Europe After the Rain II

A corroded, ravaged landscape stretches under a sickly sky, its forms eaten away into dripping, petrified ruins where a beaked figure stands amid the decay. Max Ernst created Europe After the Rain II using decalcomania - pressing and lifting paint to generate eerie, eroded textures - while fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe for America. Now in the Wadsworth Atheneum, it is among the great Surrealist visions of war - the continent imagined as a poisoned, melting wasteland after some unnamed catastrophe, beauty and horror fused into a hallucinatory image of devastation and the wreckage left behind.