Ernst, Max

Ernst, Max (1891-1976), French artist of German birth, who was a seminal figure in both Dada and Surrealism. He was noted for an extraordinary range of techniques, styles, and media.

Ernst was born in Brühl. He enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1909, where he studied philosophy and psychiatry. During World War I he served in the German army. The Dadaist movement had already begun in Switzerland by the time Ernst left the army. Attracted by the Dadaists' revolt against convention, Ernst settled in Cologne and began to work in collage. In 1922 he moved to Paris. There he turned to Surrealism, painting pictures in which solemn humans and fantastic creatures inhabit precisely detailed Renaissance landscapes. In 1925 he invented frottage (pencil rubbings of objects); later he experimented with grattage (the scraping or trowelling of pigment from a canvas). After the German invasion of France in World War II Ernst was imprisoned; in the prison camp he worked with decalcomania, a technique of transferring pictures from specially prepared paper to glass or metal. He emigrated to the United States in 1941 with the help of the heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who became his third wife in 1942. Ernst returned to France in 1953. Thereafter his works were highly prized.

Throughout his remarkably varied career, Ernst was known for being a tireless experimenter. In all his work he sought the ideal means of conveying in two or three dimensions the extradimensional world of dreams and the imagination.