Do you want to know how we know Max Ernst is a legit painter?

Because every time we look at Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale we feel like we are living in a nightmare. I mean for real, who needs horror films when we have this?

At first, it doesn’t look like much. There’s a cute little gate that leads you to a cute little garden with huge blue skies, but then things get a little more sinister when you realize that there is a woman who has seemingly fainted on the ground. Then you realize that the object in the other woman’s hand is a knife, supposedly her weapon of choice to fight off the nightingale flying above her. And you thought running with scissors was bad. This is just a disaster waiting to happen. But this isn’t even the most concerning thing happening in this painting…There is a man holding a small child on the roof! Of all the places to be holding a small child this has got to be among the worst. He is literally on his tippiest of toes reaching for a knob that is actually fastened to the painting rather than painted into it. Each of these thing individually wouldn’t be that bad but altogether, nightmare-ish, which i guess is the point because Max Ernst was a Dadaist, and then a Surrealist.

Ernst said that this painting came to him in a dream when he was having hallucinations due to a fever as a child. It also has something to do with the death of his sister when he was 6 but Ernst didn’t specify. As the MOMA website says, “Nothing ‘makes sense’ in the picture. Yet the total experience is undeniably meaningful; Ernst has re-created a sensation painfully familiar to us from our dreams but never before quite recaptured in art—that of total disorientation in a world where nothing keeps to its expected scale or fulfills its expected function.” We respect Ernst’s talent but we wish that he wasn’t so good at painting horrifying dreamscapes.