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Max Ernst

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Max Ernst
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Max Ernst, photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1965.
(click to enlarge)
Max Ernst, photograph by Yousuf Karsh, 1965. (credit: Karsh — Rapho/Photo Researchers)
(born April 2, 1891, Brühl, Ger. — died April 1, 1976, Paris, Fr.) German-born French painter and sculptor. He gave up studying philosophy and psychology at Bonn University for painting. After serving in World War I, he became the leader of the Dada movement in Cologne (1919), working in collage and photomontage. A characteristic work is Here Everything Is Still Floating (1920), a startlingly illogical composition made from cutout photographs of insects, fish, and anatomical drawings. In 1922 he settled in Paris and was among the founders of Surrealism. His work was imaginative and experimental; he pioneered the technique of frottage and experimented with automatism. After 1934 the irrational and whimsical imagery seen in his paintings appeared also in his sculpture. In 1941 he moved to New York City, where he joined his third wife, Peggy Guggenheim, and began collaborating with Marcel Duchamp. He returned to France in 1953 and continued to produce lyrical and abstract works.

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Biography: Max Ernst
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The German painter Max Ernst (1891-1976), a leading figure in the Dada and surrealist movements, possessed an amazing range of styles and techniques.

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 series of 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.

Further Reading

Ernst wrote a short, fanciful account of his life ("to a young friend") which is in the New York Museum of Modern Art publication, Max Ernst, edited by William S. Lieberman (1961). Ernst also wrote poetically on his ideas on art in Beyond Painting (1948), which includes interesting essays by his friends. Ernst's work is remembered in Werner Spies, editor, Max Ernst: A Retrospective, te Neues Publishing Company, 1995; and William Camfield's Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism, te Neues Publishing Company, 1995. A solid account of Ernst is John Russell, Max Ernst: Life and Work (1967).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Max Ernst
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Ernst, Max (mäks ĕrnst) 1891-1976, German painter. After World War I, Ernst joined the Dada movement in Paris and then became a founder of surrealism. Apart from the medium of collage, for which he is well known, Ernst developed other devices to express his fantastic vision. In frottage he rubbed black chalk on paper held against various materials such as leaves, wood, and fabrics to achieve bizarre effects. He was also the author of several volumes of collage novels. A note of whimsy often characterizes his dreamlike landscapes while other works reveal an allegorical imagination. Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale and several other works are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Bibliography

See his Beyond Painting (1948); studies by J. Russell (1967) and U. M. Schneede (1973); R. Rainwater, Max Ernst, Beyond Surrealism: An Exhibition of the Artist's Books and Prints (1986); W. A. Camfield, ed., Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism (1993); W. Spies, ed., Max Ernst: A Retrospective (2005).

Wikipedia: Max Ernst
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Max Ernst

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in 1948
Born April 2, 1891(1891-04-02)
Brühl, Germany
Died April 1, 1976 (aged 84)
Paris, France
Nationality German
Field painting, sculpture, poetry
Movement Dada, Surrealism

Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.

Contents

Early life

Ernst was born in Brühl, Germany, near Cologne. 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.[1] During World War I he served in the German army, which was a momentous interruption in his career as an artist. He stated in his autobiography, "Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914."

Dada and Surrealism

Max Ernst, Ubu Imperator, (1923), Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

After the war, filled with new ideas, Ernst, Jean Arp and social activist Alfred Grünwald formed the Cologne, Germany Dada group. In 1918 he married the art historian Luise Straus—a stormy relationship that would not last. The couple had a son who was born in 1920, the artist Jimmy Ernst. (Luise died in Auschwitz in 1944.[2]) In 1919 Ernst visited Paul Klee and created paintings, block prints and collages, and experimented with mixed media.

In 1922, he joined fellow Dadaists André Breton, Gala, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Éluard at the artistic community of Montparnasse.[1] Constantly experimenting, in 1925 he invented a graphic art technique called frottage, which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images.

He also created another technique callead 'grattage' in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He uses this technique in his famous painting 'Forest and Dove' (as shown at the Tate Modern).

The next year he collaborated with Joan Miró on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. With Miró's help, Ernst pioneered grattage in which he troweled pigment from his canvases. He also explored with the technique of decalcomania which involves pressing paint between two surfaces.[3]

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.[4] In 1927 he married Marie-Berthe Aurenche, and it is thought his relationship with her may have inspired the erotic subject matter of The Kiss and other works of this year.[5] In 1930, he appeared in the film L'Âge d'or, directed by self-identifying Surrealist Luis Buñuel. Ernst began to make sculpture in 1934, and spent time with Alberto Giacometti. In 1938, the American heiress and artistic patron Peggy Guggenheim acquired a number of Max Ernst's works which she displayed in her new museum in London.

World War II and later life

L'Ange du Foyer, (1937)

In 1938 he was interned in Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence, along with fellow surrealist, Hans Bellmer, who had recently emigrated to Paris on the outbreak of World War II. Thanks to the intercession of Paul Éluard, and other friends including the journalist Varian Fry he was discharged a few weeks later. Soon after the Nazi occupation of France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo, but managed to escape and flee to America with the help of Guggenheim.[1] He left behind his lover, Leonora Carrington, and she suffered a major mental breakdown. Ernst and Guggenheim arrived in the United States in 1941 and were married the following year. Along with other artists and friends (Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall) who had fled from the war and lived in New York City, Ernst helped inspire the development of Abstract expressionism.

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 1953 he and Tanning moved to a small town in the south of France where he continued to work. The City, and the Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais in Paris published a complete catalogue of his works.

In 1966 he created a chessgame made of glass which he named "Immortel"; it has been described as

a masterpiece of bewitching magic, worthy of a Maya palace or the residence of a Pharaon.[6]

Ernst died on 1 April 1976, 1 day before his birthday, in Paris.[1] He was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Selected works

Ernst in modern culture

  • Many of Ernst's works from Une Semaine de Bonté are used in albums by American rock group The Mars Volta, and Barefoot In The Head, a collaboration between guitarist Thurston Moore and saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich of Borbetomagus, features a collage from this same book.
  • The American rock group Mission of Burma titled two songs after the artist: "Max Ernst" was the b-side of their first 1978 single (now included on the CD of Signals, Calls and Marches), mentioning two of Ernst's paintings (The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus and Garden Airplane-Trap) and ending with the words "Dada dada dada ..." repeated many times and distorted via tape loop; their 2002 album OnOffOn features "Max Ernst's Dream".
  • The writer J. G. Ballard makes numerous references to the art works of Max Ernst in his breakthrough novel The Drowned World (1962) and the experimental collection of short stories The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Legacy

Max Ernst's life and career are the subject of Peter Schamoni's 1991 documentary Max Ernst. Dedicated to the art historian Werner Spies, it was assembled from interviews with Ernst, stills of his paintings and sculptures, and the memoirs of his wife Dorothea Tannning and son Jimmy. The 101-minute German film was released on DVD with English subtitles by Image Entertainment.

In 2005, "Max Ernst: A Retrospective" opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and included works such as Celebes (1921), Ubu Imperator (1923), and Fireside Angel (1937), which is one of the few definitively political pieces and is sub-titled The Triumph of Surrealism depicting a raging bird-like creature that symbolizes the wave of fascism that took over Europe. The exhibition also includes Ernst's works that experiment with free association writing and the techniques of frottage, created from a rubbing from a textured surface; grattage, involving scratching at the surface of a painting; and decalcomania, which involves altering a wet painting by pressing a second surface against it and taking it away.[7]

Ernst's son Jimmy, a well known German/American abstract expressionist painter, who lived on the south shore of Long Island, died in 1984. His memoirs, A Not-So-Still Life, were published shortly before his death. His grandson Eric and granddaughter Amy are both artists and writers.

Gallery

Europe After the Rain II (1940-1942)

Dans les rues d'Athenes, (1960)

An Ernst sculpture on display at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark

The Max-Ernst-Museum in Brühl

References

  1. ^ a b c d Olga's Gallery. "Max Ernst biography". http://www.abcgallery.com/E/ernst/ernstbio.html. 
  2. ^ de:Luise Straus-Ernst
  3. ^ Max Ernst working in decalcomania is in shown in the 1978 documentary on the Dada and Surrealist art movement, Europe After the Rain.
  4. ^ Image: The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E. and the Artist
  5. ^ Flint, Lucy, Guggenheim Collection. "The Kiss (Le Baiser)". http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_45_4.html. 
  6. ^ "Max Ernst - Masterpiece". http://maxernstmasterpiece.com/en/10-the-work.html. Retrieved 2008-11-25. 
  7. ^ A Max Ernst Retrospective Opens Today in NY, ARTINFO, April 7, 2005, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/117/a-max-ernst-retrospective-opens-today-in-ny/, retrieved 2008-04-23 

Bibliography

External links

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Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
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