Ernst_book

"Immobilized as he had been that final year, Max Ernst must have fought the enforced languor of his body by letting his extraordinary creatures, who retained the suggestion of a smile even as they screamed or hissed or roared in alien elements, mate and battle with each other in the infinite spaces of his mind. I had the strange feeling that this ironic scoffer at popular credos knew where he was going after all of this. He had more friends in that other world than in this one, and none were casual acquaintances. His alter-ego, his enduring image, Loplop, the King of the Birds, had commuted to that fabulous landscape since April 2, 1891. Who knows? At this point he may have been looking forward to the adventure because he suspected that Loplop had not told him everything..."

from "A Not-So-Still Life" Chapter 2, "Cage of Nightmares"
Jimmy Ernst, "Icarus 64", 1964 Oil on canvas, 50" x 40"	"Immobilized as he had been that final year, Max Ernst must have fought the enforced languor of his body by letting his extraordinary creatures, who retained the suggestion of a smile even as they screamed or hissed or roared in alien elements, mate and battle with each other in the infinite spaces of his mind. I had the strange feeling that this ironic scoffer at popular credos knew where he was going after all of this. He had more friends in that other world than in this one, and none were casual acquaintances. His alter-ego, his enduring image, Loplop, the King of the Birds, had commuted to that fabulous landscape since April 2, 1891. Who knows? At this point he may have been looking forward to the adventure because he suspected that Loplop had not told him everything..."
Jimmy Ernst greeting Max as he enters the U.S., July 1941	"...It seemed probable that during the new phase of his voyage he would travel exclusively in the company of the strange creatures and forces created by the obsessions of a lifetime..."
November 1921, in Max Ernst's studio. Gala Eluard wearing Max's WWI Iron Cross, Max Ernst, Theodore Baargeld, Lou Strauss, Paul Eluard and Jimmy Ernst	"...There was about this man, my father Max Ernst, an almost unreasonably magic combination of physical beauty and intellectual sparkle, a magnet for which there seemed to be no defense..."