Max Ernst The Horse He's Sick (Un Peu malade le cheval) 1920

  • Not on view

In many of Ernst’s Dada overpaintings and collages, he appropriated images from the Bibliotheca Paedagogica (1914), a catalogue of anatomical and biological teaching materials for students in elementary through high school. This work is based on a lithograph of a cross section of a meat fly, which Ernst excised whole from the Bibliotheca and transformed by reorienting it, affixing to it three additional elements (birds, angiosperm, and a tall oven) and adding a ground line in pencil to create a “sick” horse in a landscape.

Gallery label from Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018.
Medium
Cut-and-pasted printed paper with pencil and gouache on printed paper on cardstock
Dimensions
8 7/8 x 11 7/8" (22.5 x 30.2 cm)
Credit
Purchase
Object number
241.1935
Copyright
© 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Department
Drawings and Prints

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Provenance Research Project

This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.

André Breton, Paris. Given to him by the artist
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase, summer 1935

Provenance research is a work in progress, and is frequently updated with new information. If you have any questions or information to provide about the listed works, please email [email protected] or write to:

Provenance Research Project
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].