Deux Enfants sont menacés par un rossignol

Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (Deux Enfants sont menacés par un rossignol)

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/max-ernst-two-children-are-threatened-by-a-nightingale-1924/
Max Ernst
(French and American, born Germany. 1891–1976)

1924. Oil with painted wood elements and cut-and-pasted printed paper on wood with wood frame, 27 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 4 1/2" (69.8 x 57.1 x 11.4 cm)
See this work in MoMA’s Online Collection

Max Ernst said that a “fevervision” he had experienced when he was sick with measles as a child inspired him to compose the haunting scene that unfolds in Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. Merging collage and painting, he affixed a wooden gate, parts of a toy house, and a knob to a dreamlike painted landscape. A blue sky dominates the composition, and in it a small nightingale hovers above two young girls. One girl moves toward the nightingale, brandishing a large knife. The other lies on the verdant grass in a faint. To the right of this unfolding drama, a man steps lightly across the roof of the house. He holds a child in one arm and reaches out the other to the knob protruding at the edge of the picture, as if it will lead him to some escape from this scene.

As Ernst recalled, speaking in the third-person, his “fevervision” was “provoked by an imitation-mahogany panel opposite his bed, the grooves of the wood taking successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird’s head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on.” A poem he wrote shortly before making this work begins, “At nightfall, at the outskirts of the village, two children are threatened by a nightingale.” The painting features what would come to be identified as the defining preoccupations of Surrealism, a movement in which Ernst was a central figure: dreams and the unconscious; sexuality (as represented, for example, by the girl’s phallic knife); and incongruous juxtapositions.