Möwenflug

A seagull in flight, without a seagull or seagulls? Max Ernst was one of the pioneers of Dadaism and Surrealism in the 1910s and 1920s. His fanciful pictorial world, which gives form to myth and the unconscious, exercised a great influence on successive generations of artists. No less influential was his innovative use of techniques such as collage and frottage—a graphic process developed by Ernst which consisted in pressing paper onto a textured surface, for example wood, in order to reveal its structure.

In 1941, Ernst fled to the USA to escape the National Socialists. His late work, which began after his return to France in 1953 and which includes »Seagulls Flying«, frequently displayed light colors and an emphasis on the painterly structure. Applying the paint with a spatula, Ernst covered the entire picture with a network of blue-white triangles. His image approaches the borders of abstraction yet retains a representational character, with the blue circle and the lower third of the picture awakening associations with landscape motifs.

In his late work, Ernst continued to reject a purely abstract formal language, while the title of this work illustrates the artist’s ability to generate ambiguity—after all, what are we witnessing here: the flight of one seagull or many?