Max Ernst, le Jardin de la France

He is one of the most cosmopolitan artists of the XXth century: born in Germany, in love with a Spanish girl (who would become Dali’s famous Gala), with an English one (Leonora Carrington) and an American one (Peggy Guggenheim), Dadaist and Surrealist in Paris, naturalized American in 1948, Max Ernst returned to France in 1953. With his new companion, Dorothea Tanning, he settled in Huismes, in the Touraine region, the «garden of France». The catalogue that accompanies an exhibition at the museum of Beaux-Arts in Tours shows the creative vitality of the artist’s last years: the large sculptures in very white tufa, the rubbings, the embossed collages and the close links built with his colleagues – Matta or Calder, who lived at Saché – as well as the town councilors of the region, among them Michel Debré who commissioned a fountain for Amboise.

•Max Ernst, le Jardin de la France, collective work, Silvana Editoriale, 2009, 212 p., 28 €, ISBN : 978-2-90333-118-4