Galerie Thomas, Munich
Galerie Arditti, Paris
Acquired circa the early 2000s

Werner Spies, Sigrid & Günter Metken & Jürgen Pech, Max Ernst Werke 1964-1969, Cologne, 2007, no. 4049, illustrated p. 104

The panel is sound and there are no traces of retouching under UV. The collage elements are securely attached. This work is in very good condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The following seven lots are all from the same Important North American Collection. Featuring exceptional examples by Renoir, Degas, Monet, Ernst, Picasso and Miró, there is no doubt that this private collection has been assembled by connoisseurs with a most discriminating eye for quality. The works were acquired with great patience and rigor over a twenty-year period beginning in the late 1980s, and the superb range that the collection embodies—from the greatest names of Impressionism to Picasso (surely a movement in his own right) to Surrealism—makes this a highly sophisticated and interesting offering. One of the many highlights of the group is the extraordinary Monet Nymphéas oil, dating from 1917-1919 (lot 129), the likes of which are so rarely available on the market today; the artist’s lily pond is surely amongst the very most coveted and iconic of subjects, not only within the sphere of Impressionist Art but across any collecting category. Monet’s later lily pond works, of which this picture is an excellent example, have been the subject of immense focus and reevaluation in recent years, presented by art historians as a hugely significant step in the development toward modernity and abstraction, prefiguring even the art of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s. 

In addition to these seven works being offered as highlights of this sale, the collection also includes a very striking 1921 Picasso Verre et fruits offe🍰red in Sotheby's Impressionist & M♏odern Art Evening Sale on May 5, 2015.

A highly abstracted depiction of a seventeenth century portrait inspired by the great master Diego Velasquez is the subject of Ernst’s richly painted composition from 1965. Hommage à Velasquez was completed following Ernst’s return to France after a decade-long hiatus in Arizona with his wife Dorothea Tanning, the well-known artist and writer. The fantastic quality and opulence of color Ernst witnessed in the mountains of the American West during the 1940s and 1950s left a strong impression, and he continued to incorporate the aesthetic of desert moonrises and sunsets in the compositions completed after he returned to France. The works created during these years are representative of the artist’s renewed optimism triggered by Europe’s post-war recovery. The present work with its beautifully hued coloring can be interpreted in this spirit.

In this richly colored composition, Ernst employed the technique of grattage, a procedure he created during the early days of the Surrealist movement. Grattage was first developed by Ernst in the mid-1920s as a painterly response to the Surrealist concept of automatism. Grattage is the oil paint version of frottage, a technique Ernst first employed in his works on paper. This processes is most evident in the present composition in the sharp edges of the figure’s torso where the palette knife had smoothed and scraped the wet paint. This procedure revealed a delineating color palette evidenced in the lighter blues reveled below the top layer of pigment. Acknowledging the origin of these techniques, Werner Spies wrote, "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... 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 catalogue), New York, 2005, pp. 12-13).

In addition to Ernst’s painterly techniques, he frequently incorporated collage and three-dimensional materials into his compositions. Jürgen Pech notes, “Beginning with his Dada period in Cologne, Ernst regularly experimented with three-dimensional material, employing the indirect working method and re-interpretative point of view found in his oeuvre as a whole. In the process, he drew on everyday objects. Wooden blocks and cotton reels, hat-blocking forms and lathed bars from stair gates are employed to produce relief montages and assemblages of objects depicting anthropomorphic figures. Ernst employed the penetration and accumulation of forms as the working principles for his additive constructions” (Jürgen Pech, Max Ernst Retrospective, Ostfildern, 2013, p. 295). As is the case for the present work, Ernst integrated three-dimensional material in the form of a petite square wood🉐 relief in the lower left of the composition, and an intricate paper cut-out resembling a mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century costume ruff.