MAX ERNST — Estampes, Livres Illustrés, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1975

Issued for the opening of Estampes, livres illustrés, Bibliothèque Nationale, Galerie Mazarine, Paris, 25 June 1975, 19:00. Folded exhibition-opening invitation, 15 × 10.5 cm folded, 30 × 10.5 cm unfolded; black printing on cream card. Invitation valid for two persons.

Paris divided Max Ernst in two in the summer of 1975. The Grand Palais got the painter. The Bibliothèque Nationale got the books. Only five weeks before this invitation was issued, a vast Max Ernst retrospective had opened at the Grand Palais, running from 16 May to 18 August 1975. Then, on 25 June, the Bibliothèque Nationale opened Estampes, livres illustrés in the Galerie Mazarine, turning away from the monumental survey to concentrate on the quieter machinery underneath Ernst's career: prints, collage, reproduction and the illustrated book.

Long before Surrealism became museum history, Ernst had understood printed matter as a place where images could be taken apart and made unstable. His collage novels — including La Femme 100 têtes of 1929 — were constructed from nineteenth-century engravings cut from their original contexts and recombined into sequences whose logic was closer to dreaming than conventional narrative. Image becomes fragment; fragment becomes another image; the book becomes the place where the transformation happens.

That history is sitting directly on this invitation. The outer panel reproduces Une Dame et un Guide: a Victorian-looking woman enclosed within a circle beside an almost absurdly reduced male figure — a guide who has practically disappeared into a line. It is unmistakably Ernstian in its collision of found illustration, scale and impossible companionship. Then the card opens and changes register completely. Inside, the dream image gives way to bureaucracy: MAX ERNST in enormous heavy type; estampes / livres illustrés stacked and rotated beside it; the opening date, Bibliothèque Nationale and Galerie Mazarine; and, on the opposing panel, the formal invitation of Jean-Pierre Soisson, Secrétaire d'État aux Universités. Surrealist disturbance on the outside. French state protocol on the inside. That friction is the object.

By 1975 Ernst's journey from Cologne Dada and Paris Surrealism to institutional canon was essentially complete. The same year brought the major Grand Palais retrospective and the first volumes of Werner Spies's catalogue raisonné. And the date becomes poignant: Ernst died in Paris on 1 April 1976, little more than nine months after this opening. What had been conceived as a retrospective examination of his graphic production became, almost immediately, part of the closing inventory of a living career. While the Grand Palais confirmed the master on the museum scale, the Galerie Mazarine returned to the medium through which so much of Ernst's visual intelligence had originally travelled: paper, books, prints, fragments and reproduction.

The invitation performs the same movement in miniature. Closed, it is almost an Ernst image-object. Opened, it becomes an administrative document. Fold it again and the institution disappears behind the picture. A small paper object from the summer in which Paris was taking stock of Max Ernst twice — and one in which the supposedly secondary world of books and prints turns out to be very close to the centre of the story.

Condition: very good vintage; gentle age toning and light handling consistent with period exhibition ephemera. Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.