Ernst, Max

Ernst, Max (1891–1976). German-born painter, printmaker, collagist, and sculptor who became an American citizen in 1948 and a French citizen in 1958, one of the major figures of Dada and even more so of Surrealism. He was born at Brühl, near Cologne; his father, who taught at a school for deaf and dumb children, was a keen amateur painter. A nervous and imaginative child, he was strangely affected at the age of 14 by the death of a favourite cockatoo on the same day as the birth of a sister. Later (referring to himself in the third person) he wrote that ‘In his imagination Max coupled these two events and charged the baby with the extinction of the bird's life. There followed a series of mystical crises, fits of hysteria, exaltations and depressions. A dangerous confusion between birds and humans became fixed in his mind and asserted itself in his drawings and paintings’ (he came to identify himself with Loplop, a birdlike creature that features in many of his works). In 1909 Ernst began to study philosophy and psychology at Bonn University, but he became fascinated by the art of psychotics (he visited the insane as part of his studies) and in 1911 he abandoned academic study for painting. He had no professional training as an artist, but he was influenced by August Macke, whom he met in 1911. Throughout the First World War he served as an artillery engineer, but thanks to an art-loving commanding officer he was sometimes able to paint, and he exhibited at the Sturm Gallery in 1916. After the war he settled in Cologne, where with his lifelong friend Arp (whom he had met in 1914) he became the leader of the city's Dada group. In 1920 he organized one of Dada's most famous exhibitions in the conservatory of a restaurant: ‘In order to enter the gallery one had to pass through a public lavatory. Inside the public was provided with hatchets with which, if they wanted to, they could attack the objects and paintings exhibited. At the end of the gallery a young girl, dressed in white for her first communion, stood reciting obscene poems’ ( David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism, 1935). In 1922 Ernst settled in Paris, where he joined the Surrealist movement on its formation in 1924. Even before then, however, he had painted works that are regarded as Surrealist masterpieces, such as Celebes (Tate Gallery, London, 1921) in which an elephant is transformed into a strange mechanistic monster. The irrational and whimsical imagery seen here, in part inspired by childhood memories, occurs also in his highly original collages. In them he rearranged parts of banal engravings from sources such as trade catalogues and technical journals to create strange and startling scenes, showing, for example, a child with a severed head in her lap where a doll might be expected. He also arranged series of such illustrations with accompanying captions to form ‘collage novels'; the best-known and most ambitious is Une Semaine de bonté (‘A Week of Kindness'), published in Paris in 1934. Other imaginative techniques of which he was a leading exponent were frottage (which he invented in 1925) and decalcomania. In 1930 he appeared in the Surrealist film L'Age d'or, created by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and in 1935 he made his first sculpture (he worked seriously but intermittently in this field, characteristically creating totemic-like figures in bronze).

Ernst left the Surrealist group in 1938, as he refused to comply with André Breton's demand that members should ‘sabotage in every possible way the poetry of Paul Éluard’ (a close friend of Ernst), but the break did not affect his work stylistically. At this time he was living with the British Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, whom he had met in 1936. They set up home at St-Martind'Ardèche, near Avignon, but in 1939, after the outbreak of the Second World War, he was interned as an enemy alien. Éluard helped to secure his release, but he was twice more interned, escaping each time. In 1941 he managed to flee to the USA, where he stayed until 1953 (apart from a visit to France in 1948), living first in or near New York and then in Arizona. While in the USA he collaborated with Breton and Duchamp in the periodical VVV. He was briefly married (his third of four wives) to the American art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, then in 1946 married the American Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. In 1953 they settled in France, living first in Paris and then from 1955 in Huismes, Loire. Ernst had often struggled financially early in his career, but in 1954 he won the main painting prize at the Venice Biennale and this marked the beginning of a much honoured old age, when he received many awards and was the subject of several major retrospective exhibitions. His work of this time became more lyrical and abstract.