Max Ernst was a German-born painter and sculptor, born in Brühl, near Cologne, in 1891, who died in Paris in 1976. He co-founded the Dada group in Cologne, then became one of the inventors of Surrealism in Paris, where in 1925 he devised frottage, a way of making pictures by rubbing paper over wood.
He escaped wartime France in 1941. He is remembered for his techniques, his collage novels and his dream forests, and for being thrown out of the movement he helped build.
In his autobiography he wrote that he died on 1 August 1914 and rose from the dead on 11 November 1918. The first date is the day Germany went to war. The second is the day the guns stopped.
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Between those dates Ernst was an artilleryman. He was twenty-three, a student of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry who had decided two years earlier to become a painter, and he served on both the Western and Eastern fronts. When he came home to Cologne in 1918, he started cutting up other people's pictures.
His first collages, made in 1919 from illustrations torn out of teaching-aid catalogues, set unrelated things side by side, and the Moderna Museet reads in them a sense of futility after the war. The world still calls him a Surrealist.
It is an odd label for a man the Surrealists threw out. In 1954 the Venice Biennale gave him its Grand Prize for painting, and André Breton excluded him from the group, again.
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