Max Ernst

Painter

  • Born: April 2, 1891
  • Birthplace: Brühl, near Cologne, Germany
  • Died: April 1, 1976
  • Place of death: Paris, France

German artist

German painter and sculptor Ernst was the cofounder of the Cologne branch of Dada and later became a leading artist of the Surrealist movement. His work contributed much to the broadening of Surrealist artistic and philosophical thinking.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Max Ernst (ehrnst) was the son of Phillip Ernst, a teacher of the hearing impaired, and Louise Kopp. Phillip Ernst was a religious man, a disciplinarian, and a rather mediocre, although locally recognized, painter. He was responsible for his son’s strict Roman Catholic upbringing; the boy’s inquisitive, rebellious nature, however, brought him into conflict with family, school, and church. The artist’s emotional battle with his father, a battle that endured long after his father’s death, was to become an obsessive theme of Ernst’s art. Ernst saw his father at work on a small watercolor in 1894, and several years later the five-year-old also made a series of drawings.

From the age of fifteen, Ernst traveled whenever possible, visiting museums and drawing and painting from nature. By the time he had completed his studies at the gymnasium in Brühl and entered the University of Bonn in the winter of 1908, Ernst had read most of the important works of modern literature and seen many of the advanced paintings of the early twentieth century.

At Bonn, Ernst studied philosophy and psychology to please his father. He soon neglected his studies for painting, which he pursued on his own, never receiving formal training. In such early canvases as Landscape with Sun (c. 1909), which are characterized by strong color and vigorous brushwork, the influence of Vincent van Gogh is apparent. In 1911, he met the expressionist painter August Macke, who introduced him to members of the Blaue Reiter (blue rider) group in Munich.

In 1912, Ernst committed himself to a career as a painter, and in 1913 he participated in the First German Autumn Salon, which was held in Berlin’s avant-garde Der Sturm Gallery. His fellow exhibitors included Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and several Italian Futurists. In 1912, Ernst met French painter Robert Delaunay and poet Guillaume Apollinaire when they visited the Rhineland, and the young German artist made a brief trip to Paris the following year. At the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne, the last manifestation of German modernism before World War I, Ernst met Hans Arp, who later became a close friend.

Life’s Work

In World War I, Ernst served in France and in what is now Poland as an artillery engineer for the German army. Although he was wounded twice in the head, Ernst survived. Macke and Franz Marc, the talented young expressionists who had influenced Ernst, were killed in action in France. Marc and Ernst both had been impressed by Delaunay’s orphism, an optical variant of cubism, and Ernst incorporated elements of Delaunay’s color symbolism and of Marc’s animism in his Flowers and Fish, painted in 1916, the year of Marc’s death.

Home from the army in 1917 as a result of his injuries, Ernst exhibited with the Zurich Dadaists and, in 1918, traveled to Cologne, where he reestablished contact with Arp. Discovering that they shared in the disillusionment that had led to the creation of Dadaism in Zurich in 1916, the two artists launched a Dada movement of their own in Cologne in 1919. Ernst’s Dadaism was inspired by the state of astonishment experienced by those returning from the war, by the absurdity of the events that occurred during the past four years. Dadaism was a radical protest against conventional artistic and social values, and Dada in Cologne, during its brief but turbulent existence, caused quite a stir. The most outrageous event staged by Ernst, Arp, and Johannes Baargeld, a fellow Dadaist, was the Cologne Exhibition of 1920.

Ernst’s earlier influences included Pablo Picasso and sculptor Aleksandr Archipenko, but about 1919 he saw some Giorgio De Chirico reproductions in the magazine Valori Plastici. In 1919, influenced by De Chirico’s disconcerting imagery, Ernst invented his Dada collages, which were, in turn, to influence the Surrealists. Using clippings from newspapers, magazines, and illustrated catalogs and cut-up fragments of old wallpaper, textiles, and other materials, Ernst extended the principle of collage to include ready-made images. Different from cubist collages, the aim of these works, according to Ernst, was a new kind of shocking, anecdotal art.

Soon after his return to Cologne in 1918, Ernst married Louise Strauss, an art historian. Born in 1920, their son Jimmy later became a celebrated American painter. In 1927, after divorcing his first wife, Ernst married Marie-Berthe Aurenche.

In 1920, Ernst took part in the large Dada Fair held in Berlin, and, collaborating with Arp, he produced the series of collages called “Fantagaga.” Introducing chance elements into the construction of these works, the artists anticipated the Surrealist technique of random creation. Ernst’s collages so attracted the attention of André Breton and Paul Éluard that they staged an exhibition of the Dada collages at the Galérie au Sans Pareil in Paris, in 1921, under the title “Beyond Painting.”

Ernst left Germany permanently in 1922. After entering France illegally, he stayed in Eaubonne with Éluard and his wife Gala (who later became Salvador Dalí’s wife, model, and muse). Ernst’s outstanding paintings of this period, The Elephant Célèbes (1921), Oedipus Rex (1922), and Ubu Imperator (1924), combined solid craftsmanship with powerful and disturbing imagery. Moving to Paris later in 1922, Ernst illustrated one of Éluard’s works and experimented with automatic writing. Pietà: Or, Revolution by Night (1923), marks the end of Ernst’s Dadaist period; the work recalls the conflicts of childhood in its representation of the artist’s father. Childhood experiences also inspired Two Children Are Menaced by a Nightingale (1924), in which a pastoral landscape is the setting for a scene of terror.

After the decline of the Dada movement, in 1922, the group of writers soon to be known as Surrealists gathered around Breton in Paris. Until Ernst joined the Surrealist group in 1924, it had been almost exclusively literary. In 1925, Ernst used the term “frottage” for his innovative technique in which designs are made by placing paper on a rough or uneven surface and then rubbing the paper with charcoal, crayon, pencil, or paint. Because of the strikingly random patterns formed in this process, Breton hailed frottage as the plastic equivalent of automatic writing. In 1926, Ernst used this technique to make a series of thirty-four drawings entitled “Natural History,” because the shapes resembled mysterious plants and animals.

After the development of frottage, Ernst, influenced by his fellow Surrealist Joan Miró, adapted the process to oil painting. Ernst’s Two Sisters (1926) is an example of this method, which is known as grattage. In 1926, keeping to the spirit rather than to the letter of Surrealism, Ernst collaborated with Miró on the set design for Sergei Diaghilev’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Breton accused Ernst of having betrayed Surrealism through the commercialization of his art, and at the first Paris performance the Surrealists staged a hostile demonstration.

In 1933, Ernst was among those artists whose work was labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis, and in this decade his attitude toward Surrealism changed. Observing the deteriorating political and economic situation in Europe, Ernst realized that Surrealism’s revolutionary program, based on the belief that a reconciliation of the rational and the intuitive could transform human consciousness, had failed. He was the only Surrealist to allude directly in his work to the horrific events of those years.

While spending the summer of 1934 in Switzerland with Alberto Giacometti, Ernst produced his first important sculptures (he had made cubist-influenced reliefs in the period 1916-1919). Working in plaster, he produced Oedipus in 1934 and Lunar Asparagus in 1935. The following year, forty-eight of his works in both media were included in the influential “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ernst officially broke with the Surrealists in 1938 over Breton’s call for the expulsion of Éluard. With the outbreak of the war in 1939, Ernst was interned by the French as an enemy alien but used the time in detainment to work in the decalcomania technique with oil paint. (In this technique a surface is painted with oil, laid down and pressed against a second surface onto which paint is rubbed, creating a spontaneous, smudged effect.) In 1940, when the German armies occupied France, Ernst escaped. With the help of his son, the noted art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and other Americans, he made his way via Spain to New York City on July 14, 1941. Ernst divorced his second wife and married Guggenheim in 1941 (from whom he was divorced in 1942; he married the young painter Dorothea Tanning in 1946).

Although not unknown, Ernst found making a living in the United States difficult. His 1942 show at the Valentin Gallery in New York City was enthusiastically received by young artists, but the press was hostile and the public did not buy his work. In 1943, Ernst painted the large Vox Angelica, which he described as an autobiographical account in dreams and reality of his various journeys from one country to another, a very different, nightmarish quality pervades The Eye of Silence (1943). Then, in 1944, Ernst produced his best-known and most successful sculpture, the bronze piece entitled The King Playing with the Queen. While Ernst created sculptures only sporadically, he carried over into the medium the same inventiveness and fantasy of his paintings.

From 1942 to 1952, and again in 1956-1957, Ernst lived in Sedona, Arizona. The landscape and light of Arizona strongly affected his art from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. Coloradeau of Medusa (1953), inspired by the Colorado River, is a mental landscape painted in layers of color that give the appearance of rock as seen through a haze of heat. Ernst, however, saw himself as a European and in 1949-1950 returned to Paris for his first postwar visit and was reunited with Arp, Éluard, Tristan Tzara, and other old friends. Although in 1951 he was to be honored with a retrospective in his hometown of Brühl, Ernst was little known in Europe.

In 1954, however, Ernst won the prestigious international grand prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, and his reputation grew steadily over the next twenty years. He moved back to France in 1955, and in 1958 he became a French citizen. After Me, Sleep, one of his most poetic canvases, was painted in that year. Color had always been secondary to Ernst’s concern for content and evocative imagery, but The Marriage of Heaven and Earth (1962) expressed a new interest in color and light. Much of Ernst’s painting of the 1970’s was in the lighter, more lyrical manner of this painting, although he sometimes reverted to the styles and techniques of his Dada and Surrealist periods.

In 1964, Ernst moved to Seillans, France. Major Ernst retrospectives were staged at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 and at the Grand Palais, Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1975. Ernst died in Paris in 1976, only one day before his eighty-fifth birthday.

Significance

Throughout his career Ernst played a pioneering role in the development of modern art. His paintings of 1921-1924, which include, for example, Oedipus Rex, have been justly described as among the first paintings to emerge from the Surrealist movement, with their irrational juxtapositions of objects, their Freudian-inspired symbolism, their allusions to dreams, and their avoidance of visual “beauty.” With De Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings, the paintings of this period also provided the basis for the resurgence of illusionism in Surrealist painting in the late 1920’s and 1930’s.

Ernst was among the few notable painters of the modern period whose concern was directly with the external world, with the world of social events and institutions the Church, political repression, erotic enslavement rather than with the interior world of the artist as externalized in plastic form. Minimizing the role of objects, tactility, and abstract plasticity, he preferred instead to maximize the role of humans in contemporary history, and he was among the first to denounce those evils that civilization had been all too willing to forget.

Bibliography

Diehl, Gaston. Max Ernst. Translated by Eileen B. Hennessy. New York: Crown, 1973. This chatty, brief book contains numerous color and black-and-white plates, a bibliography, and a chronology of the artist’s life. The author maintains that one of the reasons for the belated recognition of Ernst’s work was that society believed itself to be the target of the artist’s brush. Diehl attempts to make amends for this neglect and focuses on the visionary and iconoclastic dimension of the artist’s life and work.

Ernst, Max. Beyond Painting, and Other Writing by the Artist and His Friends. Edited by Robert Motherwell. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948. In his essay “Beyond Painting,” Ernst gives an insightful view of his early artistic development as well as a detailed discussion of his innovative techniques such as frottage and collage. The book also contains recollections of his life and work written by people who knew him best, for example Breton, Éluard, and Tzara, among others. The book also contains a biographical note and numerous black-and-white plates.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Max Ernst: Beyond Surrealism. Edited by Robert Rainwater. New York: New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 1986. This 192-page retrospective of Ernst’s books and prints contains 117 plates (in color and black-and-white), a chronology of the artist’s life and work, and insightful essays by the editor and others on the artist’s printmaking and collage-novels.

Read, Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Painting. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. In this enlarged and updated edition of a classic work, the author, a personal friend of Ernst, offers a concise and informative analysis of the artist’s work in the context of the origins and development of Dadaism and Surrealism. Includes a bibliography and many color and black-and-white plates.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Modern Sculpture: A Concise History. 1964. Reprint. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985. A companion work to Read’s history of modern painting, this work contains discussion of Ernst’s sculpture, especially his “Fantagaga,” in the chapter entitled “From Futurism to Surrealism.”

Russell, John. Max Ernst: Life and Work. London: Thames & Hudson, 1967. Perhaps the most comprehensive and scholarly work written on Ernst, this voluminous work, drawing on conversations with the artist as well as close analysis of his art, provides readers with invaluable information about the sources of Ernst’s inspiration as well as the underlying principles of his work. The book includes photographs of the artist and his friends; reproductions of his frottages and collages; excellently reproduced color and black-and-white plates of Ernst’s painting and sculpture; biographical notes; and a chronological survey of his works.

Spies, Werner, ed. Max Ernst: Life and Work, an Autobiographical Collage. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Source documents, including Ernst’s letters, poetry, and diaries and texts by other Surrealists, are reproduced here, along with Ernst’s artworks, to place his work within the context of his life and involvement in the Surrealist movement.

Tanning, Dorothea. Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Tanning, a painter who was also married to Ernst, discusses Ernst’s life and their relationship in her autobiography.

Warlick, M. E. Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Ernst was interested in alchemy, and Warlick describes how alchemical philosophy and symbolism featured prominently in his art works and writings.

1901-1940: 1913: Duchamp’s “Readymades” Redefine Art; October, 1924: Surrealism Is Born.

1941-1970: October 20, 1942: Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery Promotes New American Art.