Apart from some very fine lines of craquelure with associated retouching, mainly to the upper left quadrant, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly brighter and fresher in the original.
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In this monumental work, Ernst presents a highly abstracted vision that evaporates into a kaleidoscopic haze. Ernst had returned to Paris from America in the early 1950s with a renewed optimism triggered by Europe's post-war recovery, and the present work can be interpreted in this spirit. When he painted 33 Fillettes partant pour la chasse au papillon blanc in 1957, Ernst employed the technique of grattage that he had created during the early days of the Surrealist movement. But now his paintings exhibited a stylistic duality of composition and disintegration - a suitable metaphor for the times. According to Werner Spies, his mood during this period 'was an ambivalent one, which [Ernst] paraphrased as follows: "From 'The Age of Anxiety' to 'The Childhood of Art' only half a rotation of the orthochromatic wheel is required. Between the Massacre of the Innocents and Stepping Through the Looking-Glass lies an interval merely of one luminous night." ... Ernst remained true to his early decision to strive for a symbolic painting in which open questions, and hence the unfathomable obscurity of existence, took precedence over simplistic positivist explanations and definitive stylistic results' (W. Spies in Max Ernst, A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 252).

Grattage was first developed by Ernst in the mid-1920s as a painterly response to the Surrealist concept of automatism. Grattage is a development in oil paint of frottage, the technique Ernst first employed in pencil and paper: 'One rainy day in 1925 Ernst was first inspired to explore the possibilities of frottage by the look of the grooves in the well-scrubbed floor of his hotel room at the seashore in Pornic. Attracted by the open structure of the grain, he rubbed it, using paper and pencil, and then reinterpreted the results. As he developed the procedure, he used a variety of new elements to start with - stale bread crumbs, grained leather, striated glassware, a straw hat, twine – always transforming the results so that whatever lay beneath his paper experienced a metamorphosis. The characteristics of these objects got lost in the process. Unrefined textures turned into more precise shapes. The grain of wood became the tossing surface of the sea, the scaly pattern of the weave of a straw hat became a cypress tree, the texture of twine became another kind of grain, even a horse. At first Ernst carried out his rubbings with paper and pencil. Soon, however, he began to explore new effects obtained by pursuing grattage, a variant of frottage executed in the medium of painting. In grattage, objects are placed beneath a surface covered with a thin layer of pigment, which the artist scrapes away with a spatula or palette knife... these works are sensual and tactile, with images of rubbed objects that appear as ghostly traces of form' (Werner Spies, 'Nightmare and Deliverence' in Max Ernst: A Retrospective (exhibition cꦑatalogue), New York, 2005, pꦫp. 12-13).

The current work belongs to a series which the artist executed in the 1950s focusing on the imaginative subject of its title (fig. 1). Though Ernst would title his works in a fantastical manner that recalls the automatic writing of the Surrealists, there is an internal logic within his titles that contrasts with the semiotic separations of titles favored by fellow surrealist painter René Magritte. The titles for Ernst grew out of the pictures themselves. A publication of Ernst's writings from 1959 included 'La nudité de la femme est plus sage que l'enseignement du philosophe' ('The nudity of the woman is wiser than the teachings of the philosopher') in which the artist described the process of titling his works. He defined a period after which a work was🍷 completed when he was "haunted by the picture, and this obsession does not leave me until the title appears as if by magic.' 

During the 1950s, geology and astronomy were a central focus for Ernst and this fascination subtly permeates the pulsating forms in the current work. He was drawn to the romanticism of the unknown, a notion that had sparked much of his artistic exploration. Around the time he painted the present work, Ernst published Maximiliana ou l'Exercice illégal de l'astronomie - a series of illustrations in homage to the great nineteenth-century astronomer, Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel. Werner Spies describes this work as indicative of Ernst's complex mentality:  'Maximiliana focuses on the last twenty years of Tempel's life, when he traveled through Europe seeking an observatory in which he could pursue his work, looking into the vast realm of interstellar space in a time dominated by narrow minds. His was a life and a quest marked by war, flight, and exile, a life and a quest whose parallels with Ernst's own are obvious and strong. These parallels offered Ernst an opportunity to create a biography that was also an autobiography. In the spirals and mists of Tempel's nebulae, he discerned the Surrealist's romantic worldview expressed in Breton's term "explosante-fixe." In his homage to Tempel, Ernst drew together and united the threads of Dada protest and the Surrealists' triumph over violence' (W. Spies, ibid., p. 18). Reflective of these rich influences, 33 Fillettes partant pour la chasse au papillon blanc is a brilliant and energetic example of the artist's mature work.

Fig. 1, Max Ernst, 33 Fillettes chassant les papillons, 1958, oil on canvas, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Mad🐼rid