Esquisse Pour Un Portrait De Max Ernst

The soul-crushing experience of imprisonment conjured by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings is also evoked in this haunting portrait that the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer drew of his friend and fellow artist Max Ernst. At the time they were both prisoners at a World War II internment camp for “undesirable foreigners” housed in a brick and tile factory in the South of France. Ernst’s face is rendered in a mosaic of small bricks, alluding to the artists’ incarceration, the brick prison building, and its former product.