Short answers, pulled from the story.
Max Ernst invented frottage and grattage. Frottage uses pencil rubbings of textured surfaces to generate images; grattage involves scraping paint across a canvas to reveal imprints of objects placed beneath it. He also worked with decalcomania, which presses paint between two surfaces.
Loplop was a bird figure Ernst used as his alter ego in paintings and collages. Ernst said the character stemmed from an early childhood confusion of birds and humans, rooted in a night when his pet bird died minutes before his father announced the birth of his sister.
Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo after the German occupation of France. He escaped to the United States with the help of journalist Varian Fry and art patron Peggy Guggenheim. He and Guggenheim arrived in the United States in 1941 and married at the end of that year.
Ernst lived in Sedona, Arizona from 1946 to 1953 with his wife Dorothea Tanning. He built a cottage by hand on Brewer Road, completed his sculpture Capricorn, and compiled his book Beyond Painting while in Sedona.
Max Ernst received the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1954.
The Max Ernst Museum opened in 2005 in Brühl, Germany, Ernst's hometown. Its collection spans seventy years of his career, including paintings, frottages, collages, nearly his entire lithographic works, and over seventy bronze sculptures. The core of the collection dates to 1969, when Ernst donated works to the City of Brühl.