1928

Seashell

American (born Germany), 1891 - 1976

Max Ernst created the contours and textures of the scalloped shell and wood slats in this picture by placing his canvas over different objects and then scraping paint on or off with a palette knife. This innovative process, called grattage, was meant to suspend preconceived ideas in the creation of the motif. Only after shapes began to appear would they be more actively transformed. Ernst, a member of Dada circles in Germany before moving to Paris in 1922, related such practice to “the intellect’s age-old energetic need to liberate itself from the deceptive and boring paradise of fixed memories and to investigate new, incomparably expansive areas of experience, in which the boundaries between the so-called inner world and the outer world become increasingly blurred.”