Lot 32 D

The Peter Schneppenheim Collection

With six works by Max Ernst, comprising three paintings, one sculpture (Lots 32-35) and two works on paper (Lots 211, 212, Auction 1248, 5 June 2024), selected works from one of the most important and extensive collections of the Franco-German artist - the Schneppenheim Collection - are being offered for sale. The initiator of this collection was the Cologne physician Dr Peter Schneppenheim (1926-2021), who had collected the works over decades on the national and international art market. The collector's persistent and constructive commitment also led to the founding of the Max Ernst Museum in his hometown of Brühl in 2005. His extensive collection of graphic works, illustrated books and select paintings formed the basis of this unique artists' museum.
For almost two decades, Peter Schneppenheim was head physician at the Heilig-Geist Hospital in Cologne-Longerich. He found balance and fulfilment in both music and art, particularly in the works of the painter, graphic artist and sculptor Max Ernst, who was born in Brühl in 1891 and whose work he had often encountered there and in Cologne. One of the first works that he had consciously noticed, and which immediately made him smile, was the collage ‘C'est le chapeau qui fait l'homme’ from 1920. However, the key experience for the acquisition of his works was the first renowned German retrospective in 1951 at Augustusburg Castle in Brühl. Schneppenheim was immediately fascinated by the variety of pictorial themes and techniques: "In my enthusiasm for the unusual, previously unseen works of art, probably also euphorically inspired after having just passed my state examination, I had the idea of acquiring paintings by this artist myself - initially a daring pipe dream on the salary of a young medical assistant, until I had enough for my first works on paper." (quoted from: Max Ernst. Graphische Welten, exhib. cat. Brühl 2004, p. 10).
Schneppenheim's initial enthusiasm for Max Ernst never waned - on the contrary, his increasing interest in the artist's life and work, in his innovative pictorial techniques and literary horizons, led over time to systematic acquisitions with the aim of covering his graphic oeuvre as completely as possible. The purchase of predominantly graphic works was - at least initially - a conscious decision. From the outset, Schneppenheim demonstrated an impressive eye for quality and uniqueness and selected Ernst's primary works on paper. For the first time, in 1968, he also decided to purchase an oil painting and acquired the landscape ‘Les antipodes du paysage’ – now to be offered for sale – (Lot 34) through the renowned gallery owner Fritz Valentien in Stuttgart, who specialised in Max Ernst. This painting is also significant because it formed the starting point for the collection's thematic focus on landscapes.
A special event in the 1970s was Schneppenheim's personal meeting with Max Ernst and his wife Dorothea Tanning on the occasion of a Rhine trip in 1971, which the Cologne gallery owners Hein and Eva Stünke had organised for the artist and his clients. By the time of Max Ernst's death on 1st April 1976, the collection had been expanded with substantial works.
A highlight for Schneppenheim was the first public exhibition of his collection in 1990 at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In 2001, the Kreissparkasse Köln acquired the graphic holdings of the collection, which became part of the ‘Max Ernst Foundation’. Four years later, a "lifelong dream" came true for the collector with the opening of the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl.

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Mobiles Herbarium

The best known and most beautiful work from the important series of overpaintings that Max Ernst created during his Dada period in Cologne

For Max Ernst 1919 marked a decisive turning point that would determine the course of his artistic future. His encounter with the metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà led him to turn away from his previous expressionist painting. Appalled at the prevailing conditions of society and conventional currents in art, he founded the Cologne Dada group together with Johannes Theodor Baargeld and Hans Arp. They published the weekly magazine “Der Ventilator” which, like the Dada exhibition presented by the Kölnischer Kunstverein in November 1919, was forbidden by the British military government.
Ernst’s art became defined by the Dadaist idea of seizing on images and objects from the world of everyday life, modifying them through artistic means and loading them with entirely different levels of meaning. In doing so, he made use of wood assemblage, stereotype printing, rubbings and, from 1920, overpainting.
His source for this form of creative transformation was provided by a chance discovery, the “Bibliotheca Paedagogica”, a catalogue of educational resources presenting extensive visual materials for illustrating the field of science in schools. He describes the effect that this find had on him in his memoirs: “1919. On a rainy day in Cologne, the catalogue of the institute for educational resources attracted my attention. I saw advertisements for models of all kinds: mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, palaeontological and so on. Elements so disparate in nature that the absurdity of their accumulation confused the eye and the mind. Elicited hallucinations which invested the depicted objects with new, rapidly shifting meanings. I suddenly felt my ‘visual capacity’ become so intensified that I saw the re-emerging objects on a new ground.” (Max Ernst, cited in: DADAMAX, op. cit., p. 226). Max Ernst created around 44 overpaintings in 1920/1921: in addition to the works based on the catalogue of teaching resources, these also included larger ones on display panels and wallpapers.
“Mobiles Herbarium” is one of the most beautiful and famous pieces from this group of works. It was created on a plate from the catalogue’s section on botany (see comp. ill.). The artist has transformed the colourless schematic drawings presented in the plate into a variety of tree blossoms in a coloured, magical landscape. He has revised the drawings of plants not just by adding colour but also by adding trunks and stems, and they are situated within a broad plane featuring a mesa set off against the luminous, turquoise-blue sky above it. Ernst has thus placed these parts of plants, which had been torn out of context, back into the soil, so to speak, and provided them with a novel type of autonomy. In the right half of the picture, mechanical elements like supports, weights, pendulums and belts have been inscribed into the plants and provide the organic vegetation with a technological component that thematises the mobility of the title but perhaps also the incessant changes of natural processes. In a poetic manner, Max Ernst has caused a fairy-tale world of enigmatic beauty to emerge out of these mundane illustrations.