Human Figure with Two Birds

"Human Figure with Two Birds" is a 1925/29 oil on emery paper mounted on scrap-wood panel covered with industrial-grade black paper by Max Ernst that demonstrates the German Surrealist's commitment to unconventional materials and his exploration of the grattage technique during the period of his most intense involvement with the Surrealist movement in Paris. The composition is a tall, narrow painting—116.4 × 39.4 centimeters—showing a human figure with two birds rendered with the oil on emery paper creating a surface of extraordinary texture and abrasive physicality. The emery paper support adds a dimension of industrial rawness and tactile aggression that suggests both the violence of the Surrealist imagination and the material experimentation of the avant-garde. The scrap-wood panel and industrial black paper suggest both the anti-aesthetic stance of the Surrealist object and the revolutionary politics of the interwar period. The 1925/29 date places this work in the period of Ernst's most intensive production of grattage paintings and his collaboration with the Paris Surrealists. Art historians have connected this painting to the broader tradition of the human figure in modern art, from the sculptures of Giacometti to the paintings of Picasso, noting that Ernst's treatment is more focused on the material experiment and the psychological suggestion, the transformation of the human form into uncanny vision, than the anatomical analysis or the formal purity of these other traditions.

This 1925/29 oil on emery paper made human figure uncannily material through tall 116cm abrasive emery-texture scrap-wood industrial-black-paper rawness and Surrealist grattage experimentation, using Paris intensive production to transform human anatomy into uncanny psychological vision beyond Giacometti formal sculptural purity.

It matters because Ernst painted a person with birds on sandpaper and made the wood feel like it was scratching at the boundary between human and animal—proving that even a figure could be a mystery if the material was rough enough.