“A simultaneously tranquil and disturbing forest. In the forest, a hermit. The leaves of the beech trees painted one by one with meticulous and almost maniacal precision […]. The monk engrossed in a book, so engrossed that he almost disappears, so to speak. All that remains is the book and what it contains, a secret, a trifle. Little Max is very upset.”

It often happens in Max Ernst’s biography that reality is interwoven with a tale of esoteric character. His childhood, outlined in a handful of highly indicative episodes, thus encapsulates the essential features of his future career as a painter. 

One of the most frequently quoted passages from Ernst’s Biographical Notes regards the impression made on him as a child by watching his father Philipp paint a watercolour of the hermit Caesarius of Heisterbach: 

“A simultaneously tranquil and disturbing forest. In the forest, a hermit. The leaves of the beech trees painted one by one with meticulous and almost maniacal precision […]. The monk engrossed in a book, so engrossed that he almost disappears, so to speak. All that remains is the book and what it contains, a secret, a trifle. Little Max is very upset.”¹ 

The sight of this painting was followed by a desire to define the forest as a psycho-social environment and its contradictions. In accordance with the romantic concept of the sublime, nature is transformed from a simple backdrop into an aesthetic category²: “The wonderful pleasure of breathing at ease in a vast space and, on the other hand, the harrowing impression of being locked up in a prison formed by the surrounding trees. Inside and outside at the same time. Free and imprisoned.”³ 

In the mid-1930s, after publishing a short piece entitled “Les Mystères de la forêt” in the magazine Minotaure,⁴ Ernst returned insistently to this subject and rediscovered his youthful enthusiasm for the painting of Henri Rousseau, first seen in the Sonderbund exhibition of 1912 in Cologne. A dialogue with Rousseau’s paintings is developed through bright colours, luxuriant vegetation, high horizons and a pervasive claustrophobic atmosphere. Animals hide in the tangle of tree trunks and foliage while man is almost completely absent and stripped of any primacy.⁵ An erotic quality of the image, wholly lacking in the work of the French primitive, is instead a constant feature of Ernst’s paintings. The ferocious hybrid figures resembling the praying mantis that inhabit the undergrowth recall the interest aroused by insects - above all in Surrealist circles - by virtue of their behavioural similarities with human beings. 

In addition to “Les Mystères de la forêt”, the May 1934 issue of Minotaure included what was to be a famous article by the sociologist, anthropologist and literary critic Roger Caillois on the praying mantis and its extraordinary process of reproduction.⁶ Caillois followed this up in the June 1935 issue with the eccentric contribution “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire”, in which the nature of mimicry was examined in relation to the insect’s visual experience, thus avoiding an anthropocentric reading of this sphere of natural organisation.⁷ In Caillois’s interpretation, as in Ernst’s vision of the forest, importance is attached precisely to the disappearance of boundaries between interior and exterior. The loss of self-possession and the danger of being absorbed into the surrounding environment are evident in the image of a natural world that appears to swallow up everything that inhabits it. 

The Cerruti Nature à l’aurore (Nature at Dawn) has the same title and dimensions as two other paintings of 1936.⁸ Beneath a sky of hallucinogenic colours, the small work on cardboard presents a close-up view of undergrowth, an impenetrable jungle inhabited by a strange creature, half insect and half lizard, and the anthropomorphic bird Loplop, Ernst’s alter ego.⁹ In the upper right-hand section of the background, a figure seen from behind with a melancholy tilt of the head, probably a carved idol, appears to be a citation of Giorgio de Chirico’s L’enigma dell’ora (The Enigma of the Hour, 1911, private collection) and hence also of Arnold Böcklin’s Die Toteninsel (Island of the Dead, first version, 1880, Kunstmuseum, Basel). 

It was the year 1936 that saw Ernst’s consecration as a master of the Surrealist movement, featured in the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York, Museum of Modern Art, organised by Alfred H. Barr Jr) with forty-eight works, far more than Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, André Masson or Joan Miró. 

Previously present in Paris and in the German area of Switzerland, the small Nature à l’aurore did not enter the Cerruti Collection before the mid- 1990s, as it does not appear in the handwritten inventory of the items in the villa at Rivoli dated 30 June 1993. Finally, lot 404 in the catalogue of the Finarte auction of 22 June 2000, a copy of which is present in the Cerruti archives, is a woollen tapestry also entitled Nature à l’aurore (1975-78), based on the Cerruti painting and woven in the workshop of Yvette Cauquil-Prince in accordance with a practice by no means uncommon for Ernst’s work in the 1970s.¹⁰ 

Fabio Cafagna

¹ M. Ernst, “Note per una biografia”, in Rivoli 1996, p. 204.

² See K. von Maur, “Max Ernst and Romanticism: Between the Lyrical Celebration of Nature and the Aesthetics of Horror”, in London-Stuttgart-Düsseldorf 1991, pp. 341-350.

³ M. Ernst, “Note per una biografia” cit., p. 204.

⁴ Ernst 1934, pp. 221-223; see also Nantes 1987; Sabri 2001, pp. 245-259.

⁵ Turpin 1993, p. 94.

⁶ Caillois 1934, pp. 23-26.

⁷ Caillois 1935, pp. 4-10; see also Krauss 1990.

⁸ Nos. 2268-2270 in Spies, Metken, Leppien 1975-2007, vol. IV, pp. 370-371.

⁹ Bischoff 1992, pp. 47-54.

¹⁰ Finarte, Arte moderna e contemporanea. Dipinti Disegni Grafica, Milan, 22 June 2000, lot 403, p. 156. For tapestries that Cauquil-Prince wove from Ernst’s works, see Milwaukee 1978.