Lot109 N11729Max Ernst Les Asperges de la lune
“The sculpture originates in an embrace, two-handed, like love itself. It is the most simple, the most primeval art.”
One of the earliest and most arresting examples of Surrealist sculpture, Les Asperges de la lune presents a series of dialogues between the real and absurd, the human and vegetal, the modern and ancient—melding what seem to be opposing principles into one dream-like vision in true Surrealist spirit.
The two titular asparagi, emerging abruptly from their base as if growing from soil, sprout into being at a size deeply unusual for the spring vegetable, but at the approximate height of a typical human. The slender stalks stand parallel, never touching but seemingly swaying closer then further, helplessly both drawn to and repelled by each other. In this striking yet intimate form, Ernst carefully anthropomorphizes these two beings, bringing humor and grace to a bronze that defies the constraints of reality.
Primarily known for his painted oeuvre’s pioneering explorations of the frottage and grattage techniques (see fig. 1), as well as his collages, Ernst began to venture into the realm of sculpture in the mid-1930s. While visiting Switzerland in 1935, Ernst found himself fascinated with the work of the sculptors Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti (see fig. 2). He spent that summer with Giacometti at his house in Maloja where they were “seized with a fever to sculpt,” as he wrote in a letter to Carola Giedion-Welcker (reproduced in Exh. Cat., Milan, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Max Ernst, Sculpture—Sculptures, 1996, p. 67). While there, he began work on a series of over 20 spherical stone works derived from boulders that had been gradually eroded by the nearby Forno Glacier, utilizing a full team of horses to heave the stones to Giacometti’s home. Ernst would carve the weather-worn surfaces with a chisel and paint over them to reveal patterns and contours in the stone in something approximating a translation of his grattage technique into the three-dimensional. Drawing influence from the ancient monolithic figures of Easter Island, Ernst experimented with hewing anthropomorphic form from a geometric foundation, heralding the Oceanic-inspired sculpture he would continue to craft in the coming years.
The present work was conceived one year before the landmark 1936 Exposition surréaliste d’objets in Paris, where Ernst and many others within his Surrealist milieu exhibited over 200 found and readymade objects—including the plaster version of this work—alongside Oceanic and Native American works. The process of searching and discovering objects by happenstance was one of particular importance to the Surrealists, who believed that the merveilleux, or the fabulous, could only occur at the serendipitous moment of discovery. Ernst was a particularly devoted follower of the significance of found objects, often taking inspiration from and even directly casting parts of his sculptures from bottles, shells, or even egg cartons. In the eyes of the right-hand figure of Les Asperges de la lune, Ernst incorporates a found object, a smoothed stone given to him by his friend Roland Penrose, of such importance that he later gave it a name, Sphinx Eye.
"Polished by the sand, spherical in shape like a cherry stone, it was encircled by horns like the crescent of the new moon,” Penrose later recalled. “On my return to Paris Max Ernst seized upon it as a surrealist object of significance and putting it in a plush jeweler's box he kept it beside him or exhibited it as a rare treasure trove among his paintings" (ibid.).
With its playful integration of found objects and intentionally crafted forms into an in-the-round collage, Ernst pokes fun at the functionality of everyday items while also evoking the mythological themes that his other works referencing Sphinx Eye allude to. Harboring a deep interest in ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology that was reflected in his oeuvre as early as the 1920s, he incorporated images and casts of his beloved Egyptian talisman into works such as his third collage novel, Une Semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux. The fourth section of this book adapts the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, with Oedipus esoterically depicted as a bird’s head with a man’s body. In one scene, he gazes contemplatively into the eye of the Sphinx, whose riddle he will eventually solve according to the legend (see fig. 3).
Ernst was an avid collects or of Asian and Pacific artifacts and was profoundly aware of his art historical predecessors. The present work bears a remarkable resemblance to the sculpture Double Figure (Le Lys) (see fig. 4), made in the Lake Sentani region of New Guinea and collects ed in 1929 by Ernst’s dealer and Surrealist poet Jacques Viot. Given his close proximity to Viot, Ernst in all likelihood would have encountered this sculpture and employed it as his formal inspiration for Les Asperges de la lune. Both works portray two adjacent figures emerging into existence from a shared base, adjacent but not quite touching. The present work, however, emphasizes the forms of the left-hand figure's mouth and the right-hand figure's eyes while erasing the rest, as if to isolate the viewer’s attention on the human actions of seeing and speaking.
With the surface of Double Figure having worn relatively smooth over t.mes , eroding the rough wooden carving marks that once inlaid the figures, such an object might have held the same visual interest for him as the 1934 sculpted boulders from Forno Glacier that he and Giacometti had worked on “scratching our secrets into them, like runes” (ibid., p. 69). Symbiosis between natural processes and human creation, with physical form being inevitably altered by the symptoms of t.mes , plays a recurring role throughout Ernst’s sculptural career and is epitomized here in Les Asperges de la lune.
The two faces of the lunar asparagi were later repeated by Ernst when he and Leonora Carrington, newly wed after a whirlwind romance, moved to the village Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in 1938 and bought and fully renovated an old farmhouse into a Surrealist Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art”—complete with fantastical bas-reliefs and man-monster amalgamation sculptures (see fig. 6). On the doors opening into his and Carrington’s staircase, Ernst affixed two circular masks of the same forms that he constructed from metal parts of old machinery as a pendant to Les Asperges de la lune.
The present work is numbered V/IV in an edition of seven plus one artist's proof. Of these casts, only the present cast as well as one numbered I/VI and held by The Museum of Modern Art were painted white in order to emulate the original plaster. Having acquired the original plaster version of Les Asperges de la lune in 1937, the museum later acquired a bronze cast. Additional, unpainted, bronze casts are also held in the Menil collects ion, Dallas and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, with a painted resin version held in the collects ion of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Further to the esteemed collects ions that hold various versions, Les Asperges de la lune’s form boasts a remarkable exhibition history, with the plaster making appearances in watershed Surrealist exhibitions such as The Museum of Modern Art’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism and Galerie Charles Ratton’s Exposition surréaliste d’objets.
