Max Ernst
The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with Bells the Dappled Fire Damps and the Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look for Caresses (La Biciclette graminée garnie de grelots les grisous grivelés et les échinodermes courbants l'échine pour quêter des caresses)
1921
Gouache, ink, and pencil on printed paper on paperboard
Not on view
Ernst was fascinated with microscopic images, which were first broadly distributed in the early twentieth century. Here, he created an overpainting on the ambitious scale of traditional oil painting by using a commercially available teaching chart. Ernst inverted the found poster, which contains magnified views of brewer’s yeast cells, and selectively painted in a black ground. He then painted gears and bands, as well as humanizing details including eyes, noses, limbs, and whiskers, to create a virtual circus of tightrope walkers, clowns, and cyclists. The inscription lends amusing sexual connotations to the hairs, orifices, and protrusions of these microorganisms.
Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018.
Gallery label from Dada , June 18–September 11, 2006.
Ernst was fascinated with microscopic images, which were first broadly distributed in the early twentieth century. Here, he created an overpainting on the ambitious scale of traditional oil painting by using a commercially available teaching chart. Ernst inverted the underlying diagram probably illustrating mitosis in the cells of a gramineous (grassy plant) specimen, and painted in a black ground. He combined these animated organic forms with what appear to be machine parts, while the inscription "The gramineous bicycle garnished with bells the dappled fire damps and the echinoderms bending the spine to look for caresses" lends amusing sexual connotations to the hairs, orifices, and protrusions of these microorganisms.
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Tristan Tzara, Paris. Acquired from the artist
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased from Tristan Tzara, 1937
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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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