Themes and experiments of Ernst’s work

The immense breadth of themes and experiments of Ernst’s work spreads over seventy years of twentieth-century history, between Europe and the United States, constantly escaping any definition. Pictor doctus, profound connoisseur and visionary interpreter of the history of art, philosophy, science and alchemy, Max Ernst is presented in this context as a humanist in the neo-Renaissance sense. If André Chastel claimed to find in Ernst a sort of “reincarnation of those Rhenish authors of Bosch-like devilry”, Marcel Duchamp had traced there “a complete inventory of the different eras of Surrealism”.