"The Elephant Celebes" is an oil on canvas 1921 painting by which artist?

Max Ernst (1891 – 1976) was a German Dadaist and surrealist who painted the oil on canvas "The Elephant Celebes" in 1921.

He told Roland Penrose that the title "Celebes" was derived from the opening words of a German schoolboys' rhyme with sexual connotations. The common consensus to the origin of the movement's name is that the German artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a letter-opener at random into a dictionary, where it landed on "dada", a colloquial French term for a "hobby horse".

Dada was an art movement formed during the WWI in Zurich with negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature.

The central focus of this painting is a giant mechanical elephant. It is round and has a trunk-like hose protruding from it. "Celebes" suggests "ritual and totemic sculpture of African origin" shown by the totem-like pole to the right and the figure's bull horns.

Ernst's creature has a frilly metallic cuff or collar, and a horned head and tail. The low horizon emphasizes the creature's bulk, and the gesture of the headless mannequin introduces the viewer to the figure. The mannequin wears a surgical glove, a common Surrealist symbol. The mostly empty sky contains more incongruities with two fish 'flying' to the left. The black shape to the right of the fish looks like an oncoming airplane, and there is a trail of smoke in the right part of the sky.