Max Ernst Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation

Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Bruhl, near Cologne, Germany. His father, Philipp Ernst, was a teacher and amateur painter whose disciplined practice and religious convictions framed the household from which the young artist would break away. Ernst studied philosophy, literature, psychology, and art history at the University of Bonn, a broad intellectual grounding that fed his skepticism about rational systems and nourished an early fascination with the unconscious mind. He began painting and drawing in earnest before the First World War, and by 1912 he was taking part in exhibitions and becoming aware of the radical challenges to representation posed by avant-garde currents in Germany and France.

War and the Birth of Dada

Conscripted into the German army during World War I, Ernst served on both Western and Eastern fronts. The experience of mechanized conflict, displacement, and trauma left a lasting mark on his imagination. After demobilization he joined with Hans (Jean) Arp and Johannes Theodor Baargeld to form the Dada group in Cologne. Their outrageous exhibitions and publications, often closed or censored by authorities, rejected conventional aesthetics and social pieties. Collage became Ernst's crucial vehicle: he appropriated engravings, catalog images, and ephemera to produce disjunctive, poetic images that fused humor with menace. This reworking of printed culture, mastered in the immediate postwar years, established his reputation for invention.

Paris and Surrealism

In 1922 Ernst moved to Paris, drawn by friendships with the poet Paul Eluard and with Andre Breton, who was consolidating the Surrealist group. He circulated among writers and artists such as Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, Man Ray, Joan Miro, and later Salvador Dali, contributing vigorously to their journals and exhibitions. While never entirely compliant with Breton's shifting edicts, Ernst helped define the movement's visual language: enigmatic architectures, metamorphosed bodies, hybrid birds, and dreamlike landscapes that seem at once archaic and futuristic. Works like The Elephant Celebes (1921) and Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924) distilled his blend of irony, memory, and visionary unease.

Techniques and Imagery

Ernst relentlessly expanded his methods. Around 1925 he developed frottage, placing paper over textured surfaces such as wood or leaves and rubbing with graphite to coax imagery out of accidental patterns. The portfolio Histoire naturelle exemplified this procedure's fecundity. He extended the principle to painting through grattage, scraping pigment over textured grounds to summon unexpected forms. In the 1930s he explored decalcomania, spreading paint between surfaces and pulling them apart to generate branching, geological effects, later crucial to works like Europe After the Rain II. Across media he conjured the figure of Loplop, Superior of Birds, an avian alter ego guiding his journeys through forests, eroded cities, and mineral dreamscapes. His collage novels, including La Femme 100 tetes (1929), A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil (1930), and Une semaine de bonte (1934), recomposed 19th-century engravings into narratives of desire, terror, and metamorphosis.

Personal Ties and Creative Communities

Ernst's life intersected closely with poets and patrons who shaped the modern movement. In the early 1920s he shared an intense bond with Paul Eluard and Gala Eluard, living for a time in a constellation that challenged conventional domestic arrangements while sustaining productive collaboration. He had earlier married Luise Straus, a journalist and art historian; their son, Jimmy Ernst, later became a painter in the United States. During the late 1930s Ernst lived with the artist Leonora Carrington, whose imagination and mythic imagery conversed deeply with his own. Their circle overlapped with figures like Marcel Duchamp and Giorgio de Chirico, artists whose strategies of irony and enigma resonated with his.

War, Internment, and Exile

The rise of fascism made Ernst doubly vulnerable: as a German national in France and as a prominent avant-garde artist whose work was denounced as "degenerate". In 1939 he was interned by French authorities as an enemy alien, released, and then threatened again after the German invasion. With help from friends, notably the patron Peggy Guggenheim and the rescue network around Varian Fry, he escaped France via Marseille and Lisbon and reached the United States in 1941. Soon after, he married Guggenheim; the union brought visibility and support but was short-lived. In New York he reconnected with Duchamp and many Surrealists in exile, contributing to exhibitions that introduced their ideas to American audiences.

America and the Expansion of Scale

In the mid-1940s Ernst formed a lasting partnership with the painter Dorothea Tanning, whom he married in 1946. The couple spent extended periods in Arizona, where the desert's geology and monumental vistas catalyzed new sculpture and painting. Ernst assembled totemic figures from cast-off materials and plaster, later realized in bronze; Capricorn (1948) embodied his synthesis of ritual, humor, and myth. The stress on process, chance, and textured surfaces fed back into his canvases, whose craggy terrains and stratified skies influenced younger American artists attentive to materiality and automatism.

Return to Europe and Late Recognition

After the war Ernst divided his time between the United States and France before resettling in Europe. He continued to paint, sculpt, write, and design books, maintaining a characteristically experimental approach. In 1954 he received the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, a signal of official recognition that also sparked tensions within Surrealist ranks. Despite such frictions, he remained a magnetic presence for artists and poets drawn to the liberties he had claimed decades earlier. In later years he lived and worked primarily in France, often in the south, alongside Dorothea Tanning, while participating in retrospectives that consolidated his international reputation.

Legacy

Max Ernst died in Paris on April 1, 1976. His career traced a path from Dada's assault on reason to Surrealism's exploration of desire and dream, and onward to an open-ended practice that fused accident with discipline. He left a body of work that moved fluidly among collage, printmaking, painting, and sculpture, anchored by a few simple ideas: that images might be discovered rather than invented; that imagination thrives on encounters with the material world; and that humor and terror often share a boundary. His influence extends from midcentury abstraction and assemblage to contemporary practices of appropriation and book art. Through friendships and alliances with figures such as Hans (Jean) Arp, Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Paul and Gala Eluard, Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Leonora Carrington, Peggy Guggenheim, Dorothea Tanning, and his son Jimmy Ernst, he helped build a transnational network that redefined what modern art could be.