MAX ERNST (1891–1976)
Untitled (Bird Embraced by Horned Animal), n.d.
Pencil highlighted with white on brown paper
Jean Farley Levy Estate
The drawing pictured here appeared in Levy’s first surrealism exhibition in 1932. Max Ernst’s early work was heavily influenced by the Dada movement. Rising in Germany in 1916, Dadaism—from dada, the French child’s word for hobbyhorse—flouted conventional aesthetic values by producing works marked by absurdity, incongruity, and irreverence. An artistic movement as satirical as its name, Dadaism purported to derive art from anything that stimulated the imagination: a found object, or an assortment of them—anything that held meaning for its maker.
Ernst, like many Dadaists, favored subjects from his imagination, often mining his childhood fantasies. In 1941, he fled to the United States, where he helped build the surrealist movement in art and literature. Ernst collaborated with Duchamp and Andre Breton on the periodical VVV, a journal devoted to the fine arts, poetry, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and an important reference for expatriate European surrealists. Published in New York from 1942 to 1944, each issue was illustrated with works by surrealist artists. Ernst remained in the U.S. until 1952, when he returned to Europe to set up a studio in Paris, where he continued to paint until his death in 1976.