© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris
On view
Theodora Walton William Walton III Pavilion
The Witch,
1941
More Context
Handbook Entry
A pivotal figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, Max Ernst helped form the Cologne-based Dadaists in 1919. He moved to Paris in 1922 and became involved with France’s nascent Surrealist movement a few years later. Influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, Ernst prized the unconscious, the irrational, and the uncanny. Art, he believed, should serve as a repository for immaterial states of mind. The Surrealists projected many of their fantasies onto women, and Ernst was no exception. Painted the same year he fled Europe for New York seeking sanctuary from the Nazis, this painting depicts one of Ernst’s favorite subjects — the witch — whose powers of metamorphosis inspired both fear and fascination. In order to more faithfully channel the unconscious into art, the Surrealists embraced automatism, a technique intended to inhibit deliberation. <em>The Witch</em>, for instance, was made using decalcomania, a process whereby sheets of glass or paper are pressed into wet paint, resulting in unpredictable bubbles and rivulets.
Information
1941
Max Ernst, the artist, gift, 1942; to Alfred H. Barr Jr.and Margaret Scolari Barr, gift; to Princeton University Art Museum, 1979.
- John Russell, Max Ernst, life and work, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967)., p. 350
- David Larkin, ed., Max Ernst, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975)., fig. 18
-
Edward Quinn, Max Ernst: textes de Max Ernst, (Paris: Editions cercle d'art, 1976).
, fig. 260 -
Pere Gimferrer, Max Ernst o la dissolucio de la identitat (Barcelona : Ediciones Poligrafia, 1977).
, p. 69 fig. 75 - Edward Quinn, Max Ernst, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977)., p. 216, fig. 260
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1979," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 39, no. 1/2 (1980): p. 40-63., p. 56
- Wakakuwa Midori, エルンスト (Erunsuto), (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1981)., p. 36 (color illus.)
- Pere Gimferrer, Max Ernst, (New York: Rizzoli, 1984)., pl. 104
- Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 248 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 263 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 315
