Max Ernst
The Little Tear Gland That Says Tic Tac (La Petite fistule lacrimale qui dit tic tac)
1920
Gouache, pencil, and ink on printed wallpaper on board
Not on view
To make this work, Ernst started with a wallpaper fragment, probably taken from a wall in his home. He added gouache in clever angles at the bottom, transforming the wallpaper’s repeating pattern into an apparently threedimensional forest. To further heighten the tension between flatness and depth, he placed a blue sun-like gear behind the printed stripes at the top, as if floating in the distance, and a blue stream flowing toward us at the bottom. In his nonsensical Dada title, Ernst plays with the notion of an eye—the organ that controls vision and reveals emotion—being mechanized like a clock: tic tac.
Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018.
Provenance Research Project
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André Breton, Paris. Given to him by the artist
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased from André Breton, 1935
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Max Ernst
French and American, born Germany. 1891–1976 234 works onlineA key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to both personal memory and collective myth.
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