Sans titre

This drawing was originally conceived as a preparatory study for the cover and title page of Peggy Guggenheim’s seminal publication Art of This Century, published in New York in 1942. Issued in conjunction with the opening of Guggenheim’s celebrated gallery of the same name, the publication brought together works by leading figures of the European avant garde and their American contemporaries, reflecting the extraordinary convergence of artistic talent in wartime New York. Ernst, who had arrived in the United States in 1941, played a central role in this transatlantic exchange. The present composition, with its fluid, interlocking contours and biomorphic forms, exemplifies the artist’s ability to suggest multiple figures and identities through an economy of line. As Dr. Jürgen Pech has observed, the lightly drawn passages reveal the work’s preparatory character. Ernst modified the design slightly, adjusting its contours and introducing an additional circular element before its reproduction in the publication.

The work acquired a second life around 1950, when Ernst appears to have torn the original drawing into an irregular shape and mounted it against a contrasting black background. Dr. Pech has suggested that this striking intervention may have been conceived as a playful response to Marcel Duchamp’s provocative cover for the 1947 Surrealist exhibition catalogue Le Surréalisme en 1947, which featured a three-dimensional, tactile breast mounted against a black ground. Ernst and Dorothea Tanning had returned to France between August 1949 and October 1950, providing a plausible occasion for his encounter with Duchamp’s design.