Max Ernst
Frederick
Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage – A Centennial Celebration. The
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, May 14 – July 31 2005, no cat.
American
Photographs: Selections From The Hallmark Photographic Collection at the
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Mulvane Art Museum, Topeka, KS, September 19 –
29, 2006, no cat.
Rotation 15. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,
Kansas City, MO, June 19, 2013 - January 5, 2014, no cat.
Rotation 22. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, August 10, 2016- January 8, 2017, no cat.
To make this evocative portrait of the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, Frederick Sommer posed the artist against a weathered wooden backdrop. He then combined this negative with another, an image of a rough-hewn rock surface. When printed together, the two images meld into a singular, psychological portrait of the aging fifty-five-year-old artist.
Sommer and Ernst were friends with shared artistic sensibilities. They first met in Los Angeles in 1941, but became closer after Ernst and his wife, the artist Dorothea Tanning, moved to Sedona, Arizona in 1946. Sommer, who lived in nearby Prescott, was encouraged by Ernst to explore the techniques of free association and automatism, which influenced his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s.
Given by the Hall Family Foundation to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2005.
