New York
Chess Figures (1944), the wooden chess set that Max Ernst made while vacationing in Great River, Long Island, greeted visitors to “Max Ernst/Paramyths: Sculpture, 1934– 1967.” Like Marcel Duchamp, Ernst was a player of a game that conscripts intellectual wit to commandeer abstract warriors through never-ending configurations of battle. It’s play, but serious play, and that’s precisely how Ernst regarded his sculptural output—as a spirited interlude to overcome creative block. “Whenever I reach an impasse in my painting, which happens time and time again, sculpture always helps me out,” he once remarked to the filmmaker Peter Shamoni. The chess set, its wooden playing pieces inspired by ordinary objects and simple stacked geometric shapes—spoons, triangles, circles, and crescents—provided the basic visual vocabulary for the freestanding bronze works in this show …see the entire review in the print version of May’s Sculpture magazine.
