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DADA · WORK

The Elephant Celebes

Max Ernst · 1921

A monstrous boiler-bodied beast (built from a photograph of an African corn-bin) stands alone on a bare plain under flying fish, the Cologne Dada canvas where collage stops being scissors and glue and becomes a way of painting.

The canvas
Tap to zoom
Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes, 1921. Oil on canvas. 4 ft 1 3/8 in × 3 ft 6 1/2 in.
Tate, London. Purchased by the Tate from Roland Penrose, 1975 (T01988)
Look closer
Find these on the canvas above
  1. The boiler / corn-bin body
    The huge rounded mass at the center, standing on two stubby legs
    The “elephant” itself. Its true source is a photograph of an African communal corn-bin (a clay grain silo that stands on a squat pair of legs), which Ernst found in an anthropological publication and gave a riveted, metallic, boiler-like skin. The two legs are the silo’s legs. It is a corn-bin refigured; the exact people, region, and photographer behind that photo are contested in the scholarship, so it stays unpinned to one tribe or place. It reads as machine and animal at once.
  2. The tusked snout, a trunk that is a hose
    Reaching out from the front of the body and curling back toward it
    A long, flexible tube ends in a tusked, trumpet-like mouth: the “elephant’s trunk” that is plainly not a trunk but a length of hose with a horn on the end. It loops back toward the body. This is where the “elephant” of the title meets the thing on the canvas, and they do not match.
  3. The little horned mechanical head
    At the top of the form, small against the bulk below it
    A small horned head with a frilly metal collar sits where a head would go, but it is far too small for the body, like a bolt-on afterthought. The mismatch of scale is deliberate; it is part of what makes the creature feel wrong rather than merely invented.
  4. The headless female mannequin
    Lower right, a pale figure standing apart from the beast
    A pale, headless female figure stands at the right with one gloved hand raised, as if beckoning or directing the monster. It is the classic de Chirico mannequin (human, but blank and dismembered) that Ernst had absorbed from reproductions, and it pulls the painting toward dream and dread rather than Dada joke.
  5. The flying fish
    Up in the sky, toward the upper left
    Fish swim through the air. It is the single cleanest dream-logic violation in the picture: the wrong creatures in the wrong medium, stated flatly, with no explanation offered. Nothing in the scene reacts to them, which is the point.
  6. The bare horizon
    A low, empty line under a flat, washed sky, across the whole lower background
    The emptiness does the work. A low horizon and a featureless sky isolate the beast, give it scale and silence, and turn the plain into a stage. (Also back there: a tower or totem-pole at the right and a small dark airplane-like shape trailing smoke.) The calm is exactly what separates this from a Dada provocation.
The story · 5 chapters
~18 min total
1
Cologne · 1921
Dada, and the picture that tips out of it
Max Ernst is a driving force of Cologne Dada, the anti-art movement (founded in 1919 with Johannes Baargeld and Hans Arp) born out of the wreckage of the First World War. Most Dada was provocation: cut, mock, deny that anything is art. Celebes is the strange exception, a still, almost silent dream-scene, painted with a straight face, that points past Dada toward something with no name yet.
2
The making
A corn-bin becomes a monster
The “elephant” is not invented from nothing. Ernst built its body from a photograph of an African communal corn-bin (a clay grain silo on two stubby legs) found in an anthropological publication, gave it a riveted metal skin, and bolted on a tusked snout and a tiny horned head it never had. The title comes from a bawdy German schoolboy rhyme, not from the island the word once named.
3
The canvas
What is standing on the plain
The boiler body, the trunk that is a hose ending in a tusked trumpet, the too-small horned head, the headless female mannequin beckoning from the lower right, the fish swimming through the sky, and the bare flat horizon that turns the whole thing into a silent stage.
4
The break
Collage, painted
Ernst takes the collage operation (the chance collision of unrelated things) and executes it in oil, with a smooth, photographic finish that makes the impossible monster read as solidly, physically there. The seams vanish. That is the hinge from Dada into Surrealism, three years before André Breton’s 1924 manifesto gave the movement its name.
5
After
From the studio to the Tate
The canvas passed through the poet Paul Éluard to the English Surrealist Roland Penrose, who sold it to the Tate in 1975 and used the proceeds to found the Elephant Trust. It is the proof-of-concept the high Surrealists (Dalí, Tanguy, Magritte) would build on: paint the irrational with hard realist conviction so the impossible reads as fact.
1921
Painted
4′1⅜″ × 3′6½″
Dimensions
Tate
Now at
Provenance
Every hand it passed through
1921
Max Ernst (the artist)
Cologne
Painted in 1921 while Ernst was a driving force of Cologne Dada.
1921
Paul Éluard (poet, patron)
Paris
Acquired early by Ernst’s close friend the poet Paul Éluard, who took it to Paris. The standard date is 1921, the year the canvas was painted.
1938
Roland Penrose (artist, collector)
London
Bought in 1938 by the English Surrealist artist and collector Roland Penrose (later Sir Roland Penrose), when Éluard sold off much of his collection.
1975–today
TateMuseum
London
Purchased by the Tate from Roland Penrose in 1975 (accession T01988); Penrose used the proceeds of the sale to found the Elephant Trust. On view.