Max ernst

Max Ernst (Brühl, Germany, April 2, 1891 - Paris, France, April 1, 1976) was a German artist who became a French national and was considered a fundamental figure in both the Dada movement and the in surrealism. Throughout his varied artistic career, Ernst was characterized as an indefatigable experimenter, using an extraordinary diversity of techniques, styles, and materials. In all of his works he sought the ideal means to express, in two or three dimensions, the extradimensional world of dreams and imagination.

Biography

Born in Brühl, near Cologne, in 1891, he was the son of Philip Ernst, a teacher of the deaf and a painter by vocation. He entered in 1909 at the University of Bonn where he studied philosophy, art history, literature, and psychiatry. His first works date from this period, whose expressionist affiliation reveals the trace of his friendship with August Macke, a member of The Blue Rider . The famous 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne gave Ernst the opportunity to see works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch and Picasso first hand.

He enlisted in the German army during World War I. When Ernst left the army, the Dada movement had already emerged in Switzerland; Drawn by the Dadaist revolution against the conventional, Ernst settled in Cologne and began working on collage.

In 1922 he moved to Paris, where he began painting Surrealist works in which solemn human figures and fantastical creatures inhabit Renaissance spaces rendered with detailed precision (L'eléphant célèbes, 1921, Tate Gallery, London).

In 1925 he invented frottage (which transfers the surface of an object to paper or canvas with the help of pencil shading); He later experimented with grattage (a technique by which the already dry pigments are scratched or engraved on a canvas or wooden board). Ernst was imprisoned after the German invasion of France during World War II; in prison he worked on decalcomania, a technique for transferring paintings made on specially prepared paper to glass or metal.

She later resorted to collage in three picture novels: La Femme 100 têtes (The Woman with 100 Heads, 1929), Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (Dream of a girl who wanted to enter Carmel, 1930) and Une semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux (A week of kindness or the seven capital elements, 1934).

In 1930, he made his film acting debut with The Golden Age (L' Age d' Or), the second surrealist film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, where he plays the role of the cruel bandit chief. The film caused a real scandal in France, and was banned for more than fifty years. However, Ernst continued to collaborate on other surrealist films in the following years.

In 1941, after having a romantic relationship with Leonora Carrington, his student, he emigrated to the United States with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, who would become his third wife in 1942.

In 1946 he married Dorothea Tanning in a double wedding along with the couple Man Ray (photographer) and Juliette Browner (dancer and model). In 1953 Ernst and Tanning went to live in France. From then on his works enjoyed a notable revaluation.

Legacy

Max Ernst Museum.

His work would have a great influence on many artists. This is the case of the Spanish cartoonist Josep María Beà, who during his stay in Paris in the sixties allowed himself to be subjugated by works such as Una Semaine de bonté, which “infected him with the need to use collage using engravings taken from 19th century magazines», as can be seen in his fantastic series Tales Of Peter Hypnos (1975-76).