Max Ernst (* April 2, 1891 in Brühl (Rhineland); † April 1, 1976 in Paris, France), actually Maximilian Maria Ernst, was an important painter, graphic artist, and sculptor of German origin who was granted American citizenship in 1948 and French citizenship in 1958.
After military service in World War I, he founded the Cologne Dada group in 1919 with Johannes Baargeld and Hans Arp. In 1922 he left his family behind and moved to Paris, where he joined the Surrealist circle around André Breton and became one of the most important members in the artistic field of the Surrealist movement.
At the beginning of World War II, he was interned in France several times starting in 1939, was able to flee with the art patron Peggy Guggenheim, later his third wife, and, like many other European artists, chose the U.S. as an exile in 1941. In 1953 he returned to France with his fourth wife, the painter Dorothea Tanning.
With his paintings, collages and sculptures, the artist created enigmatic combinations of images, bizarre creatures, often representing birds, and fantastic landscapes. In addition to his artistic work, Max Ernst wrote poems and autobiographical as well as art theoretical writings.
Artists' books occupy a large space in his work. The techniques frottage, grattage and drip painting, developed as oscillation, go back to him. Applied by Jackson Pollock, Drip Painting became a component of American abstract expressionism.
Max Ernst's Life
Childhood and youth
Max Ernst was born as the third of nine children of the deaf-mute teacher and lay painter Philipp Ernst (1862-1942) and his wife Luise, née Kopp (1865-1949). His first contact with painting was through his father. In 1896, his father painted his five-year-old son as the baby Jesus.
In 1942, Max Ernst published an autobiographical text in the American exile art magazine View, in which he describes his magical relationship with birds: his birth from a bird's egg that his mother had placed in an eagle's nest, and the connection between the death of his favorite bird, the pink cockatoo Hornebom, and the birth of his youngest sister Apollonia (called Loni) in 1906, which he experienced as simultaneous.
Max Ernst's description of the coincidence of the two events is fictitious; the cockatoo lived on for some time after the birth of its sister. Max Ernst, influenced by these ideas, developed in his work as an alter ego the "Vogelobren Hornebom" and "Loplop".
In his late work the artist appears as "Schnabelmax". Bird-like creatures appear in many of his paintings, especially in the series of works Loplop presents from the 1930s.
After graduating from high school in Brühl, he initially studied classical philology, philosophy, psychology and art history at the University of Bonn from 1910 to 1914.
Philosophers whom the student Ernst appreciated were Novalis, Hegel and the "great critics of the one-dimensional thinking of the 19th century, Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche". Through the study of psychology, he came into contact with the writings of Sigmund Freud and became involved with the art of the mentally ill.
Max Ernst often visited the museum in Cologne and was interested in the Flemish masters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, as well as in German Romanticism, especially Caspar David Friedrich.
From 1909, two landscapes are preserved that show his admiration for Vincent van Gogh. In 1911 he became friends with August Macke and the following year, encouraged by the recognition and encouragement of Macke's circle of friends, he decided to become a self-taught painter.
First successes as an artist
Max Ernst had his first exhibition in 1912 at the Galerie Feldmann in Cologne. At the International Art Exhibition of the Sonderbund Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler zu Cöln in the same year, he saw works by important artists such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch.
In 1912/1913 Max Ernst wrote art and theater reviews for the Bonn Volksmund and participated in the 1913 exhibition Rheinische Expressionisten in Bonn. During a trip to Paris that same year, he met Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay, and in 1914 Hans Arp, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship.
Also in 1913, Max Ernst was represented with two works (No. 129: Sturm; No. 130: Promenade) at the First German Autumn Salon in the Berlin gallery "Der Sturm" by Herwarth Walden, in whose gallery a second exhibition of his works took place in March 1916, followed in 1917 by the exhibition in the Zurich "Galerie Dada", also organized by Walden.
Use in the First World War
From August 1914 to November 1918, Ernst served in the First World War in France and Poland. In 1918 he was promoted to lieutenant against his will. On October 7, 1918, shortly before the end of the war, he married his university friend, the art historian Luise Straus, daughter of the Jewish hat manufacturer Jacob Straus, in a wartime wedding ceremony in Cologne. Their son Hans-Ulrich, who later became known in the USA as a surrealist painter under the name Jimmy Ernst, was born in 1920. He felt the return from the war as a rebirth:
"Max Ernst died on August 1, 1914. He returned to life on November 11, 1918 as a young man who hoped to become a magician, to find the myths of his time."
Dada and Surrealism in Cologne and Paris
Founding of the Cologne Dada Group
Disgusted by the "great mess of this stupid war," Max Ernst founded the Cologne Dada Group in 1919 with the self-invented epithet "minimax dadamax" together with Johannes Theodor Baargeld, the "Zentrodada," and Hans Arp, in which his wife Luise Straus-Ernst was involved.
Already in February and March of that year, after a double issue, five more issues of the weekly Der Ventilator, edited by Baargeld with the collaboration of Max Ernst, had appeared. Further issues were banned.
In the summer of 1919, Ernst went to Munich with Baargeld to visit Paul Klee. In the Munich book and art shop of Hans Goltz, he discovered works by Giorgio de Chirico in the magazine Valori Plastici, which impressed him so much that he published the graphic folder Fiat modes - pereat ars with the funds of a financial support for unemployed artists in Heinrich Hoerle's Schloemilch publishing house.
Also in 1919, the artists' association Das Junge Rheinland was founded in Düsseldorf, of which he was one of the members. Its center was Johanna Ey's gallery, which supported Ernst's work through exhibitions.
In November of that year, an exhibition of the Dadaists was held in the rooms of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, which was closed by the British military government under which the Rhineland was under after the First World War.
In 1920 the "Zentrale W/3" was founded, the "Weststupidien 3" were Arp, Baargeld and Ernst, who published the magazine die schammade.(dilettanten erhebt euch!) in February. French collaborators included André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon. The second Cologne Dada exhibition was held in April 1920 under the title Dada-Vorfrühling at the Brauhaus Winter.
Together with Hans Arp, he created the collages collectifs for it, jokingly called Fatagaga (Fabrication de tableaux garantis gazometriques). The exhibition aroused public displeasure, was temporarily closed by the police, and led to a break with Ernst's father. From the end of June 1920, the artist was represented with works at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin, as was Baargeld. A year later, during a vacation in Tarrenz, Tyrol, he met with Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber, and André Breton, among others.
At Breton's invitation, he had his first exhibition in May/June 1921 at the Paris gallery Au Sans Pareil, but he was not present. The catalog listed, among other works, the collage The Hat Makes the Man. In the fall of 1921, the writer Paul Éluard and his wife Gala were guests of Max Ernst in Cologne for a week. Éluard spontaneously acquired the early Surrealist paintings Celebes and Oedipus Rex from him.
Move to Paris
In August 1922, after a second stay in Tarrenz, the artist finally moved to Paris and left his family. Éluard had sent him his own passport, as Ernst had not been able to get a visa, and Max Ernst lived with the Éluard couple. For almost two years he had to do odd jobs, as he could not make a living from his painting.
His 1922 work The Rendezvous of Friends was presented the following year at the "Salon des Indépendants." In 1923, the Éluard couple moved into a house in Eaubonne near Paris, where Ernst painted a cycle of 15 pictures of grotesque mythical creatures and paradisiacal gardens on the doors. They were pasted over by subsequent inhabitants, rediscovered in 1969, restored by the artist himself and transferred to canvas.
Among them was the mural At the First Clear Word, which today belongs to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Ernst had fallen in love with Gala, and Éluard, who had initially tolerated the liaison, escaped the ménage à trois to Saigon in 1924. Gala and Max Ernst followed him.
He secured the money for the trip by selling his Paris paintings to Johanna Ey. While the Éluards returned to Paris, Ernst did not make the return trip until three months later. Gala later married Salvador Dalí.
From 1924 Ernst was already one of the most important members of the Surrealist group around André Breton. In this year Breton wrote the Manifeste du Surréalisme, in which he defined surrealism as a "pure psychic automatism". The group's organ was the journal La Révolution surréaliste, which included works by Ernst.
In 1925 Ernst moved into his first studio at Les Fusains, 22, rue Tourlaque, Paris. A contract signed that year with the collector Jacques Viot ensured him a regular income, and exhibitions in Paris galleries followed. From 1925 he produced his first works in the frottage technique he had invented, which were published in his book Histoire naturelle in 1926, and developed the painting technique of grattage.
These techniques now defined his typical style. He collaborated with Joan Miró on the set and costumes for Djagilev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, music by Constant Lambert, which was performed by the Ballets Russes.
This collaboration provoked the protest of the Surrealist group. Strong opposition, this time from clerical circles, was met by his 1926 painting The Virgin Chastises the Child Jesus Before Three Witnesses, which was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and then at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, where it was to be removed.
After divorcing Luise Straus-Ernst in 1926, Ernst married the much younger Marie-Berthe Aurenche, sister of the screenwriter Jean Aurenche, the following year. Beginning in the early 1930s, the couple moved into an apartment in the Montparnasse quarter at 26, rue des Plantes, where they were neighbors of Alberto Giacometti, who was occasionally allowed to store sculptures on the Ernsts' terrace.
In 1930 Max Ernst took on the role of a robber chief in the controversial surrealist film The Golden Age (L'Âge d'Or) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. In the fall of 1933 he met the twenty-year-old artist Meret Oppenheim, with whom he had a love affair that lasted until the next year.
Max Ernst spent the summer of 1934 with Alberto Giacometti in his summer studio in Maloja; both artists transported granite blocks found in a riverbed and washed round by the water to Giacometti's house. Ernst worked on these blocks as his first sculptural experiments, creating shallow reliefs on them that offered representations of flowers, birds, and figures, but he did not continue their form later. In 1936 he divorced from Marie-Berthe Aurenche.
Under the Nazi regime in Germany, Max Ernst's works were defamed, he himself was ostracized and his art was classified as "degenerate" in 1933. In 1937, two of his paintings were shown in the Munich exhibition Entartete Kunst. The painting Die Schöne Gärtnerin (The Beautiful Gardener, 1923), exhibited in a room under the motto "Mockery of the German Woman," has since been considered lost.
That year, under the impression of the Spanish Civil War, he created the painting Der Hausengel (L'Ange du foyer) in three variations, in which a monster with bared teeth and extended claws threatens the earth. Also that year, he created stage designs for Alfred Jarry's drama Ubu enchainé, first performed 30 years after the author's death at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées on September 22, 1937.
In 1938, he was a participant in the landmark Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris; together with Salvador Dalí, he served as technical advisor and exhibited 14 paintings, plus a doll as an art object.
However, the exhibition proved to be the final manifestation of the Surrealist movement. Political circumstances, as well as personal, politically motivated differences - between André Breton and Paul Éluard, who had moved closer to Stalinism - caused Éluard to leave the Surrealist group that same year. Max Ernst and Man Ray joined him in solidarity.
Stay in the USA
Internierung und Flucht nach New York
The Second World War had a lasting influence on the artist's life: Ernst was interned as an "enemy German" in France in 1939, first in the former prison of Largentière, then in the Les Milles camp, where he met Hans Bellmer. There they created the joint mural Schöpfungen, the Creatures of the Imagination, and Bellmer created a portrait of Max Ernst composed of painted bricks as a reference to the walls of the camp.
Through Éluard's mediation, he was released again at Christmas. The following year he was imprisoned again, this time by the Gestapo, but he managed to escape. He could not stay in his house because his mistress Leonora Carrington, with whom he had lived in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche since 1938, had fled and "sold" it to a neighbor for a bottle of cognac to save it from confiscation.
Ernst fled with the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who supported him financially, via Spain and Portugal to the USA in 1941. The escape agent was Varian Fry, the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee.
They arrived at New York's La Guardia Airport on July 14, 1941, where they were greeted by Jimmy Ernst and old acquaintances. Max Ernst was initially interned as an "enemy alien" by immigration officials in the Ellis Island fortress, but was released after three days. In December of that year - after the United States entered the war - Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim were married in New York.
In March of 1942, Ernst participated in the joint exhibition Artists in Exile at the Gallery Pierre Matisse. A photograph shows him alongside 13 other artists including Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Roberto Matta, Piet Mondrian, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy and the writer André Breton.
In May, the catalog was published with a cover painting by Ernst for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, which opened in October 1942. That same year, with David Hare, Marcel Duchamp, and André Breton, he became editor of the magazine VVV, which played an important role in spreading Surrealism in the United States. Also in 1942, Ernst participated in the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism in New York and began to work more as a sculptor.
In the Wakefield bookstore in New York, Betty Parsons showed in a group exhibition a painting of Ernst painted in a new technique, at that time he called it abstract art, concrete art, later Young Man, curiously watching the flight of a non-Euclidean fly. The technique - called drip painting or oscillation - attracted the attention of some young American painters like Jackson Pollock.
Ernst met the young American painter Dorothea Tanning in late 1942, who was represented in Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in the exhibition Exhibition by 31 Women, and subsequently separated from Peggy Guggenheim. In 1945/46, the Bel Ami competition was held, which Ernst won with his painting The Temptation of St. Anthony.
Move to Sedona
In 1946, a double wedding was celebrated: Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning and Man Ray and Juliet Browner were married in Beverly Hills. The couple then left for Sedona in the Arizona desert, where they built a small, secluded house called Capricorn Hill. There, in 1948, they created the cement sculpture Capricorn.
In the same year Max Ernst obtained American citizenship. He came into contact with the Native Americans, the Hopi, and became involved with their art. He was particularly interested in Kachina dolls and ceremonial masks. The geometrically stylized forms and the painting of the Kachinas are reflected in his work.
In 1951, on the occasion of Ernst's 60th birthday, his hometown of Brühl organized the first major German retrospective in Brühl's Augustusburg Castle, which was well attended but ended with a financial deficit. The Cologne gallery Der Spiegel participated in the exhibition, from which a lifelong business and friendship relationship developed between the gallery and Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning from 1953.
Ernst asked his Cologne gallery owner Hein Stünke, the proprietor of Galerie Der Spiegel, for help in locating his divorce papers from his second marriage to Marie-Berthe Aurenche, which had been lost during the turmoil of the Second World War, and which the artist had requested through her Parisian lawyers to resume marital intercourse and maintenance.
Hein Stünke commissioned the art collector and lawyer Josef Haubrich to do the research, and he was successful. In 1952 Ernst became a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique, which had been founded after World War II in honor of Alfred Jarry and Jarry's 'Pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions. In the summer of that year, he gave 30 guest lectures on "Fifty Years of Modern Art" at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
Last years in France
In 1953 Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning returned to Paris, where they moved back into their two attic rooms on Quai St. Michel. He worked as a neighbor of Constantin Brâncuși in a studio at No. 11 Impasse Ronsin, which the U.S. painter William Copley had placed at his disposal. The Collège de 'Pataphysique in Paris awarded him the title of "Satrap" in the same year.
At the 27th Venice Biennale in 1954, Max Ernst was honored with the Grand Prize for Painting, which led to his final expulsion from the Surrealist group. The grand prize for graphics in that year was awarded to Joan Miró, and for sculpture to Hans Arp. The awarding of the prize led to international fame and further honors.
In 1955 the couple moved to Huismes and lived in the house "Le pin perdu", which since 2009 can be visited as "Maison Max Ernst". He kept this country residence as well as the apartment in Paris, but since 1964, for health reasons, he often stayed with his wife in the south of France in Seillans in the Var department in Provence. In 1958 he became a French citizen.
He resentfully refused honorary citizenship, which Ernst's native city of Brühl offered him in 1966 on his 75th birthday, because the city had sold his donated painting The Birth of Comedy (1947) in 1951 for $800. In addition, the city's poor treatment of Karl Seibt, the city co-organizer of the financially loss-making Max Ernst exhibition of 1951, played a role.
In connection with his refusal, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger as well as private acquaintances accused him of having been able to save his first wife, Luise Straus-Ernst, who was Jewish and had been murdered in Auschwitz in 1944; however, Ernst had refused to take her with him into American exile.
The artist then took a stand in a letter in the Stadtanzeiger and clarified that his first wife had refused the remarriage offered to her, although it would have opened up the possibility of taking her with him.
In 1967 he created a fountain for the town of Amboise, which was inaugurated as the "Fontaine Max Ernst" in 1968. The dispute between the artist and his hometown of Brühl was settled in 1971. Since that year, the city has awarded the art prize "Max Ernst Stipendium" for young artists still in training, and Ernst donated the figures for the fountain, which stands in front of the Brühl town hall.
In 1975, Max Ernst stayed in Paris again after suffering a stroke. He died one day before his 85th birthday, on April 1, 1976 in Paris and was buried in the columbarium of the Père Lachaise cemetery after being cremated.
His wife, Dorothea Tanning, survived him by more than three decades. She died in New York in January 2012 at the age of 101. His son from his first marriage, Jimmy Ernst, died in New York on Feb. 6, 1984. His memoir, A Not-So-Still Life (German: Nicht gerade ein Stilleben. Erinnerungen an meinen Vater Max Ernst), was published shortly before his death.
Max Ernst's Honors and art awards
In 1946 Max Ernst won the Bel Ami competition with his painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and in 1954 at the 27th Venice Biennale he received the Grand Prize for Painting. In 1958 he became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and in 1961 New York's Museum of Modern Art held a Max Ernst retrospective. In the same year he received the Stefan Lochner Medal of the city of Cologne.
In 1964, the government of North Rhine-Westphalia awarded him an honorary professorship, and in Hamburg he was honored with the Lichtwark Prize.
In 1966, at the age of 75, he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1972, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn. In 1975, at the age of 84, Ernst traveled to the opening of the Max Ernst Retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
That same year, the retrospective opened its doors at the Grand Palais in Paris. In 1976 he was posthumously awarded the Goslar Kaiserring, one of the most prestigious international art prizes. In 1974 he was elected as an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In the Federal Republic of Germany there are several streets named after Max Ernst, for example in Cologne and Bonn. His hometown of Brühl has dedicated the Max-Ernst-Allee to him. The city of Paris named the rue Max Ernst after him in 1990; it is located in the 20th arrondissement in the Quartier du Père-Lachaise.