Max Ernst

Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Brühl, a small town near Cologne in the German Rhineland ^[1]. His father, Philipp Ernst, taught at a school for the deaf and painted in his spare time, a strict amateur whose devout Catholicism and rigid academic style left a lasting mark on his son. The young Ernst later traced much of his fascination with the irrational to childhood episodes in Brühl, including the death of a beloved pet bird, an event he connected in memory with the birth of a sister and which fed the bird imagery that runs through his mature work ^[2].

In 1910 he enrolled at the University of Bonn, where he read philosophy, psychology, and art history rather than pursuing formal art training ^[1]. He visited asylums and studied the art of psychiatric patients, an interest that predated the Surrealists' enthusiasm for such material by more than a decade. He taught himself to paint, absorbing the work of van Gogh, the German Expressionists, and the Blaue Reiter circle, and in 1913 he exhibited alongside members of the Rhineland avant-garde and met Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay during a trip to Paris ^[2].

The First World War interrupted this promising start. Ernst served in the German artillery on both the Western and Eastern fronts, an experience he described afterward with bitterness and which deepened his contempt for the nationalist culture that had produced the slaughter ^[1]. He married the art historian Luise Straus in 1918; their son Jimmy Ernst, born in 1920, would himself become a painter in America ^[3].

Demobilized in 1918, Ernst returned to Cologne and threw himself into the anti-art revolt then spreading from Zurich. With Johannes Baargeld and, for a time, Hans Arp, he founded the Cologne Dada group, publishing provocative journals and mounting exhibitions designed to scandalize ^[1]. The most notorious, staged in 1920 in the courtyard of a brewery, could be entered through a public lavatory and invited visitors to destroy an object with an axe; the police briefly shut it down ^[2].

During these years Ernst developed the collage method that became his signature. Cutting and recombining illustrations from mail-order catalogues, scientific manuals, and nineteenth-century engravings, he produced images in which ordinary objects met in impossible, dreamlike configurations ^[4]. When a selection of these collages was shown in Paris in 1921, André Breton and the future Surrealists greeted them with excitement, seeing in them exactly the kind of disruptive poetic image they were seeking ^[1].

Who was Max Ernst at this point? Not yet a Parisian celebrity, but already a figure the French avant-garde wanted. In 1922 he left Germany without a passport, abandoned his first marriage, and settled in Paris, initially sharing a household with the poet Paul Éluard and Éluard's wife Gala in a famously unconventional arrangement ^[3].

Ernst was a founding participant in Surrealism when Breton launched the movement with his manifesto of 1924, and paintings such as Celebes (1921) and Pietà or Revolution by Night (1923) were later claimed as landmarks of Surrealist art even though they preceded the manifesto ^[4]. His canvases of the 1920s combined meticulous, illusionistic rendering with subject matter drawn from dream, memory, and Freudian ideas, which he had encountered in his university reading years before most of his Paris colleagues ^[2].

In 1925 he devised frottage, taking pencil rubbings from floorboards, leaves, and other textured surfaces and developing the chance patterns into images; he published a suite of these drawings as Histoire Naturelle in 1926 ^[1]. He soon adapted the principle to oil painting as grattage, scraping pigment across canvas laid over rough materials. Both methods were attempts to reduce conscious control over the image, a painterly parallel to the automatic writing the Surrealist poets practiced ^[4].

Among the most sustained Max Ernst achievements of this period are his collage novels, above all La Femme 100 Têtes (1929) and Une Semaine de Bonté (1934), wordless narratives assembled from reworked Victorian engravings that read like illustrated nightmares ^[2]. He also invented a personal alter ego, the bird-headed figure he called Loplop, who appears throughout his work of the 1930s as a kind of master of ceremonies ^[4]. In 1934 he began making sculpture in earnest during a summer spent with Alberto Giacometti in Switzerland, carving and assembling forms he would return to for the rest of his life ^[1].

The rise of Nazism made Ernst's position increasingly dangerous. His work was ridiculed in the Degenerate Art exhibition mounted by the German authorities in 1937, and he had long since been regarded as an enemy of the regime he had left behind ^[2]. He was living in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche in southern France with the British Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington when war broke out in 1939, and the French government interned him as an enemy alien despite his years of residence ^[3].

Released and then interned again after the German invasion of 1940, he escaped and, with the help of the American journalist Varian Fry's rescue network and the collector Peggy Guggenheim, made his way out of Europe, reaching New York in July 1941 ^[3]. He married Guggenheim later that year; the marriage was brief, but her gallery Art of This Century placed his work at the center of the wartime New York art world ^[1].

In America his example mattered. Younger painters, including Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes, saw in Surrealist automatism a way forward, and Ernst's experiments with dripping paint from a swinging punctured can, used in works such as The Bewildered Planet, anticipated concerns that Abstract Expressionism would make its own ^[4]. His large 1941 canvas Europe After the Rain II, finished in America, rendered a continent dissolved into ruin through decalcomania, a technique of pressing and lifting paint that he had adopted from Oscar Domínguez and pushed further than anyone ^[2].

Ernst's private life was as unsettled as his art. After his first marriage to Luise Straus ended, he was married briefly to Marie-Berthe Aurenche in the late 1920s, then to Peggy Guggenheim in 1941 ^[3]. In 1943 he met the American painter Dorothea Tanning at a gathering of artists; they married in Beverly Hills in 1946 in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, and remained together until his death ^[3]. Luise Straus, his first wife, was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, a fact that shadowed the family after the war ^[3].

Ernst and Tanning settled in Sedona, Arizona, where the red rock landscape echoed the mineral fantasies he had been painting for years. There he produced one of his best-known sculptures, Capricorn (1948), a monumental seated group cast in concrete and later in bronze ^[1]. He became a citizen of the United States in 1948, and after the couple returned to France in the early 1950s he took French citizenship in 1958 ^[2].

Recognition, long withheld, arrived in his final decades. He won the Grand Prize for painting at the 1954 Venice Biennale, an award that prompted the Surrealist group to expel him on the grounds that accepting official honors betrayed the movement's principles ^[1]. Major retrospectives followed in New York, Paris, Cologne, and elsewhere. He continued to paint, sculpt, and make prints from homes in Paris and in Seillans, Provence, until his death in Paris on April 1, 1976, one day short of his eighty-fifth birthday ^[2].

Any serious Max Ernst biography has to reckon with his range. Few artists of his century worked convincingly as painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet, and book artist, and fewer still invented as many usable techniques. Frottage, grattage, his oscillation experiments, and his transformation of collage into sustained narrative all expanded what visual art could do, and each was taken up by later generations ^[4].

His institutional presence is broad. The Max Ernst Museum opened in his birthplace of Brühl in 2005, holding a large collection of his work across all media ^[5]. Major holdings are found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and his collage novels remain in print decades after their first appearance ^[4]. Dorothea Tanning, who outlived him by thirty-six years, helped steward his legacy alongside her own career ^[3].

Among the more striking Max Ernst facts is the arc of his citizenships: born a German subject, stripped of his homeland by politics, naturalized American, and finally French. That itinerary mirrors the displacement of an entire European generation of artists, and Ernst turned the experience into images of collapse and metamorphosis that still feel current. Historians of Surrealism generally rank him with Miró and Magritte among the movement's indispensable painters, and his insistence that chance and the irrational deserve a place in serious art remains one of modernism's durable lessons ^[2].