ABOUT THE WORK

Beginning in 1936, Max Ernst painted a series of intricately detailed canvases composed of tangled, jungle-like undergrowth and a bizarrely animated vegetative world. With a total of fourteen paintings, Ernst’s “jungle painting” series reflected on the political chaos in Europe and the subconscious fears of the human mind. Three paintings in this series are ironically titled La joie de vivre (The Joy of Life), including the painting shown.

Max Ernst's jungle series plunges into a surreal world intertwined with intricately detailed foliage. Ernst's lush vegetative world takes root from Dürer's renowned Das grosse Rasenstück (The Great Piece of Turf), a watercolor masterpiece from 1503. Inheriting this Northern European tradition of botanical observation, Ernst meticulously renders natural elements, laying the groundwork for his surrealistic reinterpretation of flora and fauna.

Before La joie de vivre, Ernst embarked on the Ville entière series in 1935, depicting cities atop plateaus succumbing to nature's reclaiming embrace. This transition symbolizes civilization's cyclic rise and fall, as captured in La ville entière (1936 – 1937), the series' culmination, as nature's tendrils encroach on urban foundations, signaling the inevitable demise of human constructs.

In La joie de vivre, Ernst explores the mysterious and sometimes sinister manifestations of the plant kingdom. These paintings depict a progression from benign plant forms to predatory creatures, metaphorically reflecting life's struggles amid Europe's chaotic political landscape in the 1930s. In the right-hand corner of the composition, a bird-shaped figure blends among Ernst’s tangled jungle. This bird, a recurring motif in his work, is symbolic of Ernst’s subconscious dreamscapes. Stemming from a childhood experience, Ernst associated birds with themes of mortality and renewal. The bird often appears as Ernst's alter ego, Loplop, a character that guides Ernst through his creative subconscious. In this particular painting, the winding vines and branches actively enclose the terrified bird, depicting the anxiety of a society on the brink of demise. This intertwining of nature with human consciousness metaphorically explores the dangerous aspects of both the natural world and the human psyche. The bird's presence not only reflects Ernst's personal narrative but also symbolizes a quest for freedom amidst confinement, embodying the dualities of creation and destruction, safety and danger, and the tangible and the dreamlike.