Capricorn Hill I Max Ernst & Dorothea Tanning's house

When Max Ernst first crossed Arizona in the early 1940s, he felt he had stepped into one of his own paintings. The red rock formations, the vast desert silence, the light that seemed to belong to no known civilisation, it was the landscape of Surrealism made real.

The two had met in New York in 1942. Ernst, then married to Peggy Guggenheim, came to Tanning's studio and stayed to play chess, and it was over the board that they fell in love. On her easel stood her self-portrait, a young woman bare-breasted before an endless succession of opening doors. Ernst gave the painting its title, Birthday, to mark her birth as a Surrealist. Within a week he had moved in. Chess would remain a thread through their whole world, a Surrealist obsession shared with Duchamp, a game of strategy, chance and hidden moves that mirrored the movement itself.

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Sedona, Arizona, 1948. Photograph by Bob Towers

In 1946, having just married in Hollywood in a now legendary double wedding alongside Man Ray and Juliet Browner, Ernst and Dorothea Tanning settled outside Sedona and built a house on a hill with their own hands, two rooms of boards and tar paper, with no running water and no electricity. For the first year they hauled water daily from a well five miles away. Tanning named it Capricorn Hill.

Capricorn Hill, of Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, in Arizona

Ernst turned the house and its surroundings into a total artwork. In the summer of 1947, exhilarated by the arrival of water finally piped up to the property, he began modelling monumental figures from cement and scrap iron, car bumpers, egg cartons, milk cartons and car springs, hybrid creatures that stood guard over the land like ancient totems. The greatest of them, named Capricorn, became one of his defining sculptures, and the bronze edition now belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. A 1952 photograph in LIFE magazine shows Ernst and Tanning beside it, the red mountains behind them.

Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with his sculpture, « Capricorn », 1947, Copyright John Kasnetsis

The house received the avant-garde as pilgrims. Marcel Duchamp and André Breton came. Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Pavel Tchelitchew, the choreographer George Balanchine, for whom Tanning designed ballet costumes, the composer Igor Stravinsky, and Caresse Crosby. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed the couple against the red rocks, and it was here, in 1946, that Lee Miller made her famous image of Ernst towering like a giant over a tiny Dorothea. Their isolation was real, the nearest neighbours were lizards, scorpions and snakes, yet the most brilliant minds in modern art crossed a continent to find them. One of their regular excursions took them to the Hopi mesas, where they watched dancers in elaborate katsina regalia, a world that fascinated the Surrealists for refusing any border between dream and waking life.

Ernst painted prolifically in Sedona, Arizona Rouge, Inspired Hill, Two Cardinal Points, embracing the fire of the landscape. Tanning, however, recoiled from it. As she put it in a 1990 interview, it is beautiful to see, but if you are painting, you simply cannot paint that much red. She turned inward instead, and the Sedona years produced some of her most powerful and unsettling works. Maternity (1946 to 1947) shows a ragged mother on a barren plain, her gown torn open at the belly, a fretful infant in her arms and, at her feet, a poodle with a child's face. Self-Portrait (1944) places a lone figure at the edge of a still expanse of water, hemmed in by Sedona's monoliths. To these belong Guardian Angels, Palaestra, Max in a Blue Boat, Avatar and A Very Happy Picture (1947, now at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris). The desert did not enter her painting as colour, it entered as space, dread and dream.

Max Ernst, Colline Inspirée, 1950, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Paul Hester © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Dorothea Tanning, Autoportrait, 1944 - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California - Copyright San Francisco Museum of Modern Art / Bridgeman Images

A small ritual punctuated those years. Every season the couple loaded a trailer with canvases and drove the whole way back to New York for exhibitions at Julien Levy's gallery, the great American showcase of the Surrealists. They sold very little. The recognition would come later.

They left at the end of the decade, as the McCarthy era made Ernst's position in America untenable and his application for citizenship was refused. The couple settled in France, returning to Sedona through the 1950s.

Ernst always called it one of only two places in the world where he truly wished to live.

The other was Paris.