Artist: Max Ernst
Title: Her smile of fire will fall on the mountain sides in the form of
black jelly and white rust
Date: 1929
UFO-like and other alien imagery play a significant role in the art of Max
Ernst, traversing several decades of the twentieth century.
The illustration here is from a collage novel originally published, in French,
in 1929 - eventually issued in an English translation (by Dorothea Tanning)
as The Hundred-headed Woman in 1981.
This book comprises about 150 collages with captions, along with 'Instructions
for the Reader' by Andre Breton.
Here is a quote from Max Ernst telling the story of how he got into producing
these collages:
'One rainy day in Cologne on the Rhine, the catalogue of a teaching aids company
caught my attention. It was illustrated with models of all kinds - mathematical,
geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical,
paleontological, and so forth - elements of such diverse nature that the absurdity
of the collection confused the eye and mind, producing hallucinations and
lending the objects depicted new and rapidly changing meanings. I suddenly
felt my "visionary faculties" so intensified that I began seeing
the newly emerged objects against a new background...'
