Museo Carmen Thyssen

A key figure in the development of art in the 20th century, the German painter, sculptor and graphic artist Max Ernst (Brühl, 1891−Paris, 1976) set out to visualise a unique and fascinating dream world in his works. The Natural History (Histoire naturelle) series, one of his most famous Surrealist creations – the artistic equivalent to automatic writing – published in 1926 by gallery owner Jeanne Bucher, brings together thirty-four of the artist’s drawings reproduced in collotype. In them he employs a technique he himself invented: frottage (rubbing), which consists in capturing the varied forms of objects placed beneath paper by rubbing a pencil or charcoal crayon over the surface. Using psychic automatism as a process, Ernst produced images of textures that he subsequently transformed into an unsettling repertoire of animals, plants and minerals – components of a metamorphic nature that blurs the boundaries between reality and the imagination and is created by and revealed to an artist who has become a clairvoyant.

The exhibition on show at the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga, staged in collaboration with the Fundación Juan March, features all the plates belonging to this unusual artist’s book by Max Ernst, loaned by the José María Jiménez-Alfaro Collection.

In collaboration with:

Image: Max Ernst, Teenage Lightning, 1926. Plate XXIV from Histoire Naturelle. Collotype on paper. Colección José María Jiménez-Alfaro. © Max Ernst, VEGAP, Málaga, 2019