A selection of six works by Max Ernst – three paintings, one sculpture (Lots 3235) and two works on paper (Lots 211, 212, Auction 1248, 5 June
2024) – from the Schneppenheim collection, one of the most important and extensive collections of the German-French artist, are going up for auction.

It was started by Cologne’s Dr Peter Schneppenheim (19262021), who gathered its works on the German and international art market over a period of decades. The Max Ernst Museum in his hometown of Brühl also owes its founding in 2005 to the collector’s persistent and constructive dedication. His extensive holdings of graphic works, the illustrated books and a selection of paintings provided the initial basis for this unique artist museum.

• Studies, Professional Career and International Aid Projects
• The Max Ernst Exhibition in Brühl in 1951 as a Formative Experience
• From the Initial Idea of Donating the Collection to the Opening of the Max Ernst Museum
• Upcoming Auctions - Max Ernst

Who was Peter Schneppenheim, and how is his enthusiasm for the works of Max Ernst to be explained? Schneppenheim was born in the Rhineland town of Brühl on 29 June 1926 and, like Max Ernst before him, attended the Brühl Gymnasium. In 1944, before he was able to complete his early A-level certificate, he was required to serve in the auxiliary air force to assist as a “flak helper” and, at the age of just 18, he was conscripted to serve in the socalled Ardennes Offensive. He was severely wounded there and was captured by the Americans. Perhaps his experiences in the field hospital are what led him to begin studying medicine at the University of Cologne in 1945/1946, directly after the end of the war. In 1951 he completed his studies by passing the state examination in medicine and then, in keeping with his specialisation in gynaecology, received his first position at the women’s hospital of the University of Cologne. He had also developed a scientific interest in cancer research early on, and he accordingly submitted a dissertation on experimental tumour research in 1953. From 1964 he was chief physician at the St-Anna-Krankenhaus in Cologne and, from 1975 to 1991, executive chief physician at the Heilig-Geist-Krankenhaus in Cologne-Longerich.

In 1959 Peter Schneppenheim married Edith Rausch, who was from Hamburg and was the daughter of an architect. The first of their three children was born in 1960, and the five of them moved into a house in Cologne-Lindenthal. Aside from Schneppenheim’s professional and private commitments, he was also a dedicated supporter of the battle against cancer in Africa, particularly in Ghana; after founding a charitable organisation, he was able to establish a small clinic in Accra and later a hospital in Battor. Not only did he sometimes work there himself, he also initiated a treatment centre in Kumasi and brought Ghanaian doctors to Cologne for training.

With so many demands placed on him through his profession and his private commitments, Schneppenheim found balance and fulfilment in both music and art, particularly in the works of the painter, graphic artist and sculptor Max Ernst, who was born in Brühl in 1891 and whose art he had often encountered in Brühl and Cologne. However, the formative experience leading to his acquisitions of Ernst’s works was the artist’s first major German retrospective, which was shown in Schloss Augustusburg in Brühl in 1951. Schneppenheim was immediately fascinated by the variety of themes and techniques: “In my enthusiasm for the unusual artworks, which I had never seen before, and surely also euphorically invigorated by having just passed the state examination, the idea came to me of now purchasing pictures by this artist myself– with the salary of a young me dical assistant, initially an audacious fantasy, until there was enough there for my first works on paper” (cited in: Max Ernst. Graphische Welten, exh. cat. Brühl 2004, p. 10).
Schneppenheim’s initial enthusiasm for Max Ernst did not wane – on the contrary, his increasing occupation with the stations of his life and work, with his innovative pictorial techniques and literary horizon gradually led to systematic purchases made with the aim of covering his entire graphic oeuvre with as few gaps as possible: “The interested layman of the initial period”, he writes, “turned into a studious, passionate collector.” My first and lasting impression: Max Ernst is an intellectual painter. In a certain sense, his sublimely challenging pictures taught me to see” (cited in: exh. cat. Brühl 2004, p. 10). The purchase of mostly graphic works was – at least at the beginning – a deliberate choice primarily based on his financial possibilities. From the beginning, Schneppenheim displayed a strikingly good eye for quality and uniqueness and selected Ernst’s central works on paper. The first graphic works included the lithographs “Danseuses” (1950) and the etching “Paroles peintes” (1959) as well as an exquisite sheet discovered by his wife, “La loterie du jardin zoologique” (1951).His early purchases also included the etching “Correspondances dangereuses” (1947), the wellknown lithograph “Masques” (1950) and the portfolio published by Ernst Beyeler in 1953: “Das Schnabelpaar”. As Schneppenheim has written himself, the graphic works were, with their abundant allusions, “a wondrous refuge” for him and meant “rest and relaxation” after “overlong workdays” (cited in: exh. cat. Brühl 2004, p. 12). Although the expansion of the collection was disrupted through the purchase of his house and practice in the early 1960s, he decided to buy an oil painting for the first time in 1968 and bought the landscape “Les antipodes du paysage” – the work that is up for auction here – through the gallerist Fritz Valentien in Stuttgart.
One exceptional event during the 1970s was Schneppenheim’s meeting Max Ernst and his wife Dorothea Tanning in person on the occasion of a Rhine cruise organised by the Cologne gallerist couple Hein and Eva Stünke in 1971. “His fascinating outward appearance, his natural disposition, his friendly affection have remained a lifelong memory for me”, writes Schneppenheim (cited in: exh. cat. Brühl 2004, pp. 1213).
Until Max Ernst’s death on 1 April 1976 – which also represented a watershed moment for Schneppenheim – he was able to expand the collection with important works. The first public exhibition of the collection at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig in 1990 marked an initial high point for Peter Schneppenheim.

The magnificent presentation of his works in the galleries of a museum may have contributed to Schneppenheim’s decision in the mid-1990s to offer to donate his graphic collection to the town of Brühl. The offer was made on the condition that the collection be made accessible to the public and be provided with an appropriate home. When this wish was not fulfilled by the town, Schneppenheim was able to convince the Kreissparkasse Köln to purchase the collection in 2001. This brought the extensive holdings into the newly founded “Stiftung Max Ernst”, and the Landschaftsverband Rheinland as well as the town of Brühl were involved in the charitable trust. Through this constellation, the preconditions were established for the building of a new artist museum in Ernst’s hometown, with the Schneppenheim collection providing its initial basis. When the museum opened in 2005, his “decadesold fantasy” finally became reality. Extremely satisfied with the design and concept of the museum, where one of the galleries is named after the donor, Schneppenheim contributed more graphic works to complete it and also donated five oil paintings as well as a frottage. With his continuing support for the Max Ernst Museum – for example, through his gift of the iconic painting “The Twentieth Century” (1955) – Peter Schneppenheim continued to remain linked to the museum for a long time and documented his nearly lifelong enthusiasm for the artist.

"Mobiles Herbarium" is probably the best-known and most beautiful work from the important series of overpaintings that Max Ernst created during his Dada period in Cologne.
For Max Ernst 1919 marked a decisive turning point that would determine the course of his artistic future. His encounter with the metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà led him to turn away from his previous expressionist painting. Appalled at the prevailing conditions of society and conventional currents in art, he founded the Cologne Dada group together with Johannes Theodor Baargeld and Hans Arp. They published the weekly magazine “Der Ventilator” which, like the Dada exhibition presented by the Kölnischer Kunstverein in November 1919, was forbidden by the British military government. Ernst’s art became defined by the Dadaist idea of seizing on images and objects from the world of everyday life, modifying them through artistic means and loading them with entirely different levels of meaning. In doing so, he made use of wood assemblage, stereotype printing, rubbings and, from 1920, overpainting.
His source for this form of creative transformation was provided by a chance discovery, the “Bibliotheca Paedagogica”, a catalogue of educational resources presenting extensive visual materials for illustrating the field of science in schools. He describes the effect that this find had on him in his memoirs: “1919. On a rainy day in Cologne, the catalogue of the institute for educational resources attracted my attention. I saw advertisements for models of all kinds: mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, palaeontological and so on. Elements so disparate in nature that the absurdity of their accumulation confused the eye and the mind. Elicited hallucinations which invested the depicted objects with new, rapidly shifting meanings.
I suddenly felt my ‘visual capacity’ become so intensified that I saw the reemerging objects on a new ground.” (Max Ernst, cited in: DADAMAX, op. cit., p. 226). Max Ernst created around 44 overpaintings in 1920/1921: in addition to the works based on the catalogue of teaching resources,
these also included larger ones on display panels and wallpapers. “Mobiles Herbarium” is one of the most beautiful and famous pieces from this group of works. It was created on a plate from the catalogue’s section on botany (see comp. ill.). The artist has transformed the colourless schematic drawings presented in the plate into a variety of tree blossoms in a coloured, magical landscape. He has revised the drawings of plants not just by adding colour but also by adding trunks and stems, and they are situated within a broad plane featuring a mesa set off against the luminous, turquoiseblue sky above it. Ernst has thus placed these parts
of plants, which had been torn out of context, back into the soil, so to speak, and provided them with a novel type of autonomy. In the right half of the picture, mechanical elements like supports, weights, pendulums and belts have been inscribed into the plants and provide the organic vegetation with a technological component that thematises the mobility of the title but perhaps also the incessant changes of natural processes. In a poetic manner, Max Ernst has caused a fairytale world of enigmatic beauty to emerge out of these mundane illustrations.

In 1953 Max Ernst returned to Europe with his wife Dorothea Tanning after almost 12 years of exile in the United States, and they initially moved to Paris. He quickly had to acknowledge that the art scene had changed and art informel and tachisme were now in demand instead of Surrealism: “[…] I returned to Paris at a point in time,” writes Ernst, “when those ‘terrible simplificateurs’ […] were singing the praises of abstract art and condemning the surrealists as too literary” (cited in Max Ernst. Retrospektive, exh. cat. Wien/Riehen 2013, p. 279). Even if Max Ernst took a critical view of the new artistic developments, they did not remain without influence on his oeuvre. Thus, for example, the sombre decalcomanias of the American years were gradually replaced by new, often figurative themes featuring geometric forms and a generally brighter and more cheerful palette.

The panoramaformat painting “Les trois philosophes” was among the first works Ernst created in the rural village of Huismes, not far from the town of Chinoin in the Loire Valley, in 1955. In this fascinating picture, he has placed three geometric forms in a shimmering white on a wooden ground prepared with tones of red and yellow. In doing so, he has not simply laid the individual layers of colour in on top of one another, instead, he has used a painting knife to scratch the already partially dried paint back off again, producing areas of colour that are sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent and provide the work with an enormous sense of depth. Scholars have linked the impression of glassy crystals generated in this way with the copper mineral kinoite, which is to be found in Arizona and which Ernst probably saw during the period he spent there (cf. Das 20. Jahrhundert. Werke von Max Ernst aus der Stiftung Schneppenheim, exh. cat. Brühl 2013, p. 92). But what interested Max Ernst was not the depiction of crystal formations. Instead, he has placed a black symbol at the centre of each of the forms – reading from left to right, these could be identified as a human face, a bird silhouette and a bunch of grapes. The three polyhedrons shimmering in white presumably embody the three philosophers of the work’s title. Scholars have seen them as an allusion to Giorgione’s famous painting “The Three Philosophers”, in which the Renaissance painter visualises the three stages of the human mind’s development (cf. exh. cat. Brühl 2013, pp. 9192).
As an exceptionally wellread artist, Ernst could have been familiar with this interpretation.

The first and most important painting from the Schneppenheim Collection, which further elaborates upon the fantastic theme of the Antipodes series.
Max Ernst began to occupy himself with the topos of the Antipodes in 1936, with a small series of works entitled “Aux antipodes du paysage” (Spies/Metken 22552258). The paintings from this series depict inhospitable rocky landscapes that lie beneath a sky illuminated by a yellowish light and feature foregrounds populated by isolated human figures or enigmatic hybrid creatures. These mysterious images are based on the mythical notion of the socalled Antipodeans, people living on the unexplored lower or opposite side of the globe – an idea that was heatedly debated from antiquity to the early modern period. Max Ernst assimilated this antiquated notion into his art, and this series of works speculates about what that hidden and, for us, nearly uninhabitable antiworld might look like – fantasy as the antipode of reality.
In 1954 Ernst returned to the theme with his “Les antipodes du paysage”. In 1968 this would become the first oil painting to make its way into the Schneppenheim Collection. In this work the artist has depicted his subject matter in a markedly freer and more abstract manner than he had twenty years before, and his use of the grattage and decalcomania techniques he had personally developed in the 1920s are decisive. A glowing red and deep black define the painting and stir associations with lava and hot coals. A black plane rises above the rockily jagged ground of the lower quarter of the picture: six enigmatic, organic objects appear to hover in front of it and emit their own light. The crusty, manylayered form of the three red manifestations in the middle makes them reminiscent of deepsea organisms. The three other objects made up of delicate red lines and shimmering green shapes produce the impression of ephemeral light effects with their elliptical forms. In this painting, Max Ernst has created a scene of magical depth and luminosity, one that could be placed in the context of the eternal darkness of the deep sea just as easily as the cosmic phenomena of the night sky.

“Janus” is surely the most beautiful bronze sculpture among Max Ernst’s late work. It was created in 1974 in the form of a slab sculpture like those first made by Alberto Giacometti in the 1920s and further developed by Max Ernst.
One important characteristic of Max Ernst’s sculptural works is their additive construction out of assembled individual elements. In keeping with its title, “Janus”, the sculpture has two sides for viewing, each of which faces in the opposite direction. The vertical rectangular slab is crowned by a different head on each side. For the other elements of the composition, the artist has used toy moulds in the form of shells, turtles and frogs to create plaster casts, although he has removed the animal forms’ legs or feet. Stylised in this way, they still remain identifiable as animals, but they take on the form of male genitals. On one side, the shell form is arranged in a pair on the upper part of the slab, producing an allusion to a woman’s breasts; on the other side, a shell directly under the head assumes the meaning of a beard or lavish necklace.
Male and female, animal form and human form, the everyday find becomes exalted within a surreal artistic context: Ernst plays in a fascinatingly multilayered and humorous manner with the forms and their interpretive possibilities: “The originally neutral toy becomes a masculine function; the conventional relationship between form and content is broken apart and represented in a manner full of wit” (Jürgen Pech, Plastische Werke, op. cit., p. 208).

You can find the objects from the private collection in our catalogue: Modern Art - Day Sale and Modern Art - Evening Sale