Marie-Berthe Aurenche

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Marie-Berthe Aurenche (* 1906 ; † 1960 in Paris ) was a French painter and sister of the film director Jean Aurenche , the second wife of the artist Max Ernst and from 1940 the partner of Chaim Soutine .

Life

Marie-Berthe Aurenche was the younger sister of the film director Jean Aurenche. In 1927, after a brief and adventurous affair in Paris, she married the surrealist artist Max Ernst , whom she had met through her brother Jean, who frequented Parisian artistic circles. Ernst had divorced his first wife Luise the previous year. The wedding was preceded by an escape from Paris in order to escape the parents, because it had been promised to a lawyer, according to a request of the parents. Ernst informed his parents in a letter that he was divorced and that he wanted to marry their daughter, so that the father gave up the wanted record and consented to the marriage. In 1930 she was with her husband among the cast of the surrealist film The Golden Age ( L'age d'or ) by Luis Buñuel . A few years later, in 1936, Max Ernst left the eccentric Marie-Berthe, whom André Breton dubbed as a nanny, because of her unbearable excitement, and applied for a divorce. She now turned exclusively to the Catholic faith and went on pilgrimages to get her lost beloved back through prayer. Jimmy Ernst , the artist's son from his first marriage, remembered in his autobiography Not exactly a still life that she could never have cope with this separation psychologically.

In 1940 Marie-Berthe Aurenche met the painter of Jewish descent, Chaim Soutine , and became his partner. During the Nazi occupation of France , the couple fled Paris in the summer of 1941 and moved to a farmhouse on the Loire in Champigny-sur-Vuede near Chinon . After Soutine's death on August 9, 1943, she sold some of his paintings to finance a tombstone for him on the Cimetière Montparnasse in Paris.

In an undated letter from 1959, Max Ernst asked Eva Stünke from the Cologne gallery Der Spiegel to help locate the divorce papers of his second marriage to Marie-Berthe Aurenche, which had been lost during the Second World War , which the artist had requested through her Paris lawyers to resume marital intercourse and alimony. Hein Stünke then commissioned the art collector and lawyer Josef Haubrich to locate the said documents, which he succeeded.

In 1960, a few months after Max Ernst was asked to marry, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, who was mentally unstable, committed suicide. She was buried at the side of Chaim Soutine.

plant

The painting from 1930, portrait of André Breton , allegedly created by Marie-Berthe Aurenche and Max Ernst and showing Breton sitting in front of columns in his office, seems to be controversial as to the authorship, although the signature contains both names. During the exhibition in the Parisian gallery Pierre Colle in 1933, Marie-Berthe Ernst figured as the only painter of the portrait. It was later attributed to Max Ernst alone - allegedly according to Breton.

Photographic representations

There are photographs of the couple Max and Marie-Berthe Ernst by Josef Breitenbach , Man Ray and Lee Miller .

literature

  • Jimmy Ernst: Not exactly a still life. Memories of my father Max Ernst , Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 1985, 1988, 1991, 2000 (orig. 1984), as paperback 1991: ISBN 3-462-02154-0
  • Karoline Hille: Dangerous Muses. Women around Max Ernst . Edition Ebersbach, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-9387-4036-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e Helga Behn: Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning: "Mirror, mirror on the wall" . In: Helga Behn: Sincerely, your Max. Artists' mail from the ZADIK holdings . Verlag für modern art Nuremberg, publisher Central Archive of the International Art Trade eV ZADIK, Cologne 2010, p. 70
  2. The golden age , new-video.de, accessed on June 17, 2012
  3. ^ Lothar Fischer: Max Ernst . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1969, ISBN 3-499-50151-1 , p. 83 f.
  4. ^ Stanley Meisler: Soutine: The power and the fury of an eccentric genius , stanleymeisler.com, accessed June 15, 2012
  5. See the illustrations in: Helga Behn: Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning: "Mirror, mirror on the wall" . In: Helga Behn: Sincerely, your Max. Artists' mail from the ZADIK holdings . Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, Ed. Central Archive of the International Art Trade eV ZADIK, Cologne 2010, pp. 68 and 69
  6. Günter Herzog: The central archive of the international art trade in Cologne and its collection profile using the example of the Der Spiegel gallery (PDF; 323 kB) ,wirtschaftsarchive.de, accessed on June 15, 2012
  7. ^ Stanley Meisler: Soutine: The power and the fury of an eccentric genius , stanleymeisler.com, accessed June 15, 2012
  8. ^ Marie-Berthe Aurenche and Max Ernst: Portrait of André Breton , 1930 , andrebreton.fr, accessed on June 16, 2012