Max Ernst — 1956 · ACL-001
In 1929 Max Ernst published La Femme 100 têtes, the first of his collage-novels: one hundred and forty-seven plates cut from nineteenth-century engravings and recomposed according to dream logic. In 1956 the book was reissued by Éditions de l'Œil, the house founded by Georges and Rosamond Bernier in the wake of their magazine L'Œil. For the occasion Ernst composed an original collage for the cover.
This is that piece. The nude, the green cup and the yellow veils take up the grammar of the 1929 book, heightened here with gouache and ink. At the bottom, the dedication “Pour Peggy” is addressed to Rosamond Bernier, whom those close to her called Peggy. The work is thus both an Ernst original and the record of an editorial collaboration.
Rosamond Bernier kept the collage until her death. In 1975 she lent it to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for the Max Ernst retrospective curated by Diane Waldman, where it appeared as number 249.
The piece converses with ACL-002, a copy of the 1956 edition for which it provided the cover.
