Max Ernst

Biography

In April 1920 the exhibition “Dada Early Spring” opened in the Winter beer hall in Cologne. Visitors demanded that objects offensive to public order be removed, and the next day Ernst received a telegram from his father disowning him. He never saw his father again.

Max Ernst was born on 2 April 1891 in Brühl, south of Cologne, the third of nine children in a Catholic family. His father, Philipp Ernst, taught deaf children and painted as an amateur; Max had his first drawing lessons from him. Ernst himself told how in 1906, on the night his youngest sister was born, his beloved parrot died, and the boy decided that the baby had taken the life from the bird. The image of the bird-man kept returning in his work, and his bird alter ego was given the name Loplop.

In 1909 he entered the University of Bonn, where he studied philosophy, psychology, art history and literature, visited patients at a psychiatric hospital and took an interest in their drawings. He never received formal art training. Having grown close to August Macke, he joined the Rhenish group Young Rhineland, and the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912, where he saw Picasso, Gauguin and Van Gogh, settled the matter. In 1914 he met Hans Arp, and the friendship lasted fifty years.

He spent the First World War in the German army, on the Western and Eastern Fronts. For a time he was kept with the mapmakers, and he was able to draw. Later he wrote that Max Ernst died on 1 August 1914 and was resurrected on 11 November 1918. Shortly before the end of the war he married the art historian Luise Straus; in 1920 their son Ulrich, later known as Jimmy Ernst, was born.

After demobilisation he returned to Cologne. Reproductions of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings in a magazine and Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifesto pushed him towards collage and lithography; in 1919 he produced the portfolio “Fiat modes”. With Johannes Theodor Baargeld he founded the Cologne Dada group and published short-lived magazines. The authorities confiscated the November 1919 exhibition. His Paris exhibition of 1921, with a catalogue preface by André Breton, took place without him: he was refused a French visa.

Around the same time he met Paul Éluard. The poet bought “Celebes” and chose collages for his collection “Répétitions”, and later the two made the book “Les malheurs des immortels” together. In 1922 Ernst entered France illegally, according to some accounts on Éluard’s passport, left his wife and son behind and settled with the Éluards near Paris. For the first years he lived on odd jobs. In 1924, when Éluard suddenly left, Ernst sold paintings to the gallery owner Johanna Ey and followed him to Vietnam; in Saigon it was decided that Gala, Éluard’s wife, would stay with her husband, and Ernst spent several more months travelling in Southeast Asia.

In 1925 he devised frottage: rubbing a pencil over paper laid on a textured surface, such as an old wooden floor. A year later came the series “Histoire naturelle”, thirty-four sheets. With Joan Miró he designed “Romeo and Juliet” for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company, and the Surrealists staged a scandal at the premiere. Then came grattage, in which paint is scraped across a canvas laid over objects with a relief surface. In 1927 he married Marie-Berthe Aurenche. His novels in collage, “La femme 100 têtes” (1929), “Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au carmel” (1930) and “Une semaine de bonté” (1934), were assembled from engravings in old magazines and novels. In 1930 he appeared in Luis Buñuel’s “L’Âge d’Or”. From 1934, in contact with Alberto Giacometti, he began to work in sculpture.

In 1937 Ernst became involved with Leonora Carrington, and they settled in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, where he covered the house with frescoes. In 1938 Peggy Guggenheim bought a large part of his work and showed it in her London gallery.

In September 1939, as a German citizen, he was interned and found himself in the Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence together with Hans Bellmer. After a few weeks he was released; Éluard had intervened. In 1940 he was arrested again; he escaped from the camp, and he obtained his release, it is reported, through his marriage to a Frenchwoman. Meanwhile Carrington, left alone, sold the house and went to Spain. Ernst left Europe by way of Marseille, Madrid and Lisbon with the help of Varian Fry and Peggy Guggenheim; on 14 July 1941 he flew into the United States. The phrase “Europe After the Rain” became the title of a painting begun while he was still in France.

In New York he mixed with Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Breton and other émigrés. The method he called “oscillation” (a tin can with a hole, swung over a canvas) interested Jackson Pollock. He and Guggenheim married at the end of 1941, but the marriage did not last. In 1946, at a double wedding in Beverly Hills with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, he married the painter Dorothea Tanning. They lived in Sedona, Arizona. The prize of 2,500 dollars for a painting of the temptation of Saint Anthony went on land and a house, and a concrete “Capricorn” appeared in the yard. In Arizona Ernst wrote the essay “Beyond Painting”.

In 1950 he returned to France. In 1954 he won the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. In 1963 he settled in Seillans in the south-east of France. Retrospectives in 1975 were held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the Grand Palais in Paris. Ernst died in Paris on 1 April 1976, the day before his eighty-fifth birthday, and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. In 2005 a museum devoted to him opened in Brühl.