1923

The Forest

Max Ernst

American (born Germany), 1891 - 1976

The "forest" in this painting is a wall of posts with the color and texture of timber, ragged tops, and the smooth finish of mechanical tubes. Rising from a platform resembling a fallen stone wall, with other posts intersecting it at a steep angle, and silhouetted against a yellow-orange sky, this strange construction takes on a monumental appearance. Forest belongs to Max Ernst’s series of works from 1921–24 known as his "collage paintings": so called because, as with the paper collages he was making at the same time, they brought together perplexing arrangements of elements that would normally be unrelated. A precise painting style makes these strange composites visually convincing.

Ernst thought of his collage paintings as dreamlike. They coincided with his close involvement with the Paris Surrealist group, whose members were deeply interested in Sigmund Freud’s scientific study of dreams, and reinterpreted dreams as a method for turning loose the creative imagination.