Max Ernst at the Met

'Max Ernst, an artist who had the eye of a miniaturist, the disposition of a scientist and the uncreased face of a Gothic angel, is one of modernism's mystery men. He is here, there and everywhere in the history of European art between the wars, closely associated with two of the century's wild and craziest movements, Dada and Surrealism. Yet he never quite materializes, never comes into focus. And he continues to be everywhere but invisible in "Max Ernst: A Retrospective" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a large solo that looks like a group show. Walk through the first few galleries and try to get a bead on him: on his style, his concerns, his feelings, whatever it is that makes him him. It's a challenge. The artist who painted that Mannerist Madonna, and that De Chiricoesque still life, and that abstract landscape, is one and the same. And he painted them all in a single year, 1926. More here. Go see it. Max Ernst used chance as a creative principle long before Cage.