The Cerruti Tremblement de terre presents a dull grey sky animated by the presence of a white lace napkin with a hole in the middle. 

“Max Ernst’s biographical data are unreliable. Whoever seeks to interpret them and his life runs up against a fine web of truth and falsehood […].”¹ The opening words of Ulrich Bischoff’s monographic study draw attention to Ernst’s common practice of laying traps for scholars to fall into and lose their way. This starts with his Biographical Notes, which first appeared in French in 1959 with the significant subtitle Tissue of Truth - Tissue of Lies, an allusion to Goethe’s autobiography Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From my Life: Poetry and Truth).² There the artist describes his father Philipp, “a teacher in a school for deaf and dumb children by profession and a painter by vocation”,³ who “tried with a great deal of good will and some naivety to paint still lifes and landscapes as well as copies of religious works by great masters from reproductions”.⁴ It is to Philipp that Ernst owed this interest in images of nature (cat. p. 786), which remained intact over the years and blossomed particularly in 1925, the year that saw the birth of his technical and aesthetic technique of frottage. 

One rainy evening in August, in a boarding house on the coast of Brittany, Ernst was enchanted by the sight of a worn wooden floor with its grain accentuated by repeated washing. Employing a process of automatism, to which both Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis attached great importance, he decided to capture the symbolic content of this vision by rubbing a black pencil over sheets of paper laid at random on the floorboards. Human heads, animals, battles, seas and earthquakes thus appeared before his eyes.⁵ 

While the story has the rhythm and flavour of an initiation myth, the procedure used by the artist was nothing other than a concrete application of Leonardo da Vinci’s advice to train the mind by observing the stains and cracks on walls, ashes in the hearth or ragged patches of cloud to discern images of mountains, rivers, trees and valleys.⁶ 

In 1926 Ernst produced a portfolio entitled Histoire naturelle, published by Jeanne Bucher, consisting of thirtyfour heliographs based on frottages of the previous year. One of these was Le Tremblement de terre, where a densely scored, irregular rhomboidal shape lies at the centre of lines of force resembling those of a magnetic field (fig. 1). This print from the Histoire naturelle is the first work by Ernst to refer explicitly to the earthquake, the recurrent subject during the second half of the 1920s of a series of mostly vertical canvases devoted to the pictorial genre of seascape.⁷ Like the work in the Cerruti Collection, these paintings are divided in two by the horizon line. The upper part presents a circular shape representing the sun and the lower a rippled effect obtained by means of frottage and rubbing objects onto the wet paint (looking forward to the future inventions of grattage and decalcomania) to represent waves and currents. 

The Cerruti Tremblement de terre presents a dull grey sky animated by the presence of a white lace napkin with a hole in the middle. The image of the napkin looks like a painted collage and is endowed with three-dimensionality by the insertion of a black shadow and playful decoration and openwork. There is a dark sphere in the centre surrounded by concentric rings that recall the marks left by glasses on a white tablecloth while being laden at the same time with disturbing erotic connotations. This threatening element appears to enter into dialogue with the lower part of the painting, where two coloured bands, probably produced by means of a technique similar to frottage, stretch over the calm surface of a thick, oily sea bounded along the bottom edge by seismographic lines. 

The most surprising thing about this series of canvases is the constant shifting between different dimensional planes, something made still more complex by the ambiguous relationship between mimesis and abstraction, sophisticated cultural references and commonplace popular sources. While the melancholy solar sphere appears to echo the cosmic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich,⁸ the lace napkin can, instead, be linked to Ernst’s aversion for handicrafts, often identified with the image of the housewife busy knitting or doing crochet, as in the case of the collage Frau Wirtin an der Lahn… (1920, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie).⁹ 

The series of paintings devoted to the subject of earthquakes also appears to look forward to the observations developed by the philosopher Georges Bataille in L’Anus solaire (1927), where a close parallel is drawn between astronomical and tectonic movements and sexual intercourse.¹⁰ At the same time, the black sun becomes an image of the “pineal eye”, an organ of delirium and excess as well as the metaphor of a blind spot in Western rationality, aptly represented by the famous scene of razor slicing an eyeball in Luis Buñuel’s film Un chien andalou (1929). 

Listed as a work of 1925 in the general catalogue, the canvas has often been attributed to a later period around 1927-28. This dating also appeared in the short catalogue of the show at the Galleria Galatea, Turin, in 1969. Still owned by the gallery in 1976, it was probably bought by Francesco Federico Cerruti shortly afterwards.¹¹ 

Finally, attention should also be drawn to the purchase in 1967 by the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin of two collages by Ernst presented that year at the Galatea. Bearing witness to Cerruti’s keen attention to the Turinese exhibition scene, this purchase is of particular importance to any attempt to define the collector’s tastes and his interest in the avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism.¹² 

Fabio Cafagna

¹ Bischoff 1992, p. 7.

² J. Drost, “‘Biographical Notes’: How Max Ernst Plays with a Literary Genre”, in Spies 2005, pp. 17-31.

³ M. Ernst, “Note per una biografia”, in Rivoli 1996b, p. 203.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ A. Jouffroy, “Max Ernst”, in Milan 1996-97, pp. 38-39.

⁶ See D. Krystof, “Der ‘Leonardo des Surrealismus’”, in Berlin-Munich 1999, pp. 250-260.

⁷ See, for example, nos. 885, 971, 976, 977, 982, 983 and 984, in Spies, Metken, Leppien 1975-2007, vol. III.

⁸ 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.

⁹ Bischoff 1992, pp. 11-12.

¹⁰ “[…] the erotic movements of the ground are not fecund, like those of the waters, but much quicker. The earth sometimes shakes with frenzy and everything collapses on its surface” Bataille 1998, p. 16.

¹¹ According to information received verbally from Annalisa Polesello Ferrari, the painting was purchased before 1983. A precise terminus ante quem is provided by the handwritten “Inventario dei mobili, dipinti, sculture, argenti, tappeti, maioliche, porcellane e oggetti d’arte che si trovano nella villa di Rivoli alla data del 30-06-1993”, in which it is listed as hanging in the area of the vestibule and the staircase (Cerruti Collection Archives).

¹² Un peu malade le cheval… (1920, inv. no. P/1721) and Bozza di manifesto (1920, inv. no. P/1720). See G. Auneddu, in Maggio Serra, Passoni 1993, p. 128.