Max Ernst - Retrospective

Max Ernst - Retrospective

A retrospective exhibition in homage to Max Ernst, the great surviving figure of Dada and Surrealism, was long overdue in New York and in Paris. While considering such possibilities, the Guggenheim Museum was approached in 1972. by Jean and Dominique de Menil, who offered their unequaled Max Ernst collection for an American museum circuit including The Rice Museum, Houston, the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge. We seized the opportunity eagerly but proposed to enlarge upon the de Menil contingent with additional loans. The result of this transformation was the most comprehensive Max Ernst retrospective ever attempted. It consists of approximately 300 paintings, collages, frottages, sculptures and illustrated books, one fourth of these from the Menil Family Collection. The total selection occupies four ramps and adjoining spaces within Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral structure. This exhibition plan was submitted to Pontus Hulten, the recently appointed Director of the Department des Arts Plastiques of the Centre Beaubourg in Paris, and promptly translated into a commitment to render analogous homage to Max Ernst by presenting the Guggenheim show at the Grand Palais in the spring and summer of 1975. A retrospective of such scope and importance engages extraordinary efforts and exertions within and outside the museum with which these acknowledgements can deal only in the most summary manner. Loans, funds and cap-abilities, each in full measure, are needed and their generous provision should, therefore, be part of this record. The lenders must be mentioned at the outset since the mounting of the exhibition is due, above all, to their generous cooperation. The Guggenheim is aware of the sacrifices it imposes when owners of important works of art, whether private or institutional, are approached for loans and, therefore, wishes to acknowledge with emphatic gratitude an indebtedness assumed on behalf of a large public. Crucial also for the successful realization of the project was the generous help received from the National Endowment for the Arts. The sizeable financial aid extended in recent years by that agency of the federal government to art museums has made it possible to continue with programs that would otherwise already be casualties of inflation and recession. The Max Ernst retrospective is an outstanding example of the Endowment's beneficial functioning.