Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Photo gallery - Press folder - Press release - Didascalia

Milan, October 3 2022 – The first retrospective in Italy dedicated to Max Ernst (4-1891), German painter, sculptor, poet and art theorist, later naturalized American and French, will open tomorrow, Tuesday 1976 October, in the rooms of Palazzo Reale. The exhibition, promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan-Cultura and Palazzo Reale with Electa in collaboration with Madeinart, is curated by Martina Mazzotta and Jürgen Pech.

There are over 400 works including paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, jewels and illustrated books from museums, foundations and private collections, in Italy and abroad. Among these: the GAM in Turin, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Ca' Pesaro Museum in Venice, the Tate Gallery in London, the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Cantini Museum in Marseille, the State Museums and the Arp Foundation in Berlin, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid.

The long study and investigation work carried out by the curators has made it possible to include among the loans, which boast the presence of around eighty paintings, also works and documents that have not been exhibited to the public for decades.

The immense breadth of themes and experiments in Ernst's work extends across seventy years of 20th century history, between Europe and the United States, constantly escaping any definition. Pictor doctus, profound connoisseur and visionary interpreter of the history of art, philosophy, science and alchemy, Max Ernst is presented in this context as a humanist in the neo-Renaissance sense. In fact, if André Chastel claimed to find in Ernst a sort of "reincarnation of those Rhenish authors of Bosch-type devilry", Marcel Duchamp found in him "a complete inventory of the different eras of Surrealism".

On the main floor of the Royal Palace, visitors will be able to immerse themselves in an itinerary that retraces the artist's adventurous creative parable, marked by the great historical events of the 20th century and dotted with extraordinary loves, as well as illustrious friendships. The itinerary narrates Ernst's biographical events, grouping them into four major periods, which are in turn divided into nine thematic rooms which open up interdisciplinary approaches to his art.

A large, ideal library - that of the artist - made up of illustrated books, study manuals, photographs, objects and documents, winds through the entire exhibition itinerary, inviting visitors to engage in games of references and correspondences between the sources of inspiration and the works themselves.

"An autumn of great exhibitions, that of Palazzo Reale - declared the councilor for Culture Tommaso Sacchi -. A season that began with Richard Avedon's solo show, already admired by 8.500 visitors in ten days, which now continues with Max's retrospective Ernst and who will continue his journey into the fantastic with the unrepeatable Bosch exhibition, opening in November, and then closing with the fascinating staging of the exhibition Le Tre Pietà in the Sala delle Cariatidi. Ernst's journey, full of works and references and suggestions, will give visitors the possibility of a multi-level visit, with different angles and insights by theme or language - continued councilor Sacchi - In fact, today, one day before the opening of the exhibition to the public,. 16 bookings have already been made, between groups and individuals, to enter the extraordinary world of Max Ernst".

At the entrance to the exhibition rooms the public is immediately invited to try their hand at a masterpiece that turns a century this year, "Oedipus Rex" (1922).

The first two rooms accompany the first part of Ernst's biography, the years of his childhood and education in Germany (1891-1921), sources of memory and inspiration for the artist's entire life; the Great War, fought personally and equated to a period of death; the resurrection, the return to life, the marriage and the birth of his son Jimmy, the revolutionary advent of Dada and the invention of collage, the first exhibition in France and proto-surrealism. The second part of the biography, which concerns the years 1922-1940 lived in France, occupies the next two rooms.

Among the works present in the first four rooms we find "Crucifix" (1914), "Fiat modes Pereat Ars" (1919), "I Cormorani" (1920), "Les Malheurs des Immortels" (1922, in the only watercolor edition), the fragments of the house of "Eaubonne" (1923), "The Kiss" (1927), "A Night of Love" (1927), "Men Will Know Nothing" (1927).

The exhibition continues chronologically by recounting the subsequent years spent by Ernst in Paris and France, the affirmation of Surrealism, his second marriage with Marie-Berte and then his love with Leonora Carrington, his deep friendships, exchanges and collaborations with many protagonists of the avant-garde, travels and experiments, the advent of the Second War, the imprisonment as a "degenerate artist" wanted by the Nazis.

The exile in the United States, organized thanks to the support of his son Jimmy and above all of Peggy Guggenheim, whom the artist married for a short period, introduces the section dedicated to America (1941-1952). The entry into the international scene of New York, the great love and then the marriage with Dorothea Tanning, the move to Sedona, Arizona, in the house built and decorated by the artists, introduce the subsequent rooms in which the role that her nature and the landscape play a role in the invention of techniques (frottage, grating, decalcomania and dripping), in the creation of strands of the fantastic and the marvelous, which also affect sculpture and goldsmithery. Among the works present in these sections, "Histoire Naturelle" (1925), "Monument to birds" (1927), "Young people in petrified attitudes" (1927), "The forest" (1927-28), "Bird-head ( 1934-35), "A borrowed ear" (1935), The whole city" (1936-37), "A fabric of lies" (1959), "The party at Seillans" (1964).

Ernst's return to Europe (1953-1976) is told in the "Memory and Wonder" section, which collects works from different decades and illustrates how history and the return of the ancient become sources of inspiration and object of the wonderful art of Ernst. Among the works presented: "Pietà or The revolution in the night" (1923), "The antipope (ca.1941), "The angel of the hearth" (1937), "Dream and revolution" (1945-'46), "Project for a monument to Leonardo da Vinci" (1957), "Among the streets of Athens (1960), "Hölderlin, Poems" (1961), "Romanticism" (1964), "Portrait of an ancestor" (1974) .

The last room, entitled "Cosmos and cryptography", looks towards the stars. In the years preceding man's landing on the Moon, art and science interacted in Ernst's works, revealing new insights into the cosmos. Works, books and cinema introduce the artist's extraordinary secret writings, those cryptographies that go beyond codified languages.

Among the works exhibited: "The world of the naives" (1965), "The world of the confused. Absolute refusal to live like a tachiste" (1965), "Birth of a galaxy" (1969), "Maximiliana or the illegal exercise of astronomy" (1964).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog published by Electa, by a guide and by a new edition, also by Electa, of two unobtainable titles by Paola Dècina Lombardi on the surrealist movement: "Surrealism 1919-1969. Rebellion and imagination" and "The woman , freedom, love. An anthology on surrealism".

A series of collateral events will enliven the opening months of the exhibition, including the film festival on Max Ernst created in collaboration with the MIC, the Italian Film Archive Foundation.

Informazioni su Royal Palace.