Max Earnst

Max Ernst b. 1891, Bruhl, Germany; d. 1976, Paris

"Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Bruhl, Germany. He enrolled in the University at Bonn in 1909 to study philosophy, but soon abandoned this pursuit to concentrate on art. At this time he was interested in psychology and the art of the mentally ill. In 1911 Ernst became a friend of August Macke and joined the Rheinische Expressionisten group in Bonn. Ernst showed for the first time in 1912 at the Galerie Feldman in Cologne. At the Sonderbund exhibition of that year in Cologne he saw the work of Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. In 1913 he met Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and traveled to Paris. Ernst participated that same year in the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon. In 1914 he met Jean Arp, who was to become a lifelong friend."

Reference:  Max Earnst [Internet] Available from: http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/bio/?artist_name=Max%20Ernst [Accessed 10th March 2011]

"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 Dali, and in 1935 he made his first sculpture (he worked seriously but intermittently in this field, characteristically creating totemic-like figures in bronze"

Reference: Ernst, Max Facts (1999) [Internet] Available from: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Max_Ernst.aspx [Accessed 16th March 2011]


"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 philosophy and abnormal psychology, which also provided material for his art. In 1912 he turned to painting seriously, but it was only in 1918, after his war service, that he began to develop his own style. He made a seriesof collages, using illustrations from medical and technical magazines to form bizarre juxtapositions of images. "
"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."
 Reference: (2005-2006) Max Ernst Biography [Online] Available at: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/max-ernst/ [Accessed on 5th  March 2011]

Reference: Max Earnst Images (2011) [Online Image] Available from: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1R2SNYK_en-GB&biw=1259&bih=627&site=search&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=max+ernst&aq=0s&aqi=g-s1g6g-m3&aql=&oq=max+ea [Accessed on 6th April]