How well-known was "The Elephant Celebes" in 1934?
July 5, 2017 11:39 AM   Subscribe

I'm trying to find out how likely it is that an American artist working in 1934 would have seen Max Ernst's 1921 painting "The Elephant Celebes". I know that it was first displayed in America in 1936—would that have been the first time it was seen by the American public? Is there any way to find out if it appeared in an American book or magazine before then?
posted by Chenko to Media & Arts (2 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: The earliest reference I can find in Google Books to the painting is in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism by Georges Hugnet, published 1936 (there's a hit in The New Yorker from 1925, but I'm pretty sure the date is wrong). The earliest reference to the painting on newspapers.com is from 1968 in the Los Angeles Times. I would say very unknown.
posted by dilaudid at 3:46 PM on July 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


An American artist might have visited Paris and met Ernst -- or Paul Eluard, who apparently owned Celebes throughout the 20s and 30s. Ernst also contributed to a lot of different avant-garde art/literary journals that an American might have read (Minotaure, transition, La Révolution surréaliste, Littérature, etc.), but I can't tell if any of them reproduced that particular painting; I skimmed through some scans of La Révolution surréaliste and didn't see it (lots of di Chirico, though, who was an influence on Celebes). Hugnet's L'Esprit dada dans la peinture, which discusses Ernst, was serialized in Cahiers d'Art in 1932-34, but again, I don't know if that specific painting appeared. So, not impossible, but not likely.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 5:36 PM on July 6, 2017


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