The volume, published on the occasion of the exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan (4 October-26 February 2023), aims to extend and renew the researches around the genius Max Ernst, German painter, sculptor, engraver, poet and art theorist, later naturalized American and French.

The publication is an unprecedented opportunity to immerse oneself in an illustrated diary documenting and chronicling the extraordinary adventure that was his life. The critical essays by the curators Martina Mazzotta and Jürgen Pech together with those of international scholars (Yuval Etgar, Ludger Derenthal, Matteo Pavesi, Paola Stroppiana and Ursula Lindau) explore his artistic production in relation to art history, memory and avant-garde (Dadaism and Surrealism in primis), with cryptographies and cosmological themes, experimental techniques, the sculpture and jewels, the book and literature, cinema, friendships and famous loves. Such readings are accompanied by in-depth critical worksheets dedicated to some of the masterpieces on display – in a corpus of more than 400 works – by a selection of original writings by the artist, some of which inedited in Italy, and by a series of storical essays by major protagonists of the critical literature around Max Ernst and Surrealism, such as André Breton, Georges Bataille, Paul. Éluard, Rosalind Krauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss.