Studies in painting: Non. He learned to express himself by means of art in the same way as the child learns to talk. No teaching is needed for the one who is born an artist, and even the expression 'self-taught' is a phony, he thinks.

In a questionnaire, Max Ernst filled out in 1948, the U.S; as quoted in Max Ernst: a Retrospective, ed. Werner Spies & Sabine Rewald, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2005, p. 7