Lot 172 D

In the early 1940s Max Ernst emigrated to the US, where he was greeted in New York by his son Jimmy. “Late one afternoon we got out of the car to look at a gigantic rattle snake that crossed Route 66 shortly before Flagstaff, Arizona. When Max looked up towards the nearby San Francisco Peaks, he turned pale […] The green line of the mountain's peak was abruptly interrupted by the band of light-red rock under the pure magenta-red mound of the peak. He was staring at exactly the same fantastic landscape which he had repeatedly painted in Ardèche, France, not at all long before, without suspecting that it really existed … This one view would alter the future of his life in America.” (Jimmy Ernst, Nicht gerade ein Stilleben. Erinnerungen an meinen Vater Max Ernst, Cologne 1984, p. 357).
At a spatial and evidently also temporal distance, the eye of the viewer, like that of the painter, forms a landscape shimmering in the heat, which Max Ernst still entitled “Arizona” when looking back on it in the mid-1960s.