"Remote and cool as an apparition, Ernst has always just left the building," wrote New York Times art critic Holland Carter about an artist who has somehow remained a mystery despite decades of research on his work.

Unlike other artists of his heyday, the cultural explosion between the two world wars, Max Ernst seems singularly unable to pin down. His background as a scholar of literature and philosophy, as well as his unyielding interest in the study of dreams, made him an artist of unusual breadth.

The 180 works in the exhibition create an over-arching picture of Ernst’s talents as a miniaturist, a satirist and a surrealist, but they don’t create any sense of linear development throughout his career.

The retrospective includes Ernst’s most important paintings, his celebrated collages, drawings, sculptures, and illustrated books lent by private and public collections in Europe and the United States.

Witty and sometimes strangely cute, Max Ernst’s work very early on displayed a visual embodiment of the aesthetic that Paris based surrealists André Breton and Paul Éluard explored in their writing, critics have said. Many of the paintings on display at the Met show demonstrate why Ernst was quickly accepted within Surrealist circles when he moved to Paris in 1921.

Among the works on display is "A Week of Kindness," a five-volume collage novel considered his masterpiece. But some of the strangest and most idiosyncratic works on display are those Ernst created during a trip he took to Southeast Asia in the early 1920’s.