1942

Rara Avis

American (born Germany), 1891 - 1976

Max Ernst described his childhood imagination as "excursions into the world of marvels, chimeras, phantoms, poets, monsters, philosophers, birds, women, lunatics, magi, trees, eroticism, poisons, mathematics, and so forth." From the early 1920s associated with the Dada and Surrealist groups in Paris, Ernst was preoccupied with bird imagery and especially with birds that metamorphose-sometimes frighteningly-into humans. He described his works as vibrating "with the incongruous and irrational qualities generally attributed to dreams although artists know they are the original breath of reality. . . . Birds become men and men become birds. Catastrophes become hilarious. Everything is astonishing, heartbreaking and possible."