Photo By Gail

A red wooden gate affixed to the painted surface opens onto a painted scene dominated by blue sky. At left, a female figure brandishes a small knife; another falls limp in a swoon; a man atop the roof carries off a third, his hand outstretched to grab a real knob fastened to the frame. The title of the work (inscribed at the base), was inspired by a fever dream the young Max Ernst experienced while in bed with measles.

As Ernst recalled in third-person, the dream was “provoked by an imitation-mahogany panel opposite his bed, the grooves of the wood taking successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird’s head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on.” A poem Ernst penned shortly before making this work in 1924 begins, “At nightfall, at the outskirts of the village, two children are threatened by a nightingale.”

Two Children Are Threatened By a Nightingale is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.