Executed at the apogee of his creative output and critical success, La Terre est une femme from 1963 is a superlative test.mes nt to Max Ernst’s fantastical and inventive personal mythology. Synthesizing the vivid memories of his recent exile with the most enduring subjects from his visual universe of images, Ernst underscores his technical sophistication and mastery of palette. Conveying his modern, and post-modern, artistic sensibility, La Terre est une femme evinces Ernst’s unrelenting desire to further the boundaries of the medium of painting.

La Terre est une femme was painted after Ernst returned to Paris in 1953 following an intermittent, decade-long hiatus in Arizona with Dorothea Tanning. This sojourn compelled Ernst to incorporate the aesthetic of desert moonrises and sunsets in the compositions completed after he returned to France. John Russell elaborates, "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 coloring of the mountains around Sedona…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). The supernatural atmosphere and the opulence of color witnessed there are beautifully invoked in the sumptuous hues of the present work.

Ernst was enthralled by the romanticism of the unknown, a notion that had sparked much of his and other Surrealists’ artistic explorations (see fig. 1), and his lifelong fascination with astronomy reached its zenith during these years. His execution of La Terre est une femme coincided with his work on 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 t.mes 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’” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Max Ernst: A Retrospective 2005, p. 18).

As typified by the enigmatic celestial universe of La Terre est une femme, the intricate shapes and patterns that Ernst developed for these illustrations (see fig. 4) were combined with recurring features of his earliest works. The prismatic orb of the present painting, evocative of a radiant planetary body, casts light on the astral landscape below. Suspended within a blazing sky, it echoes a motif present in many of Ernst’s looming, primordial forests from the pre-war years (see figs. 5, 6 and 7). Expounding on the importance of this continuity, Werner Spies writes, “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” (ibid., p. 252). Driven by a new cultural force, the deployment of these symbols from Ernst’s visual language takes on a new relevance and potency in the present work.

La Terre est une femme revitalizes Ernst’s earlier radical experimentations with the technique of grattage within a new context, creating an entirely new form of expression from the historic medium of oil on canvas. With grattage, an outgrowth of a related paper technique named frottage, Ernst placed objects beneath a thin layer of painted canvas, which he then scraped away the pigment with a spatula or palette knife. As Werner Spies describes, "Ernst placed subcutaneous forms, irregularities, boards and milk glass under paper or canvas which in turn then became visible on the surface and gave the artist several possibilities to combine his pictorial vision with these textures…We have to enter into it, like into a starry sky and we discover celestial bodies, heavenly creatures and nebulae. Already in the Dada years the view into the sky appears as an expression of romantic escapism as well as an allusion to the overcoming of a narrow-minded, anthropocentric world outlook…The relationship of redundant textures with the eternity of the starry sky or with the eternal movement of the sea surface does not at last originate in the material which the artist uses from the very beginnings of his oeuvre. Microforms, repetitive structures and grids stand behind it" (Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Creuzevault, Max Ernst, 1958, n.p.). First developed by Ernst in the mid-1920s as a painterly response to the Surrealist concept of automatism, this pioneering technique here takes on a dualistic sense of composition and disintegration—a suitable metaphor for the post-war years.

In this richly-worked surface, Ernst combines the precision of a surveyor with the poetry of an alchemist. His grattage, most evident near the distinct edges delineating where the palette knife had smoothed and scraped strata of wet paint, unearths galaxies of color within Ernst’s sharply-defined irregular shapes. With this technique the artist also constructs an extremely textural topography, abundant with ridges, crests, and peaks of impasto. The result is a strange and magnetic wedding of organic forms, with unpredictable colors and curves constantly evolving in a landscape of radical abstraction and geometry. A fragment of his imagined universe, La Terre est une femme is a potent emblem of Ernst’s obsession with the cosmos.