Capricorn
Max Ernst
Bronze (1948)

"Capricorn is an inventive portrait of Max Ernst and his wife, fellow Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning. On another level, it expresses the duality of male and female.

For the Surrealists, as for the Greeks, the minotaur (half man/half bull) symbolized the battle between rational mind and aggressive instinct. This minotaur figure was probably inspired by a Katsina-a Zuni spirit sculpture-that was owned by Ernst. A mermaid and a dog, with pipe eyes and trowel tongue, rest next to him. The mermaid is also a hybrid. Part woman and part fish, she lives in the sea, a symbol of the feminine unconscious.

Tanning named Capricorn after a constellation. The title hints at astrology, the study of the influence of celestial events upon the lives of humans."