Max Ernst (1891-1976), the subject of a retrospective that opens today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is among the most influential artists of the 20th century. Originally a Dadaist (and a Surrealist before “Surrealism”), Ernst has influenced – unfortunately – virtually every aspect of contemporary visual culture, from painting and sculpture to architecture, fashion, and design.

Ernst had an unwavering belief in, and commitment to, the subconscious and the accidental. He glorified the illogical, irrational, and bizarre. In doing so, he helped create a precedent for art devoted to hyperrealist fantasy, nonsense, appropriation, and the absurd, art that, rather than embracing poetry and form, merely illustrates or makes reference to strange juxtapositions, dreams, and peculiarities. Ernst’s art has given rise to a whole movement of artists who practice weirdness for weirdness’s sake.

His lineage includes the painters Gerhard Richter and Jenny Saville, who attempt to dazzle us with impastoed, grotesque surfaces, rather than form; Robert Gober’s orphaned body parts and Damien Hirst’s fish out of water; John Currin’s art historical injokes; Jeff Koon’s giant bunnies; and Takashi Murakami’s goofy yet sexual, cartoon imagery. The Met’s show, the first major U.S. survey of Ernst’s work in 30 years, is big (some 175 works), and it takes a lot of stamina to make it to the exit. But it will no doubt inspire another generation of artists who have already sharpened their teeth on contemporary conceptual, Dada- and Surrealist-inspired art.

Ernst’s works – psychosexual, hallucinatory amalgamations of machine, landscape, woman, and bird; still lifes, made of entrails, flowers, and what appear to be starched collars; collages of 19th-century ephemera, erotica, and naturalist diagrams – certainly must have lost the shocking edge they originally had. Still, they feel surprisingly contemporary.

Ernst, a self-taught artist who was interested in conveying what he saw with what he called his “inner” eye, was unimaginative and repetitive: a manipulator of paint, but not a painter. The various surfaces of his paintings – at times slickly rendered; at other times thickly frosted; thin and dry; or syrupy and messy – are among the most repulsive of any celebrated 20th-century artist. No matter what Ernst did to his paintings – and he did a lot, making deletion rubbings from objects; pressing wet paintings against each other; moving heavily loaded palette knives across and making textured impressions into paintings’ wet surfaces – the effects always remain just that: effects.

At best, Ernst was a mediocre illustrator with a bent for seeing how the universe, if broken down like pieces of a puzzle, could be rebuilt again. His best works throughout his career are the black-and-white collages, some meant to stand on their own and some book illustrations he made for the poet Paul Eluard. In the collages, when Ernst was working mostly with already existing pictures – cutting out and combining images from encyclopedias, printed books, and photographs – he had a knack for visual shifts in scale, pattern, and texture. Although more literal than visual (they never have the rhythmic punch of Kurt Schwitters’s collages or the poetic reach of the work of Joseph Cornell), these works have humorous, at times magical, moments.

Some collages (those made between 1920-21), may have been collaborated on, and are known to have been titled by Jean Arp, a Dadaist who was also a true poet. These come as close to poetry as Ernst ever gets. “Above the Clouds Midnight Passes” (1920) is sweet. In it, standing like a chorus girl, is a figure perched in the clouds. She is collaged together from pictures of a woman’s legs in high heels, a ball of string (as hips), and two pieces of crochet work (as head and torso) that look like eyes, surrounded by flower petals, on butterfly wings. The dancing figure in “The Chinese Nightingale” (1920) is Oriental in feel. The erotically charged figure, lying in a rectangle of grass like a jewel in its box, is created from pictures of a fan rising out of a Cycladic looking head (punctuated by a single eye) and undulating arms.

“Santa Conversazione” (1921) – like “The Chinese Nightingale,” a photographed collage – gives us female figures who, resembling sculpture, stand just in front of their niches. Here, Ernst perches a dove, like a rocking horse, on a woman’s hip. He puts another dove in place of a breast, and a button in place of a knee. Pleats in a skirt; veins and ligaments in skinned, diagrammatic limbs; and the tail feathers and plumage of the doves merge rhythmically, almost brilliantly. Yet as strange as his collaged juxtapositions are, they always seem to remain more in the service of literary rather than visual ideas.

Ernst was born in Bruhl, Germany, near Cologne, where two major events seem to have formed him as an artist: His pet bird died the night his sister was born (which he said led to “a dangerous confusion between birds and humans”) and he studied abnormal psychology. Ernst’s early paintings, naive, northern in temperament, resemble the works of Franz Marc, Chagall, and August Macke (whom he befriended). There are three of these early gems in the show, and they are among the most natural and unpretentious works he created. “Immortality” (c. 1913), of a family perched on top of a house and surrounded by birds and a tree, is painted in cool blues and greens. Like later paintings, such as “The Joy of Living,” “Garden Inhabited by Chimera,” and “The Nymph Echo” (all 1936), “Immortality” has a straightforward quality reminiscent at times of Henri Rousseau in the obsessively delineated foliage.

After World War I, Ernst founded a Dada group with Arp, and he became involved with the Surrealist poet Andre Breton. In 1921 Breton arranged a one-person show of his work in Paris, which, in 1922, Ernst made his illegal home. There he lived, at least for a time, in a menage a trois with Eluard and his wife. He traveled, showed regularly in Paris and abroad, and met Masson, Giacometti, and De Chirico, whom he had emulated since 1919. In 1941, with the assistance of Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married that same year, the artist moved to New York. Five years later, he moved to Arizona where, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, he married the American painter Dorothea Tanning. In 1953, the two settled back in France, where the artist lived until his death.

Walking through the retrospective, I felt as if I were encountering horrible pastiches of the artists Ernst emulated, as well as some he influenced. There are bad Picassos, such as “The Fatherland’s Child” (1930); bad Klees, such as “Red Nude” (c. 1923), “The Petrified City” (1935), and “The Sky Marries the Earth” (1964); bad Arps, Man Rays, Massons, Miros, Cornells, De Chiricos, and Surrealist-period Giacomettis. There is even a work, “Loplop Presents a Young Girl” (1936), made of oil, plaster, and found objects on wood, that looks like a bad Rauschenberg “Combine” or a Julian Schnabel plate painting.

Being innovative and influential does not always mean being a good artist. This was certainly true of Ernst, whose obsession with his “inner” eye left us with works that do not convey the kind of formal, let alone mystical, weight necessary for us to believe. For that, we have to go to the true Surrealists – Masson, Arp, De Chirico, and Giacometti – artists who recognized that art, “inner” eye or not, is experienced through the eyes in the fronts of our heads.

Until July 10 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).