Ernst began this painting by scraping pigment across the surface with a toothed plasterer’s comb, creating a composition filled with striated patterns. He then applied darker shades of green, blue, and red to this lighter, textured layer. Finally, he added more paint to some areas while removing pigment in others, creating abstract forms evoking birds, butterflies, and trees. The complex structure of Birds above the Forest combines grattage, or scraping, with other nearly indecipherable processes characteristic of Ernst’s experimental approach to painting. Birds and forests feature prominently within Ernst’s personal mythology.
Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018.
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The artist
Katherine S. Dreier (1877-1952), West Redding and Milford, Connecticut. Purchased from the artist
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Katherine S. Dreier Bequest, 1953
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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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A Surreal Lens
Gallery 517In 1924, André Breton published his Manifesto of Surrealism, which, guided by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, declared a radical break from the rationalism of modern society in favor of imagination, erotic desire, and unconscious thought.
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