Art: MAX ERNST: The Compleat Experimenter

"Rebellious, heterogeneous, full of contradiction, [my work] is unacceptable to specialists of art, culture, morality. But it does have the ability to enchant my accomplices: poets, pataphysicians* and a few illiterates." Thus Max Ernst (tongue poked its usual quarter-length into one rubicund cheek) summed up his own career at the age of 68. "Accomplices" was the key word, for it is hard to look at a Max Ernst without feeling a pact between his secret language and one's own fantasies. The carnivorous or petrified landscapes, the enchanted pencil forests, the enigmatic rooms in which sinister things happen—these constitute a world on...