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Max Ernst
French, born Germany, 1891-1976

Tree of Life, 1928
Oil on canvas

Purchase with funds from Alfred Austell Thornton in
memory of Leila Austell Thornton and Albert Edward
Thornton, Sr., and Sarah Miller Venable and William
Hoyt Venable, 1983.92

Max Ernst depicted the irrational, inner world of dreams and
the subconscious. In this work, he created a dream-like under-
water environment in which crabs and jellyfish evolve into
strange hybrid creatures, such as the snake with a bird's head.