"The Horse He's Sick (Un Peu malade le cheval)" is a seminal 1920 work by Max Ernst, created during the height of the Dada movement. Classified as a drawing, the piece employs the demanding, layered technique of collage, utilizing cut-and-pasted printed paper with supplementary applications of pencil and gouache, all mounted onto cardstock. This mixed-media assemblage reflects the era's radical fascination with found imagery and mechanical reproduction, challenging the sanctity of traditional painting.
Ernst, a key figure in Cologne Dada before his permanent move to the French artistic community in Paris, used collage to dismantle conventional narrative structures. The resulting composition is inherently unsettling, juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements from scientific illustrations, commercial catalogs, and instructional materials to create new, often absurd, relationships. This process reflects the Dadaist agenda of employing chance and anti-art aesthetics. The drawing’s title suggests a focus on themes of bodily frailty or mechanical failure, which were common subjects for Dada artists reacting to the industrial devastation of World War I.
This early, critical French Dada piece demonstrates Ernst's developing methodologies of psychic automation and the frisson of unexpected juxtapositions, techniques that would profoundly influence the subsequent Surrealist movement. The visual presentation is characteristic of Ernst’s innovative output in the early 1920s, forcing viewers to derive subjective meaning from the arbitrary arrangement of mass-produced images.
The original artwork resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. While the fragility of the original medium limits public access, the widespread appeal of Ernst's Dada experiments means high-quality prints and reproductions of the work are often available through collections potentially entering the public domain, securing its legacy as a foundational example of 20th-century collage.
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