Max Ernst painted The Elephant Celebes, the 1921 Surrealist oil painting featuring a monumental mechanical elephant.
The work combines a large, industrial-looking elephant form with a head-like structure, pipes, and scattered objects in a strange, sparsely populated landscape. Its title refers to Celebes, the historical European name for the Indonesian island now called Sulawesi.
Ernst based the elephant’s unusual appearance partly on a grain-threshing machine depicted in a colonial-era illustration. He transformed that technical image into an unsettling, dreamlike creature, demonstrating the Surrealist interest in unexpected combinations and unconscious associations.
The painting is often discussed as an important early example of Ernst’s mature style, although Surrealism was formally organized in Paris a few years later. It is held by the Tate in London, where it is also known by its German title, Celebes. The work is sometimes confused with Dalí’s dream imagery, but it was created by Ernst.