Private Collection, Italy (and sold: Sotheby's, London, June 26, 1985, lot 276)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Ernst painted Arizona during the creative height of his years in the United States. Informed by his trips through the American Southwest, his compositions oscillated between countryside landscapes and simplified horizontal bands of color. Here Ernst removes the ever-present orb from these years and focuses instead on a deeply imaginative look at the interplay of hills and valleys. Though there are clear delineations of space, Ernst complicates the figuration with passages of randomized decalcomania and grattage in the interstices. 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, 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... 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).

The influence of the expansive and geologically complex Southwestern landscape informs Arizona. The artist spent ample time in Arizona with his partner Dorothea Tanning, moving to Sedona in 1946. Ernst was thrilled to find that the fantastical landscapes he had imagined in his works of the 1920s and 30s were echoed in actuality in Arizona. Discussing the significant inspiration of these surroundings for Ernst, John Russell wrote: "Arizona offered isolation, a celestial climate, a way of life that was both economical and free from suburban constraints. It offered the inspiration of supreme, natural beauty...  Few things are more stirring than the fantastic forms and the irrational colouring of the mountains around Sedona. In the mid-1940s life and landscape in that region had an uncorrupted quality which made of Arizona a Promised Land in which a new life could be begun and an old one discarded... and although Max Ernst had never been a landscape painter, in the ordinary sense, it was deeply moving for him to come upon a landscape which had precisely the visionary quality that he had sought for on canvas" (John Russell, Max Ernst: Life and Work, New York, 1967, p. 140).