What is standing on the plain

The canvas is a little over four feet tall, a portrait shape, and almost the whole of it is given over to one thing: a huge, rounded, boiler-like body filling the center, standing on a stubby pair of legs. This is the “elephant.” Its surface is metallic, riveted, the color of a coal furnace, and it looks heavy and solidly therein a way that the impossible details around it have no right to be. Its real source is a photographed clay corn-bin; Ernst has kept the silo’s squat two-legged stance and swapped its clay for iron.

The parts that do not belong reach out from the front. A long flexible tube ends in a tusked, trumpet-like mouth and curls back toward the body: the “trunk” that is plainly a hose with a horn on the end, looping back on itself. Up at the top sits a small horned headwith a frilly metal collar, far too small for the bulk beneath it, bolted on like an afterthought. None of these pieces agrees with the others about what animal, or machine, or creature this is meant to be. That disagreement is the engine of the picture’s unease.

In the lower right stands a headless female mannequin: a pale figure, blank where the head should be, set apart from the beast with one gloved hand raised, as if summoning it or pointing the way. This figure is borrowed: the blank, dismembered tailor’s-dummy mannequin comes straight from Giorgio de Chirico(1888–1978), the Italian painter whose still, dread-filled empty plazas Ernst knew from reproductions and who is the clearest ancestor of this whole mood. Her presence pulls the picture out of Dada’s loud register and into something colder and stranger.

In the sky, toward the upper left, fish are swimming through the air. It is the single clearest violation of sense on the canvas: the wrong creatures in the wrong element, stated without comment. Nothing reacts to them. Further back there is a tower or totem-pole at the right edge, and a small dark airplane-like shape trailing smoke. None of it connects to anything else. That refusal of things to connect is the subject. This is dream-logic: in a dream the impossible arrives fully furnished and unexplained.

What is not in the picture matters as much. Behind the monster there is almost nothing: a low, empty horizon under a flat, drained sky. Ernst gives no setting, no buildings, no crowd, nothing for scale except the bare line of the ground. And that emptiness is doing enormous work. It isolates the beast, lends it size and silence, and turns the whole canvas into a kind of stage with a single actor on it. Set the noise of Dada (the cut-up urinals, the staged provocations) against this: a vast quiet, a monster, and a horizon. The calm is precisely what marks this picture as a step past the movement Ernst was running. It is not a joke about images anymore. It is a place.