The Elephant Celebes

A monstrous mechanical creature - part boiler, part elephant, with a tusked hose snaking from its head - looms in a barren space beside a headless mannequin and a strange sky. Max Ernst built the Elephant Celebes from the dream-logic of Dada and the look of African grain bins and industrial machinery, creating something absurd, menacing, and unforgettable. Now in the Tate, it is among the first great Surrealist paintings - a nightmarish hybrid that fuses the mechanical and the bodily, the comic and the threatening, the everyday object transformed into a brooding, irrational monster.