Ernst: Two Girls are threatened by A Nightingale

Oil on wood with painted wood elements and frame
27 1/2″ x 22 1/2″ x 4 1/2″
1924

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Made in 1924, the year of Surrealism’s founding, Ernst described this work as “the last consequence of his [sic] early collages—and a kind of farewell to a technique…”..The combination of flat painted surfaces and unexpected objects in this work, made in the year of Surrealism’s founding, extends the strategy of collage that Ernst and fellow Dada artists had employed and marks what he described as “a kind of farewell to a technique.” A red wooden gate affixed to the painted surface opens onto a deceptively pastoral scene dominated by blue sky. One female figure brandishes a small knife as though fending off the unassuming nightingale at left; another falls limp in a swoon; a man who lights atop the roof carries off a third, his hand outstretched to grab the knob fastened to the old-fashioned frame. Ernst gave two autobiographical references for the nightingale: the death of his sister in 1897 and a fevered hallucination he experienced in which the wood grain on a panel near his bed took on “successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird’s head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on.”
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