Time & Perspective Quote by Max Ernst

Ernst isn’t just drawing a boundary around “real art”; he’s detonating the polite expectations that usually cling to painting. “Not... decorative amusement” takes a swipe at bourgeois taste: the living-room canvas as status furniture, art as a lifestyle accessory. Then he rejects “the plastic invention of felt reality,” a phrase that needles the idea that painting’s job is to stylize emotion into something recognizably “expressive.” For Ernst, even sincerity can become a trap if it hardens into a mannerism.

The triple demand - “invention, discovery, revelation” - is a manifesto in miniature, and it mirrors Surrealism’s core wager: the most interesting truths aren’t illustrated, they’re uncovered. “Invention” grants the artist agency, but “discovery” implies the work isn’t fully controlled; the painter is also an archaeologist of their own mind, stumbling onto forms that weren’t planned. “Revelation” raises the stakes further, edging toward the mystical without getting pious. Painting should feel like it has found something that was already there, hidden under habit and taste.

Context matters: Ernst comes out of the wreckage of World War I, through Dada’s scorched-earth skepticism, into Surrealism’s experiments with chance, collage, frottage, and uncanny juxtapositions. His insistence on “every time” reads like self-discipline against complacency. No signature style as a product line; no repeating yesterday’s epiphany. The subtext is almost a dare: if painting isn’t risking surprise - even to the painter - it’s just decor with delusions of depth.