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| The Elephant Celebes | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Elephant Celebes |
| Artist | Max Ernst |
| Year | 1921 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Movement | Dada, Surrealism |
| Dimensions | 125.4 cm × 107.9 cm |
| Museum | Tate |
| City | London |
The Elephant Celebes is a 1921 oil painting by Max Ernst created during the post‑World War I avant‑garde period. The work synthesizes motifs from Dada, early Surrealism, and Cubism while drawing on visual sources ranging from African art to German Expressionism and British industrial imagery. Its hybrid imagery and mechanomorphic forms made it a pivotal work in Ernst's transition from Cologne Dada to the Paris Surrealist milieu around figures such as André Breton and Paul Éluard.
The composition centers on a monumental, cylindrical, horned machine‑beast set against a stark sky, flanked by fragmented figures and architectural echoes that evoke Mesopotamia, Ethiopia, and Ancient Egypt. Ernst employs layered glazing and frottage techniques related to his contemporaneous experiments in Maximilien Luce‑era practices and the tactile surfaces explored by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso. The palette—ochres, umbers, and slate blues—recalls palettes used by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger while the interposition of incongruous objects references compositional strategies visible in works by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Giorgio de Chirico. Spatial ambiguities nod to Gustave Moreau and Henri Rousseau, while motifs of mechanization resonate with imagery in Futurism and paintings by Umberto Boccioni.
Ernst painted the work in Cologne shortly after serving in the milieu surrounding Dada Berlin and interacting with artists and writers such as Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, and Johannes Baader. The title references a colonial film screening in Sudan and an agricultural tin from South Africa—sources mediated through popular culture channels like British Museum collections and commercial ephemera circulating in Paris and Berlin. Ernst’s technique draws from the frottage method developed alongside Paul Éluard and André Breton, and incorporates iconography resonant with African masks, Oceania artefacts displayed at institutions such as the Louvre and private collections like those of Peggy Guggenheim and Paul Guillaume. Literary influences include references to texts circulating in the Surrealist Manifesto networks and poets affiliated with Les Lettres Françaises and Littérature.
The painting entered public view in salons and dealer galleries in Paris and Berlin in the 1920s, shown alongside works by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, and André Masson. It passed through private hands linked to collectors such as Alfred Barr and galleries including Galerie Pierre and Galerie Paul Guillaume before acquisition by institutional collectors associated with the Tate Gallery and other European museums like the Centre Pompidou and Stedelijk Museum. Wartime movements paralleled relocations experienced by Marie Vassilieff artists and mirror provenance trajectories overlapping with collections of Josephine Baker and John Quinn. Its documented provenance intersects with dealers and curators including Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Ambroise Vollard, Kurt Walter Bachstitz, and later trustees of major foundations such as Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Contemporary critics framed the painting within debates between Dadaism and the emergent Surrealism led by André Breton and Louis Aragon, with responses from reviewers at periodicals linked to Cahiers d'Art, La Révolution Surréaliste, and Die Aktion. Interpretations emphasize psychoanalytic readings influenced by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and the circle around Marie Bonaparte, situating the monstrous monument as emblematic of postwar anxieties discussed by scholars associated with Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Later scholarship positions the work in dialogues with postcolonial theory scholars and exhibitions curated by figures such as Harold Rosenberg, Rosalind Krauss, and T. J. Clark. Curatorial texts have compared Ernst’s iconography with objects in the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Musée du Quai Branly, and with cinematic tropes from Georges Méliès and Fritz Lang.
Technical examinations by conservators trained at institutions like the Courtauld Institute of Art and laboratories affiliated with the National Gallery have used x‑radiography, infrared reflectography, and pigment analysis techniques championed by specialists such as Carmen Bambach and Andrew Robison. Investigations identified lead white, natural ultramarine, and earth pigments consistent with early twentieth‑century oil practice, and revealed pentimenti and underdrawing comparable to studies of works by Picasso and Paul Klee. Conservation treatments have been overseen in collaboration with staff from the Tate conservation department and forensic teams linked to ICOM‑CC protocols, addressing varnish discoloration, localized craquelure, and relined canvases following standards promulgated by organizations like ICOM and national heritage agencies including the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Category:Paintings by Max Ernst Category:Surrealist paintings Category:1921 paintings