Max Ernst

Max Ernst 1891 Brühl - 1976 Paris The Dadaist, Surrealist, versatile and experimental painter, graphic artist, sculptor, poet and thinker Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891 in Brühl; he received American citizenship in 1948 and French citizenship in 1958. Max Ernst was introduced to art by his father, the deaf-mute teacher Philipp Ernst, who also gave him his first drawing lessons. From 1910 to 1914 Max Ernst studied classical philology, philosophy, psychology and art history at the University of Bonn. In 1913 Max Ernst participates with his first works in the exhibition of the "Rhenish Expressionists", which is shown in the book and art salon Cohen in Bonn, and in the same year he is represented in the exhibition of the gallery "Der Sturm" in Berlin. In 1914 Max Ernst met Hans Jean Arp in Cologne, with whom he would form a lifelong artistic friendship. Über Dada in Cologne to Surrealism in Paris 1914 Max Ernst was drafted to serve as a soldier in World War I, a hated time about which he says in retrospect, "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." But Max Ernst's artistic success grew even during the war period and in 1916 his first solo exhibition with Herwarth Walden took place in the Berlin gallery "Der Sturm", and in 1917 the associated magazine "Der Sturm" (7th Jg. No. 5) published his essay "Vom Werden der Farbe". Shortly before the end of the war, Max Ernst married the art historian Luise Straus. In the fall of 1919, Max Ernst founded the Cologne Dada movement with Hans Jean Arp and Johannes Theodor Baargeld. In 1921 the Cologne Dadaists come into contact with the Dada movements in the other major cities, Max Ernst meets Tristan Tzara and André Breton. Also in 1921, Max Ernst's first solo exhibition outside of Germany takes place at the Galerie Au Sans Pareil in Paris with cliché prints, frottages, collages, and overpaintings. In 1922 Max Ernst moves to Paris and begins an artistic collaboration with the poet Paul Eluard, for whose volumes of poetry Max Ernst makes collages. In 1924 André Breton formulates the "Surrealist Manifesto", and Max Ernst also plays an eminent role in the development of Surrealist art. In 1925 the first group exhibition of the Surrealists took place in Pierre Loeb's gallery in Paris. The portfolio "Histoire naturelle" appears, for which Max Ernst compiles 34 collotype prints and frottages. In 1926, Max Ernst's first marriage to Luise Straus is divorced. Surrealism: Merging Dream and Reality into a New Supereality Not only through his imaginative use of painterly techniques and the invention of paper collage, frottage and sponge paintings, Max Ernst makes a great contribution to the art of the 20th century. In his works, dream and reality merge and gain new form in a hyper-reality. In 1929 Max Ernst's first collage novel "La femme 100 têtes" with pictures and captions was published, for which he made 147 paper collages. In the process of cutting out and reassembling very different, initially unrelated picture elements, absurdly bizarre new images full of profound fantasy emerge. Max Ernst repeatedly deals with the theoretical formulation of Surrealism; in 1934, for example, his text "What is Surrealism?" appears in the catalog for the Kunsthaus Zürich exhibition. In 1936 Max Ernst writes the art-theoretical text "Jenseits der Malerei" (Beyond Painting) for the magazine "Cahier d'Art". Inventive artist and important source of ideas for the art of the 20th century With the political upheavals and the outbreak of the Second World War, the situation also becomes increasingly difficult for Max Ernst. Although he lived with the English painter and writer Leonora Carrington in Saint-Martin d'Ardèche in southern France, he was interned several times in French camps. In 1941 Max Ernst emigrated to the USA and lived in New York. Here he enters into an intense but brief marriage with the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. After a trip to the west coast of the USA, Max Ernst encounters Native American art, through which he receives important inspiration for his own sculptures. In 1944 he meets the artist Dorothea Tanning, and in 1946 they marry in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner. In 1951, on his 60th birthday, his native town of Brühl organized the most extensive retrospective of his artistic oeuvre to date for Max Ernst at Augustusburg Castle, which then toured eight other German cities. From 1953 Max Ernst again lived in Paris. In 1954 he received the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. Numerous other honors and exhibitions were to follow. In 1955, 1959 and 1964 Max Ernst took part in Documenta I, II and III in Kassel. 1962/63 the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne organizes a retrospective for which Max Ernst writes down his "Biographical Notes". In 1991/92, a retrospective celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth is shown at the Tate Gallery, London, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris. In 2017/18, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is showing "Max Ernst: Beyond Painting," another impressive retrospective of the multi-faceted and multi-layered artistic oeuvre. Max Ernst died in Paris the night before his 85th birthday on April 1, 1976.