Max Ernst
 Max
Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A
prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary
pioneers of Dada
movement and Surrealism.
Ernst's paintings and collages, steeped in Freudian metaphor,
private mythology, and childhood memories, are regarded as icons of
Surrealist art. With the exception of
Picasso, few artists have played such a decisive role in the
invention of modern techniques and styles. Max Ernst
did not like being associated with groups or being categorized.
Neither did he like being an ordinary person of the sensible world.
Being a self taught artist who was constantly reinventing surrealism
as an artistic theory, Max Ernst attended regular meetings and
exhibitions of the Surrealism. Being an abstract artist, he had a
bizarre collection of paintings, sculptures, and collages. Ernst
developed the technique "frottage," which is the process of putting
paper or material on a textured surface and using a media to
transfer the design onto the paper or media. Aside from being an
artist Max Ernst also was a poet.
Max Ernst was born in April 1891 in Brühl, near Cologne, the first
son of Philipp Ernst, teacher of the deaf and amateur painter, and
his wife, Luise, née Kopp. In 1909, he enrolled in the University at
Bonn to study philosophy but soon abandoned the courses. He began
painting that year, but never received any formal artistic training.
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 In
1924 André Breton published the First Surrealist Manifesto. Max
Ernst was among those who shared the views and aims of the Surrealists
and took an active part in founding the new movement. Ernst developed a
fascination with birds that was prevalent in his work. His alter ego in
paintings, which he called Loplop, was a bird. He suggested this
alter-ego was an extension of himself stemming from an early confusion
of birds and humans. He said that one night when he was young he woke up
and found that his beloved bird had died, and a few minutes later his
father announced that his sister was born. Loplop often appeared in
collages of other artists' work, such as Loplop presents André Breton.
Ernst drew a great deal of controversy with his 1926 painting The
Virgin Chastises the infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: André Breton,
Paul Éluard, and the Painter(shown here). In the late 1920s Ernst
turned to the beloved motifs of German Romanticism and revived them in a
new, Surrealistic, manner: dark forests, mysterious caves, gloomy
cliffs, dead moonlight, figures and faces which appear like ghosts from
interlacing branches and twigs. A summer spent together with Alberto Giacometti in 1934 awakened Ernst's interest in
three-dimensionality. He made the first three-dimensional version of his
omnipresent bird image and experimented in this new area with increasing
enthusiasm. He modeled sculptures into which he stuck objects of
every-day use, which he then had cast in bronze. |
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 In
1937 Ernst distanced himself from Breton and the Communist group of
Surrealists, though he remained true to the chosen methods of work.
Ernst had this to say about his feelings towards surrealism: "I was no
longer able to feel at ease in the somewhat puritanical and disembodied
intellectualism of the more orthodox Surrealists. I feel, at heart, a
far greater affinity with the German Romantics than many of the French
Surrealists..." In 1938 he left Paris and settled in Saint Martin
d'Ardèche in the South of France, where his famous picture The Robing
of the Bride (shown here) was painted. Following the outbreak of World War II, Max Ernst was detained as an enemy alien but with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry in Marseille, he managed to escape the country with Peggy Guggenheim. They arrived in the United States in 1941 and were married the following year. Living in New York City, along with Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall, fellow avant-garde painters who had fled the War in Europe, Max Ernst helped inspire the use of Abstract expressionism among American painters. His marriage to Guggenheim did not last, and in Beverly Hills, California in October 1946, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet P. Browner, he married Dorothea Tanning. The couple first made their home in Sedona, Arizona. In 1948 Ernst wrote the treatise Beyond Painting. As a result of the publicity, he began to achieve financial success. In his late works the artist returned to the subjects of his early, Dada period. Max Ernst died on April 1st 1976, in Paris, one day before his 85th birthday. |
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