The Alchemy of the Image: Max Ernst’s Books from the Collection of Mark Bashmakov

On 14 June 2019, the exhibition “The Alchemy of the Image: Max Ernst’s Books from the Collection of Mark Bashmakov” opened in the General Staff building of the State Hermitage.

The exhibition presents around 30 publications including early collage illustrations for the poems of Paul Éluard, “novels in collage”, sheets from the Natural History series, engravings and lithographs on texts by Antonin Artaud, Jacques Prévert, Lewis Carroll and other authors who belong to the Surrealists’ circle or served as beacons for the exponents of that tendency.

Opening the exhibition, Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, said: “Our Surrealist year in the Hermitage is painting and a series of books. It is a unique form of our museum activity when the museum and a collector combine state and private partnership and develop a programme for such a rare thing as the livre d’artiste. We are proud of the fact that unique book collections are being used with us on a European scale.”

Mikhail Ivanovich Bashmakov, the collector, commented: “This is the eleventh exhibition of books in the Hermitage. What aspect of Ernst was it that attracted me? He is a brilliant inventor. That manifests itself particularly in the new means of artistically creating the image – in the books. The book was one of the main platforms where his ideas were realized. He is not simply an exponent of Surrealism: he is the one that created the tendency.”

The exhibition continues a programme devoted to the books of Surrealist artists that began in March 2019 with a display of works by André Masson. It has been conceived as a parallel to the exhibition “Max Ernst. The Paris Years” that is opening in the Twelve-Column Hall of the New Hermitage but covers a considerably longer span of time (1920s–70s). The curators of the exhibition are Mikhail Vitalyevich Balan, a researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art, Yulia Grigoryevna Lukyanova, a junior researcher in the same department, and Mark Ivanovich Bashmakov, the collector and an advisor to the General Director of the State Hermitage.

More about the exhibition