Max Ernst: The Complete Story
Max Ernst was Surrealism's great inventor of techniques, a German who fought at Verdun, founded Cologne Dada, and taught chance to draw. Born in 1891 near Cologne, he escaped two internment camps and one art movement, and won the Venice Grand Prize for it.
Every decade he handed painting a new tool and moved on before it got comfortable. Here is the escape artist of modern art.
Max Ernst at a glance:
1891: born in Brühl, near Cologne, son of a strict amateur painter who once painted his own son as the infant Jesus.
1914: four years of German artillery service begin; his autobiography says Max Ernst died that August and came back a magician.
1925: invents frottage after staring at the grain of a scrubbed hotel floor.
1941: reaches New York with Peggy Guggenheim after two internments and an escape through Lisbon.
1954: wins the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, and is promptly expelled from the Surrealist movement for it.
Dada through the pub toilet
Ernst came home from four years of artillery war, he served at Verdun and on the Eastern front, calling himself a young man who died in 1914.
In Cologne in 1919 and 1920 he and Johannes Baargeld ran Dada at full provocation: their 1920 exhibition was entered through the courtyard of a beer hall, past the toilets, and visitors were offered an axe with which to attack the works.
The police closed it; the publicity was perfect.
Frottage, grattage, collage novels
Moving to Paris in 1922, he became Surrealism's laboratory.
In 1925, staring at scrubbed floorboards in a seaside inn, he invented frottage, rubbing paper over textures until images surfaced, published as the Histoire Naturelle portfolio in 1926; scraped onto canvas it became grattage, which built his haunted forests.
His collage novels, cut and pasted from Victorian engravings, La Femme 100 Tetes in 1929 and Une Semaine de Bonte in 1934, remain the nightmare picture books of the century, presided over by Loplop, his bird alter ego.
More incredible painter stories
If Max Ernst pulled you in, you will love these too:
Interned, escaped, exported
When war returned, France interned him as an enemy alien in 1939, at Les Milles, alongside fellow inmates like Hans Bellmer, who painted his portrait there.
Released and re-interned, he escaped, and in 1941 reached New York with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, whom he briefly married.
In Arizona from 1946, with the painter Dorothea Tanning, he built a house at Sedona with his own hands and a sculpture garden to match.
The myth: one Surrealist among many
File Ernst as a member of a movement and you miss the mechanism: he supplied the movement's methods.
Frottage and grattage fed painters for decades; his drip experiments of the early 1940s, swinging a punctured can of paint over canvas, were seen by the young New York school; decalcomania built his greatest wartime canvases, Europe After the Rain among them.
Movements expelled him, twice, and kept using his tools.
The prize that got him excommunicated
In 1954 Venice gave him the Grand Prize for painting. The Surrealists, true to doctrine, expelled him for accepting official honours, their second excommunication of a man who had helped found them.
He settled in France with Tanning, kept working past eighty, and watched museums build wings around techniques he had invented out of boredom and floorboards.
Where to see Max Ernst
The Max Ernst Museum in Bruhl, his birthplace, opened in 2005; the Pompidou, MoMA and the Menil Collection in Houston hold the landmarks, and the Guggenheim in Venice keeps the works Peggy collected, and married.
Loplop, superior of the birds
When Ernst was a boy, his pet cockatoo died in the night, and hours later his father announced the birth of a sister. The coincidence lodged somewhere permanent.
Out of it came Loplop, Superior of the Birds, the beaked alter ego who keeps presenting pictures inside Ernst's pictures through the 1930s.
He wrote about himself in Loplop's third person. Biography as ornithology.
A concrete king in cowboy country
In 1946 Ernst and the painter Dorothea Tanning drove into Sedona, Arizona, then a few hundred people and a lot of red rock, and built themselves a wooden house by hand.
Beside it he cast Capricorn, a horned concrete king and queen enthroned in the desert. A German twice interned as an enemy alien was carving household gods in cowboy country.
They had married that year in Beverly Hills, in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner.
Painting against the calendar
In 1937 he painted The Fireside Angel, a leaping, grinning monster he later called his image of what was coming to Europe. Few Surrealist pictures read so plainly as political forecast.
Europe After the Rain II, begun in France and finished in America, shows a continent melted into coral and bone, a report he owed the future and delivered.
Decalcomania made those surfaces: paint pressed and lifted until it rots into landscape. He borrowed the trick from Óscar Domínguez and pushed it until it could describe a war.
The Max Ernst questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Inventing frottage and grattage, the collage novels, and Surrealism's darkest forests.
What is frottage? Rubbing paper over textures, floorboards first, in 1925, to let images surface by chance.
Who were his partners? Among others Peggy Guggenheim, briefly, and the painter Dorothea Tanning for three decades.
When did he die? In Paris on 1 April 1976, one day before his 85th birthday.
How much does an Ernst cost? The Stolen Mirror sold for 16.3 million dollars in 2011, still his auction record. The collage novels can be had for the price of a rare book.
Was Ernst ever a soldier? Four years in the German artillery in the First World War, on both fronts. The war is the reason Dada made sense to him afterward.
More secrets to unlock
A slightly wrong caption
Born on 2 April 1891, he died on 1 April 1976, one day short of 85. The obituaries appeared on his birthday. For a Dadaist who had spent a lifetime sabotaging calendars and categories, the timing reads like a last collage: even his death arrived as a slightly wrong caption.
