Max Ernst

1891, Brühl, Germany–1976, Paris

This portfolio of 34 collotype prints after frottage, shown here in two rotations for conservation purposes, was first published in 1926. In the summer of 1925, German artist Max Ernst allegedly discovered the frottage technique while staring at the wooden floor of his hotel. The fantastical landscapes and creatures that emerged from making rubbings of various objects gave Ernst the possibility to merge his “inner model” and the external world, and present frottage as an art form that best described the active relationship between humankind and the universe. It is worth noting that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution only reinforced the Surrealists’ belief in metamorphosis, and one can see in the Ernst’s taxonomy a subtle critique of the overly rational linear narrative in the evolution of life forms. The sequence of prints in Natural History symbolically ends with a human head turned to a wall, a work entitled Eve, the Only One Left to Us.

By rubbing pencil over a surface covered with paper in the automatic manner of the Surrealists (letting the unconscious guide his hand), Ernst collected imprints from various objects belonging to the natural and man-made world, including leaves, crusts of bread, wooden boards, and wire mesh, each time developing the resulting textures using his own imagination. In the frottage The Earthquake, the delicate veins of a leaf are transformed into the trembling ripples of an earthquake. In the text introducing Ernst’s Natural History, fittingly executed as piece of automatic writing, artist and longtime friend Jean (Hans) Arp states: “it is man who has replaced the alarm clock with the tremors of an earthquake, the rain of dragées with the precipitation of hail. when the shadow of a man encounters that of a fly it causes a flood. it is man too who has taught the horses to kiss as presidents.”*

*Author’s translation.