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Arizona Dream: Maxime Rossi Meets Max Ernst

Julia Drost
German Forum for Art History, Paris

Surrealism had a lasting impact on the art of the twentieth century with its
innovative and combinational artistic methods and with an aesthetic praxis that did
away with conventional boundaries between genres as well as moral hierarchies.
These revolutionary changes and transformations have continued to exert an
influence on image production right up to most recent times. Taking the French
contemporary artist Maxime Rossi as an example, we can see clearly how following
generations have been influenced by Surrealism and how they have received it. Rossi
refers solely to one protagonist from the surrealist movement, Max Ernst, who in
his work drew on an inexhaustible repertoire of art-historical references, as well as
from pictures from all possible cultural and social contexts, and created something
never seen before by putting them together in an innovative manner. What does his
work mean for contemporary artists? In what way does his new creative principle
of drawing upon already existing pictures, objects and forms, open up new artistic
paths and far-reaching possibilities of expression? And how does his work inspire
the generation of video artists of the twenty-first century in particular? Historical
Surrealism falls within the period of early cinematic experiments, something that
Ernst was very interested in. His enthusiasm brought him minor roles, in Luis
Bunuel’s L’âge d’or (1929), and Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money can buy (1947). What
possibilities for surrealist design would the digital capabilities of today’s media open
up for the artists who only had celluloid in the first decades of the twentieth century?
In the example of Maxime Rossi, who was born in Paris in 1980, one can
trace the proliferation of principles of artistic innovation that were considerably
influenced by Max Ernst and by Surrealism. Rossi’s 20-minute video Real Estate
Astrology (2015), which was produced in the color filter technique of anaglyph
projection, is a direct reference to the collection of curios that come together
Julia Drost: jdrost@dfk-paris.org
Copyright © 2019 (Julia Drost). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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to create the images of Max Ernst (Fig. 1).1 The screening of his video was the
main feature of a monographic exhibition of the same name by the artist in the
Galerie Allen in Paris in the spring of 2015, where other works and sculptures
were presented alongside the video installations.2 The video had already been
shown before at the invitation of the curator Philippe-Alain Michaud, at the Centre
Pompidou in Paris.3 In Rossi’s video, we follow Ernst’s footsteps in the late 1950s,
which take us through the Arizona desert to Sedona, a town situated at the pass
leading out of Oak Creek Canyon in the Verde Valley. It was here, halfway between
Phoenix and Las Vegas, that Ernst lived in exile from 1946 to 1953 with American
painter Dorothea Tanning.4
By choosing this biographical chapter in the life of Ernst, Rossi again
demonstrates his interest in the perfect connection between the contemporary and
the historical while also overcoming the rules of time and space, something that is
characteristic of his work. For example, in 2010 he staged a music score by Frédéric
Chopin in an installation in the Paris cemetery Père Lachaise.5 The video Sister Ship
(2015) gives a visual and musical interpretation of a biography of the Californian
pop and anti-culture artist Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986), which is embedded within
the structure of the documentary film Pygmées Blues (2012) by Renaud Barret and
Florent de la Tullaye, which is itself about the population living along the Congo.6
Clearly apparent in Rossi’s selection of themes is a predilection for historical artists,

Fig. 1. Maxime Rossi, video-stills from Real Estate Astrology, 2015, anaglyph 3D video, sound, 20:40
minutes. © Maxime Rossi, Galerie Allen, Paris (2019)

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whose works he uses as a point of departure for his own work. What ultimately
results is a hybrid whole that incorporates different sources and materials and
oscillates between the banal and the fantastical, and between fiction and reality. Rossi
consistently brings together what is essentially alien as a stylistic means, whether
through historical distance or because of the distinctiveness of things or topics.
And in doing so, he follows Ernst’s collage works. A similar trans-epochal dialogue
between the historical conditions of Ernst’s exile on the one hand, and the actual
present on the other, also runs through Real Estate Astrology, giving us two periods
within the unit of the video.
Maxime Rossi went to Sedona twice, in 2012 and 2014, and visited the places
where Ernst and Tanning lived. It is striking that both Tanning’s artistic work and
her person are left out of the film, although her memoirs are a central historical
source. In his pursuit, Rossi was inspired by visits to the Sedona Heritage Museum,
and by newspaper articles and reports from contemporaries of the time.7 The family
of sculptors Bob and Mary Kittredge have lived there for several generations.8
Tanning remembers the two artists in her notes as “[o]ur very first Sedona friends
(…) who rented out cottages (…) built incredibly of giant boulders by Bob, an atlas
of a man.”9 The Kittredges rented out cottages to tourists, also to the “Russian
friend Vladimir Nabokov…[who] spent some time at the Kittredge hideaway,”
Tanning stated as she jotted down some memories.10 Rossi met the couple’s son, Bob
Kittredge Jr., who told him about a hut located on Hopi land in a remote canyon
where Ernst is supposed to have spent time every now and again. After negotiating
with The Nature Conservancy in Sedona, the artist obtained permission to look for
the hut in a protected area in the middle of the reservation. In Rossi’s Real Estate
Astrology, the search for Ernst’s alleged hut becomes a climax of the film, which
otherwise does not follow a narrative.
In the first sequences of the film, the camera pans, accompanied by slow
esoteric saxophone music, across a reddish landscape which is contrasted with
a green-toned image. Rossi uses the technique of the anaglyph and experiments
with the medium of stereo film, which was very popular in the fifties. He uses two
cameras, each of them equipped with a color filter, whose images are cross-faded
in a montage (Fig. 2). Two “eyes”—one red, the other green—are superimposed
and create a disconcerting effect. The blurriness of the settings causes further
disorientation. In some places Rossi’s montage captures the landscape with its
massive rock formations in monumental perspective of sheer endless expansion,
while in other places he shows close ups of street views, houses and their interiors,
as well as other traces of human civilization. However, no inhabitants are to be
seen. Both camera views are superimposed again and again. Images of nature and
buildings, landscape views and the interiors of huts, appear simultaneously, one
flowing into the other, overlapping and intersecting.
A deep, suggestive voice-over accentuates the redness of the landscape and

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Fig. 2. Maxime Rossi, video-stills from Real Estate Astrology, 2015, anaglyph 3D video, sound, 20:40
minutes. © Maxime Rossi, Galerie Allen, Paris (2019)

multiplies its effect on the viewer in a veritable coloristic transmission of heat. One
is reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s red-toned view of the world, a figurative
expression of how humans are rooted in the art and science of their cultures.11 The
white light, Wittgenstein’s metaphor for the theological spiritual ideal, stands in
contrast to the colored lights of different cultures. The artificial red in Real Estate
Astrology stands in peculiar contrast to the overwhelming experience of nature that
Sedona presents to its visitors. Ernst and Tanning were repeatedly impressed by the
intense colors and the redness of the desert landscape of Arizona: “The colors are
almost accurate,” wrote Ernst, for example, in a 1949 postcard to his sister Loni,
“in reality, the dirt and rocks are an intense red. Below right are a couple of blue
cypresses (in reality even bluer).”12 Tanning describes Sedona in her autobiography as
“the place of crystal air and red rocks, that reared under pure blue.”13 In other places,
she evokes the intense effect that the landscape has on the psyche: “Imagine the
pure excitement of living in such a place of ambivalent elements. Overhead a blue
so triumphant it penetrated the darkest space of our brain. Underneath a ground
ancient and cruel with stones, only stones and cactus spines playing possum. […]
The red dust, the junipers, infinitesimal desert blooms, the stones. Even stars shed
perfume with their light when we watched them slide slowly across the sky.”14
Rossi’s interest in Ernst in the solitude of the desert however goes back
further than Real Estate Astrology. In 2012, he produced the 8-minute video, Two Owls
on a Mountain, and a Snake at the Bank. A starting point for this cinematic inspiration
was the film Mein Vagabundieren meine Unruhen (literally, “my straying my unrest”),
filmed by Peter Schamoni (1937-2011) on the occasion of Ernst’s 100th birthday

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in 1991.15 Schamoni’s film portrait brings Ernst to life for 100 minutes in a collage
comprised of documentary film, fiction, photographs and works. In the Sedona
sequence, Schamoni dispatches an actor playing Ernst through the rocky landscape
in an old car bearing a load wrapped in black blankets. The scene obviously refers
to a scene passed down by Roland Penrose: “Max’s sales had practically dried up.
He would set off on long journeys in his car towing a trailer loaded with paintings
wrapped in blankets and return without one sold. He decided to paint small
works that could be easily transported in a suitcase.”16 Using the footage method,
a technique that variably reuses archival film material, Rossi places this journey at
the center of his video (Fig. 3). He even incorporates the encounter with some
locals on horseback from Schamoni’s film. Rossi’s engagement with sources beyond
Schamoni’s film is apparent. In his letters Ernst revealed, and his biographical
notes express his admiration, not only for the colors of Sedona, but repeatedly, for
the richness of the fauna: “The first fascinating thing about the place was […] the
abundance and variety of wild animals—blue herons, wolverines, snakes with and
without rattles, the Gila monster, deer, bears, antelope, wild horses, mountain lions,
beavers, coyotes, cardinals, canaries, blue jays, roadrunners, etc.”17 Rossi films fauna
in open nature in Two Owls on a Mountain and a Snake at the Bank. We also encounter
animals in Real Estate Astrology, but the desert animals have now made way for pets
and domestic animals, cats, birds, poodles, sheep, cows, and horses.

Fig. 3. Maxime Rossi, video-stills from Two Owls on a Mountain, and a Snake at the Bank, 2012, HD
video, 8:40 minutes. © Maxime Rossi, Galerie Allen, Paris (2019)

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The Arizona Dream Becomes Reality
The coarse and dusty desert landscape inspired Ernst in exile. It finds its way
into his œuvre in numerous rocky landscapes, in views of the Colorado River, and in
his panoramas of mountain ranges. Titles like Arizona Red (1950) convey the intense
impression that the red of the desert made on the artist. Using the decalcomania
technique in his painting, Colline inspirée (1949; former collection of Dorothea
Tanning), Ernst achieves a visual effect in which the glistening heat of the desert
air seems to cause the landscape to flicker before our eyes (Fig. 4). Rossi’s anaglyphs
appear to evoke a similar optical uncertainty. When Rossi composes comparable
monumental landscape scenes with his camera, this is the result of overwhelming
experiences with nature and his knowledge of Ernst’s paintings. As contemporaries
have already remarked, Ernst’s rocky canyon landscapes are akin to the landscapes
that the painter already completed in Europe in the mid-thirties. Patrick Waldberg
states that at that time, he had already “envisioned the fantastic mountain range
he did not yet know in a way that was alarmingly real” in the fossilized landscapes
of the Villes entières.18 For Ernst’s son Jimmy, the move to Sedona was virtually
predestined: “The day he decided to settle in Arizona, I’ll never forget. Back in
the middle forties, we all flew out to California, and we bought a car and decided
to drive back. And driving back across Arizona […] he stopped the car […]. [H]e
looked up at the landscape and he sort of stiffened. He was studying one of his own

Fig. 4. Max Ernst, Inspired Hill (Colline inspirée), 1950, oil on canvas, 28 3/4 × 36 1/4 in. (73 × 92.1
cm). © Dorothea Tanning Foundation, New York, USA/ADAGP

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landscapes. There was absolutely no doubt about it. The landscape he was looking
at—he had been painting it years ago in Europe. […] From that moment on, he
knew that he was going to settle in Arizona. And when he built the foundation of his
house in Sedona, somebody took a photograph of it […] [i]t’s as if he had taken [a]
painting and translated it into the real landscape.”19
Reading this account, one is instinctively reminded of a surrealesque scene
from Emir Kusturica’s movie, Arizona Dream (1993). The main character Axel
Blackmar, who has left the Moloch New York to go to his Uncle Leo’s wedding in
Arizona, spends most of the long journey on the back seat of a convertible sleeping
off his intoxication. When he finally opens his eyes, the expanse of the dry and dusty
desert landscape passes him in a half-dream, half-waking, state. As if encountering a
vision, he stares in disbelief at the cars perched on columns and lining the edge of
the highway. He observes his enthralled uncle, played by Jerry Lewis, as he strokes
the cars lovingly with a broom, in dance-like movements. At the end of the film,
Blackmar, played by the young Johnny Depp, decides not to return to New York, and
instead takes over his uncle’s car business.20
Real Estate
Ernst and Tanning, who met in New York at the end of 1942, spent the
summer months of 1943 at a guest ranch in Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona. They
began to harbor the thought of not returning to New York, and in 1946, decided
to leave the city for good: “Max and Dorothea had endured a tough time following
Max’s acrimonious split from Peggy Guggenheim in New York and they had come
to Arizona to build a new life,” wrote their friend, the painter Roland Penrose.21 The
hot, dry climate of the desert was good for Dorothea’s health and Ernst was pleased
to exchange the increasing isolation of the exiles’ metropolis (as occasioned by his
collapsed marriage) for “the genuine isolation of Arizona.”22
In 1946 Max Ernst acquired a plot of land in Sedona. At first he built a
small wooden house. Somewhat later, when water and electricity were available,
he reinforced the pinewood construction with stone and expanded it.23 The prize
money that Ernst had recently won in New York in a competition on the subject
of Saint Anthony (also an Ernst painting of 1945) allowed him to purchase the plot
on a hill.24 Ernst’s painting’s subject, the hermit’s vision, appears to anticipate his
own biography. We are reminded of the episcopal ascetic who left the metropolis of
Alexandria in order to experience all manner of visions during twenty years in the
Arabian desert. Hopi is located in the immediate vicinity of Sedona, and Ernst was
repeatedly drawn to these Native lands. Dorothea reported on forays into Indian
caves with wall paintings and rock carvings, and into canyons. In particular she
recounts a multi-day dinghy trip through the rapids of the Colorado River, visits to
the pueblos, and a masked dance in Acoma.25 In Real Estate Astrology, the video’s setting
at Hopi creates a subtle connection to Ernst’s biography. Native cave paintings

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Fig. 5. Maxime Rossi, video-still from Real Estate Astrology showing the negative of a photograph by
John Kasnetzis, 2015, anaglyph 3D video, sound, 20:40 minutes. © Maxime Rossi, Galerie Allen, Paris
(2019)

appear briefly and illustrate the osmotic coalescence of different levels of time
and space. As is well known, Ernst’s interest in the indigenous cultures of the New
World began before he travelled there. This preoccupation and source of inspiration
had been apparent since the 1920s. In exile it only found new sustenance. In New
York Ernst frequently visited the Museum of the American Indian, founded by the
collector George Gustave Heye. Like his surrealist colleagues André Breton, Matta
and Tanguy, he acquired World art and indigenous art objects.26 On his first journey
with Peggy Guggenheim across the American continent he assembled a collection of
kachina dolls and visited an exhibition featuring works of Native Americans in San
Francisco. He was particularly enthusiastic: “Splendid! The best thing I have seen in
this country.”27
We must not forget that Ernst’s alter ego, the bird, is also an archetypical
figure of Hopi myth. Birds occasionally appear in Rossi’s film as ephemeral inserts
of these Ernstian representatives. With the exception of collages, which are based

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on already existing pictorial material, humans are represented by something else
throughout all the work of Max Ernst – most frequently by a bird. Just as Ernst tried
never to portray the human form directly, no humans appear in Real Estate Astrology.
Natural elements, roots and rock formations recall further motifs from his work. A
negative of the famous 1948 photograph by John Kasnetzis from the collection of
Bob Kittredge Jr., which shows Max and Dorothea with the monumental sculpture
Capricorn in a landscape soaked in light but totally out of focus, is also inserted by
Rossi as a historic document (Fig. 5). In this way Rossi creates associations and links
that sometimes directly, othertimes subtly, allude to Ernst’s past in Arizona and to his
artistic work.
As in a documentary film, we follow the eye of Rossi’s camera into the
previously mentioned stone hut (Fig. 6). Kittredge Jr. had reported to Rossi that it
served Ernst as a place to sleep whenever he came to the area to study the Native
Americans.28 According to him, a walking stick found in the hut belonged to Ernst.
Although we have no evidence of this narrative, Rossi has made it a central element
of his video. He inserts into the video the head of this stick (Fig. 7). In this way,
Rossi confirms the narrative of the local, suggesting that the stick’s horned form
is reminiscent of Capricorn and of the Dogon sculptures admired by Ernst.29 We
may never know if Ernst entered this hut. Due to lack of evidence it is more than
unlikely and looks more like a misplaced trail. Indeed, Rossi is playing a game in
constantly moving between historical reality and artistic invention and imagination,

Fig. 6. Maxime Rossi, video-still from Real Estate Astrology showing the assumed walking-stick of Max
Ernst, 2015, anaglyph 3D video, sound, 20:40 minutes. © Maxime Rossi, Galerie Allen, Paris (2019)

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Fig. 7. Maxime Rossi, video-still from Real Estate Astrology showing the cabin at Hopi Nation, 2015,
anaglyph 3D video, sound, 20:40 minutes. © Maxime Rossi, Galerie Allen, Paris (2019)

states which the viewer cannot distinguish. His dramaturgy abandons the format of
documentary narration which focuses on superficial realities, and instead approaches
the spirit of the place artistically—we could call it a visual concretization of the
hyperreal or surreal. In the video we follow the maelstrom of the artist’s suggestive
camera work.
Astrology
In Rossi’s video, a deep esoteric voice provides commentary in several
sequences offering astrological information on Ernst’s horoscope.30 This is the
voice of Haizen Page, an astrologer and jazz musician from Sedona whom Rossi
met on location and who also plays the saxophone music in the video. Page’s
pronouncements on Ernst’s astrological sign and personality have no connection
to the sequence of images; indeed, they sometimes seem to be in a contrapuntal
relation. Page explains the astrological significance of the planets Pluto and Mars,
as well as the Hindu god Râhu, and describes how Sedona’s stellar and planetary
constellations exerted an immense inspirational power upon Ernst and gave him
a “primitive energy.” He presents his statements as a correction of the horoscope
created for Ernst in 1930 by the artist Valentine Hugo, who was close to the
Surrealists.31 Hugo’s thème astrologique is demonstrably erroneous, since she employed
an incorrect hour for Ernst’s birth in her calculations. The astrologer’s explanations,
however, provide no real rectification. Rather, in the surrealistic manner of false

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trails, they lead us further astray. The desert astrologer’s elucidations are also
supported by false facts. What Page presented as based on “scientific” astrological
knowledge is, despite all manner of esotericism, in reality a narration of the kind
that would have pleased the Surrealists. The inclusion of these false trails marks
Rossi’s video as an “art”-work in its truest sense and also as a fiction. The format
of a superficially “documentary” film proves to be a stylistic medium for a deeper
Surrealism, and part of a collage-like whole.
Ernst’s work is also a cosmogony that requires the mystical in explaining
the world. Since the collages, frottages and paintings of the 1920s, the stars, the
horizon, the sun, earthquakes and the sea, and with them the powers of nature,
are always central to his work. In the illustrated book Maximiliana of 1964 Ernst
memorialized the misunderstood celestial researcher Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel.32
The interpretation of astrological signs, on the other hand, occupied him far less,
and then only with appropriate irony. “His tropic is disfloration,” Ernst announces
in his first autobiographical text from 1921, boasting that he knows the northern sky
well.33 In the 1941 special issue that the American magazine View dedicated to him,
Ernst’s horoscope is reproduced alongside the autobiographical text, “Some Data
on the Youth of M.E.”: “Cologne is situated just on the border of a wine-producing
region. North of Cologne is Beerland, south is wineland (Rhineland). Are we what
we drink?”34 Nonetheless, for all this ironic refraction, we also see the Ernst who
experienced the artistic impulse to create. In this autobiographic text he presents
himself as an artist who wishes to find a “new mythology.”
The mystical and zodiacal worlds were present to Ernst in Sedona, too.
Astrological motifs can be found in the wall friezes and yard of his house, which
Ernst decorated with heads, gargoyles, masks, animals, stars and signs, as well
as in the monumental sculpture Capricorn. This work appears in Rossi’s film as a
photographic negative in front of the Sedona landscape.35 Capricorn, with its “regally
enthroned, masculine hermaphrodite with a horned bull’s head and ceremonial
scepter,” reminds us of the star sign of Taurus.36 The fish-tailed mermaid at its
side, on the other hand, appears to have emerged from the universe of the friezedecorated house in the French provinces, in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, where Ernst
lived before his exile. Waldberg detects an homage to the beginnings of time in the
composition: “Between amphora and arrow— Aquarius and Sagittarius—jumps
Capricorn. A majestic constellation, a horned, manly, aggressive sign in the vastness
of the night.”37
Self-Portraits – The Meeting of Work and Truth
Henry Miller recognized “vestigial traces of a suprasensorial world” in
Ernst’s figures, chimeras and landscapes and compared the imaginary power of the
artist with that of visionaries and mystics.38 Nonetheless, in the case of the painter,
this suprasensorial vision reveals itself in paintings, that is, in shadows of what

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can be experienced suprasensorially. For this reason, Ernst’s self-representations
can be better understood as forms of reassurance and self-determination than as
simple stylizations. It is hence revealing to examine photographs that show the
artist wrapped in a blanket amidst the desert landscape of Arizona, or, in his house
alongside Native artifacts such as masks. The View special issue also enacts this
form of (self-)representation of the artist.39 The stylized depiction as a shaman,
an intermediary between the here and the beyond, finds a correspondence in the
landscape and in Native customs. As Samantha Kavky writes, Ernst’s “engagement
with Native American culture was not limited to collecting or formal borrowing.
Ernst’s shamanic persona facilitated a psychological reciprocity with the landscape of
the American West.”40 From this perspective, Ernst’s appropriation of native custom
perhaps served to process his exile, a means of growing closer to the host country
of America and its traditions, through a child’s playful means.
Rossi’s desert journey is also posthumously inscribed within this pictorial,
visionary strategy of self-reassertion. The footage of Ernst’s rich and shimmering
life is characterized by moments of clarity and of masking, by dead ends and
detours, by a multitude of tensions, and by low blows and high points. In depicting
these moments, Rossi’s video consistently remains a collage-like game, with its own
distinct artistic methods. The joy in deception and false trails, the disconcerting
and unsettling of the viewer with incoherence, the anaglyph combination of
images that are otherwise not seen together—all are stylistic means borrowed from
Surrealism, and through technology, are imported into the twenty-first century. The
negative reverse of Kasnetzis’s photograph, the hut alleged to be Ernst’s, the Native
American cave, the birds and the sky, are all, within the slow and suggestive gliding
of the camera eye, real and imaginary reminiscences of, and associations with, the life
and work of Ernst. Together they render the issue of superficial reality inessential.
On the Fruitful Misery of Failure
After the search for traces in Sedona one thing remains clear: Max Ernst’s
years of self-imposed exile-in-nature, which at the same time means experiencing
another culture, find in their existential richness immediate expression in his œuvre.
Ernst’s “Anthony-like” period, full of visions, appears to have been a fruitful
isolation. It lasted only a limited time, and allowed for the rediscovery of the self.
There was no future in the desert for Ernst, since he needed a public in order to be
perceived as an artist.
If the protagonist Blackmar of Arizona Dream falls in love with the beautiful
Elaine Stalker in the desert, then the existential experiences on the Stalkers’ isolated
Arizona estate lead him to dream sequences, such as his dead uncle Leo’s trip to the
moon. These allow him to experience a wholly new world. Ernst’s years in Sedona
might be read as such an existential experience which allowed him him to overcome
the comprehensive catastrophe of the Second World War and the consequent

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dependencies he experienced in New York. But unlike Kusturica’s hero, there was
no future for him in the desert. Maxime Rossi’s filmic cross-section of this essential
period of Ernst’s life at his place of retreat, whose natural spirituality provided a
metaphysical counterweight to European cultural catastrophe, not only allows us to
pursue his traces in their intensity, but is itself a store of imaginative energy.
Translated by Lindsay-Jane Munro and Claudia Mesch

This essay is an extended and modified version of a recent article published in French: Julia Drost,
“Arizona Dream”, in Maxime Rossi, ed. Isabelle Bertolotti (Gent: Editions Adéra, 2018), 44-53. Since
their initial contact in 2015, the author and Maxime Rossi have had several discussions, and she has
reviewed numerous documents, in particular photos and papers from Sedona and the texts from the
monograph in progress. Joseph Allen, from Galerie Allen, assisted with obtaining the images. Markus
Castor and Martin Schieder had inspiring discussions with me about Rossi’s video. I would like to take
the opportunity to thank all of them here.
1 Maxime Rossi, Real Estate Astrology, 2015, anaglyph 3D video, Sound, 20 min. 40 seconds. The video
can be accessed on demand via the Galerie Allen in Paris: http://www.galerieallen.com
2 “Real Estate Astrology: Maxime Rossi,” March 28 to May 16, 2015, Galerie Allen, Paris. See the press
dossier: http://www.galerieallen.com/en/expositions/presentation/16/real-estate-astrology. After
two years of Psychology studies in Lyon, Rossi decided to change to the visual arts. He completed
his master’s degree at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, and at Concordia
University of Fine Arts in Montréal. For more biographical details see also http://www.galerieallen.
com/en/artistes/bio/2396/maxime-rossi.
3 A first public screening was organized by Philippe-Alain Michaud, Cinema 2, Centre Pompidou,
Paris, February 25, 2015. Since then, Real Estate Astrology has been screened internationally at many
locations: in 2017 as part of the monographic exhibition “Maxime Rossi: American Wedding,” at
the Musée d’art contemporain de Rochechouart (June 23 to September 19, 2017); at the festivals Les
Rencontres Internationales. Nouveau cinéma et art contemporain, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (January 12-17, 2016)
and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (June 13-18, 2017); as part of the group show “La Pergola.
Accrochage des collections,” Musée régional d’art contemporain Sérignan (October 21, 2017-June
10, 2018); as part of the film program of the Kunstverein München (September 9-30, 2016); in
the exhibition “Your Memories are our future,” accompanying the “Manifesta 11, hors-les-murs”
exhibition organized by the Palais de Tokyo in Zurich (June 9-24, 2016); in the solo exhibition
“Maxime Rossi. It’s a Zodiac Rain,” Galerie Tiziana di Caro, Naples (December 18, 2015-February 27,
2016); and as part of the group show “Spirit,” Bar du Bristol, Paris (April 29 – May 31 2015).
4 The literature is extensive. I therefore refer to the main historical sources: Max Ernst, Écritures (Paris:
Gallimard, 1970); Werner Spies, ed., Max Ernst. Life and Work (Cologne: Dumont, 2005); Dorothea
Tanning, Between Lives. An Artist and her World (New York/London: Norton, 2001). This is an
extended version of her first autobiography Dorothea Tanning, Birthday (Santa Monica/San Francisco:
The Lapis Press, 1986).
5 Pere Lachaise, 2010, felt-tipped pen on a music score by Chopin, paper and fabric, 140 x 100 cm,
Galerie Allen Paris. See Julien Fronsacq, “Faire chanter la critique,” in Maxime Rossi, ed. Isabelle
Bertolotti, (Gent: Editions Adéra, 2018), 9-11.
6 Sister Ship, 2015, HD video, color, stereo sound, 52 minutes. This refers to the following publication:

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Julie Ault, ed., Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (London: Four Corner Books, 2006). The
film mentioned is by Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye. See the articles by Marc Bernbekoff,
“Sainte-Maxime Rossi de Palma de Majorque”; Mouna Mékouar, “Maxime Rossi, Sister Ship, 52. Min.,
2015”; as well as Andrea Vilani, “Sister Ship: A Spirited Art” in Bertolotti, Rossi, 2018, 5-7; 114; 115.
7 The Sedona artist and hobbyist Bill Gunning, whom Rossi met in Sedona, set up the FOCH
(Friends of Capricorn Hill, Ltd.) initiative with the aim of buying back the house of Max Ernst and
Dorothea Tanning, which son Jimmy Ernst had inherited and sold, and opening it to the public. It is
important to note that there also exists an entire international field of art historians, anthropologists,
literary scholars, artists and critics who have taken up the subject of Ernst in Arizona, and of the
surrealist presence in the Americas, many of whom have published in the Journal of Surrealism and the
Americas. A major event was the conference “Surrealism and the American West” organized by JSA
editors, Claudia Mesch and Samantha Kavky, which took place on October 26-27, 2006 on Arizona
State University campus and included three panels which examined the larger topic of the importance
of Surrealism and Max Ernst to the American West, and included an excursion to the Ernst house
in Sedona. A second conference, “Surrealism and the Americas,” was convened at Rice University
in 2010. The “Friends of Capricorn Hill” initiative also involved the art historian Lanier Graham,
California State University East Bay, who was a friend of Dorothea Tanning.
8 Neil Morgan, “Oak Creek Canyon still called home by Kittredges,” McIntosh County Democrat, May 2,
1971.
9 Tanning, Between Lives, 141.
10 Ibid., 142.
11 “You can’t explain to a person what red is.” – “Red is not a compound – and what is red!? – We
just want to point to something red.” In Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der
Psychologie, Edition vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 1-603, 608.
12 Postcard from Max Ernst to his sister Loni, April 15, 1949, in Max Ernst. Fotografische Porträts und
Dokumente, ed. Jürgen Pech (Brühl: Stadt Brühl, 1991), 171.
13 Tanning, Between Lives, 96.
14 Ibid., 145.
15 A DVD in French was released in 2011 titled Max Ernst. Mes vagabondages, mes inquiétudes in the series
‘Collection Phares’ by Aube Elléouëtt-Breton, with a booklet ed. by Julia Drost.
16 Antony Penrose, Roland Penrose, the Friendly Surrealist, A Memoir (New York: Prestel, 2001), 134f.
17 Ernst, Écritures, 71.
18 Patrick Waldberg, Max Ernst (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert éditeur, 1958), 61.
19 Francine Du Plessix, “The Artist speaks. My Father, Max Ernst,” Art in America, vol. 56, n° 6
(November/December 1968): 54-61, 58.
20 See among others Katherine Dieckmann, “When Kusturica was away on business,” Film Comment,
vol. 33, n°5 (September-October 1997): 44-49; Jonathan Romney, “Magic Realism meets Tennessee
Williams,” New Statesman & Society, vol. 8, n° 359 (June 30, 1995): 33.
21 Penrose, Roland Penrose, 134-35.
22 Simone Arbois, “Visite à Max Ernst,” Paru, no. 59, (April 1950): 17-21, here 18.
23 Max Ernst. Skulpturen, Häuser, Landschaften, ed. Werner Spies (Cologne: Dumont, 1998), 158.
24 Albert Lewin (1894-1968) had offered a prize for his filming of the Maupassant novel The Private
Affairs of Bel Ami (1947) and, asserted himself in the jury, which was made up of Alfred H. Barr,
Marcel Duchamp and Sidney Janis, and Max Ernst, against other artists such as Salvador Dalí, Paul
Delvaux or Dorothea Tanning. The following artists took part in the competition: Ivan Albright,
Eugene Berman, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Leonor Fini, Louis Guglielmi,
Horace Pippin, Abraham Rattner, Stanley Spencer and Dorothea Tanning. See Susan Felleman,
Botticelli in Hollywood: The Films of Albert Lewin (New York: Twayne Pub., 1997), 65.
25 Tanning, Between Lives, 156.

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26 Sigrid Metken, “‘Dix-mille Peaux-Rouges…’ Max Ernst chez les Indiens d’Amérique du Nord,” in
Max Ernst Rétrospective, ed. Werner Spies (Munich: Prestel, 1991), 357-362, here 357.
27 In John Russell, Max Ernst. Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1967), 131.
28 Email from Maxime Rossi to the author, December 20, 2018.
29 Rossi in discussion with Rahma Khazam, Galerie Allen, April 2015.
30 Haizen Paige, an astrologist and saxophonist from Sedona, wrote and spoke his texts himself
commissioned to do so by Rossi. See http://haizen.com.
31 This horoscope can be accessed on André Breton’s homepage: http://www.andrebreton.fr/
work/56600100428620?back_rql=Any%20X%20ORDERBY%20FTIRANK%28X%29%20
DESC%20WHERE%20X%20has_text%20%22th%C3%A8me%20astrologique%20max%20
ernst%22&
32 Max Ernst, Maximiliana oder die illegale Ausübung der Astronomie, 1964, folder with 34 etchings.
33 Max Ernst, “Max Ernst,” Das Junge Rheinland 2nd issue (November 2, 1921), quoted after Ernst,
Écritures, 8.
34 Max Ernst, “Some Data on the Youth of M.E.,” View 2nd series, no. 1, special issue “Max Ernst”
(April 1942): 28.
35 Jürgen Pech, “Capricorn und die Maskenfriese von Sedona,“ in Max Ernst. Skulpturen, Häuser,
Landschaften (1998), 257-264, here 261.
36 Patrick Waldberg, “Max Ernst in Arizona,” in Hommage à Max Ernst (Wiesbaden: Ebeling Verlag,
1976), 59-61, here 59.
37 Waldberg, “Max Ernst,” 59.
38 Henry Miller, “Another Bright Messenger” in View 2nd series, No. 1, special issue “Max Ernst”
(April 1942): 17.
39 Miller, 28-29.
40 Samantha Kavky, “Max Ernst in Arizona. Myth. Mimesis, and the Hysterical Landscape,” RES.
Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 57/58 (Spring/Fall 2010): 209-228, here 211.