Max Ernst, Design in Nature, 1947, Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 66.7 cm, The Menil Collection, Houston, gift of Alexander Iolas. Photo © The Menil Collection, Houston/Hester + Hardaway Photographers

BASEL..Sometimes the largest paintings are the least known. The mural that Max Ernst painted in summer 1934 for the Dancing Mascotte in the Corso-Theatre on Zurich’s Bellevue measures 415 x 531 cm. For decades Pétales et jardin de la nymphe Ancolie, with its flesh-red flowers on green leaves in a weightless space, provided pleasure as a background for dancing couples. Because of damage to the lower half of the painting the background was twice over painted with a muddy gray and entirely covered with varnish; later this feast of lush vegetation was removed, broken down into panels, and entrusted to the Kunsthaus Zürich.

This work, which is central to the oeuvre of Max Ernst (1891–1976), and not simply because of its size, is now finally being restored. Visitors to the exhibition will find a specially constructed exposed workshop where they can follow the metamorphosis of the individual panels from gray to light blue as their appearance is transformed. The restoration will also expose those parts that Max Ernst modeled on illustrations he found in a nineteenth-century botanical encyclopedia, though extremely enlarged and turned upside down. Also revealed are a woman’s naked leg in the lower right of the painting, which is the linear pendant of a hand and figure on the “top” level that suggest Max Ernst’s alter ego: his incarnation as the bird Loplop. Lovers of gardens enter into a biomorphic event. Behind the flowers and leaves and a large, birdlike dancing element, they can make out the not yet awakened nymph Ancolie, whose “Mel-” Max Ernst nipped off in order to baptize her with a more life-affirming name.

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