TitleBlack Trinity
Artist
Jimmy Ernst
(American, 1920 - 1984)
Date1976
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 30 1/4 × 40 1/4 in.
Framed: 31 × 41 1/4 × 1 1/2 in.
SignedSigned in black paint at lower right: "Jimmy Ernst 76"; also signed in black paint on reverse: ""Black Trinity" / Jimmy Ernst '76".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of Mrs. Dallas Ernst, 1986
Object number1986.2
Label TextJimmy Ernst was the son of the well know Surrealist painter Max Ernst and the art historian and journalist, Louise Strauss-Ernst. With the looming threat of the Nazi regime in Germany preceding World War II, Jimmy was sent to New York by his family in 1938. Max Ernst followed his son to New York three years later while his mother unfortunately perished in the death camp at Auschwitz. The younger Ernst became intimately connected with the New York art world of the 1940s and was a member of the infamous Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract artists who protested the policies of the Metropolitan Museum of Art toward American abstract painting. During the next two decades Ernst was an active member of the New York School of artists, eventually moving with his wife to East Hampton in the late 1960s. He died prematurely in 1984."Black Trinity" is composed of three abstract elements painted entirely in black tones and an important example of the artist's work from this period. Beginning in the late 1960s Ernst used abstract elements that were sometimes reminiscent of characters from an Asian language in works such as "Nightscape" (1969). The use of the trinity was not without precedent either, and "Black Trinity" may relate to the painting "Three Silences" (1976, Whitney Museum of American Art). Ernst was deliberately reticent when it came to discussing his painting and once said: "I prefer to think of my work as a thought or an idea which exists or fails without the necessity of elaboration or definition. Like all personal imperfections each painting is bound to create another question which can only be answered by another work."
