Ernst arrived in the United States in 1941 during World War II, having gained asylum through the help of Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and other American friends. He met and married the painter Dorothea Tanning in New York and together they moved to Sedona, Arizona, where they built a house and studio by hand. Ernst remained there for more than a decade and found the purity of the desert landscape paralleled his own spiritual vision. Free of urban constraints, he painted isolated vistas such as Earthquake, Late Afternoon, which capture the natural forces, enigmatic stillness, and intense colors of the locale.