Alamy Stock Photo: Granger Historical Picture Archive
Max Ernst at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1961.
In 1920, Max Ernst created The Punching Ball or The Immortality of Buonarroti, a self-portrait montaged with the body of a woman in an off-the-shoulder gown with a head from a medical textbook. In a striped bow tie, suit jacket, and white shirt, he looks like the most suave surrealist and debonair Dadaist you might ever meet. On the outside, he was dashing; on the inside, he suffered from his experiences as a soldier during World War I. Ernst spent his life painting, and cutting, and pasting together the unexpected to expose the illusions of his era. In 1934, he produced a collection of visual novels called The Week of Kindness; among the frightening tableaux are a flock of birds wearing suits collaged from Victorian clothes catalogs—a missive to the world about the rise of the Nazi party. His 1922 picture To the Rendezvous of Friends includes a self-portrait. As always, he is well dressed in a suit, his white blond hair swept in a boyish crop.