Dada, and the picture that tips out of it

In 1921, in the German city of Cologne, a 30-year-old painter named Max Ernst (1891–1976) was a driving force of one of the strangest movements art has produced. It was called Dada, and it had been born a few years earlier, in the middle of the First World War, out of disgust. A generation of young European artists had watched the supposedly civilized nations of Europe feed millions of men into the machine-guns and the mud, and concluded that the whole edifice of bourgeois culture (its manners, its logic, its idea of beautiful art) was a fraud that had ended in slaughter. So Dada set out to mock all of it. It was anti-art and anti-sense on purpose, a movement whose whole posture was to disrupt: cut things up, jam them together wrong, stage nonsense, and deny that anything was “art” at all.

Ernst was one of the founders of the Cologne branch of Dada in 1919, alongside the painter-poet Johannes Baargeld and the artist Hans Arp (1886–1966), who would become a lifelong friend. The three of them made Cologne one of Dada’s wildest outposts. Ernst made collages (pictures assembled by gluing together cut-up pieces of other printed images) that spliced engravings from old catalogues and science manuals into impossible, deadpan machines. He co-organized a Dada show in 1920 that the public reached by walking through a pub urinal, and that the police briefly shut down. The mode was provocation. You were supposed to be unsettled, or offended, or made to laugh at the joke that art was over.

And then, in 1921, Ernst painted The Elephant Celebes, and it does not behave like that at all. It is not a provocation. It is quiet. A single monstrous form (part animal, part machine, part idol) stands alone on a bare plain under a flat, washed sky, and the longer you look at it the less sense it makes and the more inevitable it feels. There is no joke being told at you. There is a still, dreamlike scene, painted with a perfectly straight face, asking to be believed. Most Dada pulled the picture apart to show you it was a trick. This one builds a whole impossible world and dares you to walk into it. It is the picture where Dada tips over into something that did not yet have a name.