Max Ernst German surrealist artist Date of Birth: 02.04.1891 Country: Germany

1. Biography of Max Ernst
2. Early Life and Education
3. Exploring Surrealism and Collage
4. Moving to Paris and Surrealism
5. Later Life and Legacy

Biography of Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a German surrealist artist, painter, and sculptor, known for his contributions to the Dada movement and his creation of the collage technique.

Early Life and Education

Born in Germany, Max Ernst studied painting and literature while also exploring philosophy, psychology, and art history at the University of Bonn from 1908 to 1914. During this time, he developed an interest in the Dada movement, which had emerged in Zurich three years earlier. The movement aimed to challenge established societal, moral, and artistic values.

Exploring Surrealism and Collage

In 1919, Ernst participated in the creation of a group of Dadaists in Cologne. It was during this time that he created his first collages, taking engravings from scientific publications, old catalogs, advertisements, and novel pages to create surrealistic images. These collages presented familiar subjects in absurd contexts, transforming them into surrealistic compositions. Ernst continued to create series of such works, including the collage novel "Unwifely Head" (1929), which consisted of 149 compositions.

Moving to Paris and Surrealism

In 1922, Ernst moved to Paris, where he lived until the beginning of World War II. In 1924, he joined Andre Breton and a group of artists and poets, forming the Surrealist movement. Surrealism aimed to convey the reality of the subconscious through techniques such as automatism and free association. In his search for a technique that relied more on chance than collage, Ernst invented frottage – a technique involving rubbing paper against rough or textured surfaces. He would then enhance the resulting image with paint. Ernst also employed other automatic techniques, such as dripping paint onto canvas or placing two freshly painted canvases together to create unexpected drawings.

Later Life and Legacy

In 1941, Max Ernst traveled to the United States and initially settled in New York before eventually moving to Arizona. In 1951, he created a series of miniature landscapes of Arizona, some of which were the size of postage stamps, which he called "microbe paintings." He returned to Paris in 1951, and in 1959, a retrospective exhibition of his works was organized at the Museum of Modern Art. Similar exhibitions took place in New York at the Museum of Modern Art (1961), the Jewish Museum (1966), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1975). In 1948, he also published his book "Beyond Painting." Max Ernst passed away in Paris on April 1, 1976.