eh bin l'vla l'petit chien

Created in 1924, eh bin l'vla l'petit chien marks Max Ernst’s transformation from a Dadist into a future Surrealist. After serving in the German army during the First World War, Ernst embraced Dada, a political, nihilistic art movement that emerged directly in response to the war’s horrors. ‘We young people,’ he explained, ‘came back from the war dazed and our disgust simply had to find an outlet. This quite naturally took the form of attacks on the foundations of the civilization that had brought this war about – attacks on language, syntax, logic, literature, painting and so forth’ (M. Ernst, quoted in Max Ernst, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 82).
Ernst’s abandonment of Dada for Surrealism was gradual but not unexpected: Already, he had begun to incorporate Freudian references into his compositions and was deeply drawn to Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. The transition accelerated during the summer of 1921, when Ernst met members of the Paris Dada group. According to Louis Aragon, however, Ernst was already a staunch devotee to ‘the vice called Surrealism . . . the immoderate and passionate use of the drug which is the ‘image’’ (L. Aragon, quoted in M. Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism, New York, 1950, p. 286). In Surrealism’s commitment to the dream world, Ernst found a language that suited his pictorial poetics. After he saw the artist’s first exhibition in 1921, Breton, who would go on to write the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, said that Ernst’s paintings of those years had a ‘wonderful ability to reach, without leaving the field of our experience, two widely separated worlds, bring them together, and strike a spark from their conjunction’ (A. Breton, quoted in W. Spies, Max Ernst: Collages, London, 1988, p. 228).