Sign for a School for Pirates

Titled on the stone lower left. Hand signed by the artist in pencil "Max Ernst", lower right.   Numbered in pencil "50/250", lower left.   Reproduction of the right half of a 1958 Max Ernst painting entitled "Diptychon für eine Piratenschule". Printed by Mourlot Frères, Paris. Published by Galerie Lucie Weill, Paris. Catalogue reference: Spies/Leppien A12

German artist, Max Ernst, served in the army for his country only to return home from the First World War disillusioned by the atrocities of the war and the barbarism of society.  He began to see logic and reason as the two leading factors that caused the conflict, and adopted ideas of anarchy and irrationality instead.  In 1920, he and Hans Arp began the Cologne Dada group, radically protesting against the values of the bourgeoisie that he felt were responsible for the war.  Ernst was then invited to France by the head of the Parisian Surrealist group, André Breton. While living in Paris, he befriended Tristan Tzara and became one of the leading members of the Surrealists until he left the movement in 1938. Ernst was then interned in a French prison camp in 1939 on the accusation of spying. Upon his escape, he moved to New York City in 1941 and married the famous art collector, Peggy Guggenheim. Moved to Arizona with Dorothea Tanning in 1946. Max Ernst then sailed from New Orleans to Europe in 1949, and lived in Europe as a French citizen from 1958 on.

Ernst’s painting, Sign for a School for Pirates, demonstrates his preoccupation with a disintegrated world, and his concern with the human condition as it relates to separation, loss, and reconstruction. The solitary central figure, the predominant use of blues, the geometric shapes and unsightly figures found in the lithograph, Sign for a School for Pirates, express the driving forces of the psyche, which the Ernst constantly tried to explore in his works.