A corn-bin becomes a monster

The beast at the center is the most famous fact about this painting, and the fact is surprising: the “elephant” is not invented out of Ernst’s head. Its body began as a photograph of an African communal corn-bin (a large clay grain-storage silo that stands on a squat pair of legs) which Ernst came across in an anthropological publication. He took that hollow clay container, gave it a riveted, metallic, boiler-like skin, and bolted onto it appendages it never had: a tusked snout on a flexible hose, a frilly metal collar, a small horned head. The corn-bin’s two stubby legs became the “elephant’s” legs. So the monster is a real, ordinary, photographed object (a grain silo) refigured into something that reads as machine and animal at the same time.

Scholars still argue over which corn-bin. Ernst himself confirmed the source, but the trail forks: different accounts credit the original photograph to different photographers and place it with different peoples in different parts of Africa. What is solid is the general picture, a clay grain-bin on two legs, from an anthropological publication. The specific tribe and region sometimes asserted as settled fact are not settled, and the painting works without them.

The title points two ways. “Celebes” is the old, Dutch-colonial-era name for the Indonesian island now called Sulawesi. But the painting is not about Indonesia, and Ernst did not arrive at the word through geography. He told the collector Roland Penrose (who would later own the canvas) that the title came from the opening line of a bawdy German schoolboys’ rhyme: “Der Elefant von Celebes…” (“The elephant from Celebes…”), a nonsense verse with sexual undertones that rhymes Celebes against other faraway-sounding place-names. So the word is the title’sorigin by way of a dirty rhyme remembered from childhood; the island is only what the word happens to mean. The picture is not “about” a place. It is about the rhyme, and the rhyme is just sound and mischief.

And it is not really about an elephant either. There is no elephant here. There is a grain silo with a hose for a trunk, given a name from a rhyme. Both halves of the title are a kind of misdirection, which is exactly the right preparation for standing in front of the thing itself.