The German painter
Max Ernst
(1891-1976), a leading figure in the Dada and
surrealist movements, possessed an amazing range of
styles and techniques.
Max Ernst was born on April
2, 1891, in Brühl, Germany. His memories of his
childhood were remarkably vivid, and they provided
him with many subjects for his later paintings. He
attended the University of Bonn, where he studied
These collages were Ernst's
main production when he was active in the Dada group
in
Cologne
from 1919 to 1922. The
Dada movement with its irreverent attitude to
conventional art and mores appealed to Ernst and his
friends . They produced a number of
publications, and their most outrageous act was the
famous 1920 Cologne Dada exhibition, to enter which
the public had to walk through a public urinal.
Dadamax was the pseudonym Ernst used during this
period.
In 1922 Ernst moved to Paris,
where the surrealists were gathering around André
Breton. Ernst had already started doing more
illusionistic paintings, strongly influenced by
Giorgio de Chirico, and Breton and his friends
admired them.
In 1923 Ernst finished Les
Hommes n'en sauront rein, known as the first
Surrealist painting because, as the
Phaidon Dictionary of
Twentieth-Century Art says, it possesses "all
the characteristic elements of Surealist painting:
the dreamlike atmosphere, the irrational
juxtaposition of images of widely different
assocaitons, the digrams of celestial phenomena, the
desert landscape and the central eroticism." In 1924
he completed one of his most famous pieces,
Two Children Are Threatened
by a Nightingale. Ernst himself was a winning
figure, very charming and brilliant, and
particularly fascinating to women. His romantic life
was colorful, with many love affairs and several
marriages these were always
accompanied by wild stories, and the surrealists
enjoyed his life-style as much as they did his art.
In 1925 Ernst introduced his
new technique of frottage
he placed sheets of paper on floorboards, tiles,
bricks, or whatever was to hand and rubbed them with
graphite, producing strange obsessive shapes. This
technique fitted in with the surrealist cult of
automatic drawing and writing, with their reliance
on chance. The texture of these
frottage drawings was
then applied by Ernst to his paintings, combined
with other techniques he invented. He did a series
of haunting pictures of forests, birds, and hybrid
beasts executed in a rough, painterly fashion. In
the 1930s he returned to a more illusionistic style,
though often with the same mythology as in his early
works; at the same time he began doing
sculpture, at first using boulders
and carving them slightly to reveal hidden poetic
shapes. At the outbreak of World War
II Ernst, like many other surrealists, made his way
to the United States, where he married Peggy
Guggenheim, the American art collector and dealer.
The marriage ended in divorce. Ernst lived in the
United States until 1953, spending much of his time
in Arizona, painting strange landscapes. After 1953
he returned to Europe, painting and exhibiting, and
continuing his personal life in a quieter vein, with
his wife, Dorothea Tanning, an American painter. In
1954 at the Venice Biennale, Ernst was awarded one
of the art world's top honors for painting. Ernst
died in 1976. Since his death, major retrospectives
exhibitions celebrating his artistic achievements
have toured both Europe and the United States.