Join Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, for a discussion of The Endless Night by Max Ernst, a painting on long-term loan from the Parker Foundation, on view until spring 2023.

Painted in 1940 just before Max Ernst fled fascist Europe, The Endless Night belongs to a loose group of artworks in which Ernst visualized nightmarish and ghostly otherworlds suggestive of Europe’s political and cultural destruction during World War II. These apocalyptic topographies evoke devastation, violence and war—partly through abstracted spongy, porous and fragmented elements, and partly through crisp renditions of monsters, fossils and surreal creatures in flux.