It’s easiest — and sensible, really — to classify much of Max Ernst’s artistic output either historically (pre- and post-World Wars I and II), geographically (the French period, the American period, a second French period), by his loyalty to Dada or Surrealism or by his pioneering approaches (frottage, grattage, decalcomania). But Ernst’s sculpture, something he turned to throughout his seven-decade-long career, remained a constant and transcends categorization. “He’d finish a body of work and he’d go back to sculpture, and I think he found it interesting to make,” speculates the art dealer Paul Kasmin. “He must have thrived off of it, because then he’d leap back into another body of work.”
October 21, 2015
