Santa Conversazione. 1921.
Photography of a collage.
Spies/Metken 425. Lower right signed, lower left titled. One of 6 known copies. On light board. 22.5 x 13.5 cm (8.8 x 5.3 in). Sheet: 24 x 18 x cm9,4 x 7 in).
[KT].
• Rare copy from a very small edition.
• Renowned provenance, from the collection of Louis Aragons (1897-1982), French author and an important protagonist of Surrealism.
• Fascinating work from the early period when Max Ernst began to turn to Parisian Surrealism, of which he would become an important representative in the 1920s.
• 1921 was a year of transition: André Breton invited Ernst to Paris, where he had a first solo show at Galerie Au sans pareil.
• Collage and photography are emblematic of surrealist aesthetics: Engimatic pictorial combinations of different origins take the observer to realms of imagination beyond reality.
• As key artist of the German-French avant-gard, Max Ernst is represented in international collections like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Musée national d'art moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Tate Gallery, London.

PROVENANCE: Collection Louis Aragon, Paris.
Collection Maria Macorig (gifted from the above in 1978, ever since family-owned).

LITERATURE: Werner Spies, Die Rückkehr der Schönen Gärtnerin, Max Ernst 1950-1970, Cologne 1971, pp. 121ff.
Louis Aragon, L'Oeuvre poétique, vol. II: 1921-1925, Paris 1974, p. 225.
Werner Spies, Max Ernst - Collagen, Inventar und Widerspruch, Cologne 1974, pp. 67, 68, 195, 204 (with illu. no. 115).
Werner Spies, Sigrid and Günter Metken, Max Ernst. Werke 1906-1925, Cologne 1975, p. 217, no. 425 (with illu.).