Max Ernst

• 1. Introduction

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  Max Ernst died on the 1st of August 1914. That, at least, was how he described it. In his autobiography, he wrote: "On the first of August 1914 M.E. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918." Those dates bracket the four years Ernst spent as a soldier on both the Western and the Eastern Fronts, and they tell you nearly everything about what the war did to a young German painter who had barely started his career.

  Ernst was born on the 2nd of April 1891 in Brühl, a town south of Cologne. He died in Paris on the 1st of April 1976, one day short of his eighty-fifth birthday. In between, he invented two new artistic techniques, helped found the Cologne Dada group, played a role in the birth of Surrealism, fled the Gestapo, and built a cottage by hand in the Arizona desert. He never received formal artistic training. He didn't need it. What drove him was not technique but temperament: a willingness to drag the unconscious mind into plain sight and see what came out.

  What made a self-taught painter from a Catholic middle-class family become one of the leading disrupters of twentieth-century art? And what was the bird that haunted his work for decades, the alter ego he named Loplop?

• 2. Father, Asylum, and First Brushstrokes

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  Philipp Ernst, Max's father, was a teacher of the deaf and an amateur painter. He was also a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian. In a dynamic that would shape his son's entire artistic sensibility, Philipp managed to inspire two opposite things in Max: a taste for defying authority, and a genuine love of painting.

  Max Ernst enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1909 to study philosophy, art history, literature, psychology, and psychiatry. That list is almost a manifesto. He visited asylums during this period and became deeply interested in the artwork made by patients with mental illness. That encounter with raw, unschooled expression stayed with him.

  He began painting in the same year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle and portraits of his sister and himself. By 1911 he had befriended August Macke and joined Macke's Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group, formally deciding to become an artist. A year later, a visit to the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne brought him face to face with works by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin. Their impact was immediate. Ernst's paintings from this period began juxtaposing grotesque imagery with Cubist and Expressionist forms, a combination that was ironic and unsettling by design.

  In 1914, he met Hans Arp in Cologne. Their friendship would last fifty years.

• 3. Collage, Dada, and Crossed Lives

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  Paul Éluard entered Ernst's life in 1921, and bought two of his paintings on the spot: Celebes and Oedipus Rex. Éluard also chose six collages to illustrate his poetry collection Répétitions. Within a year the two men had collaborated on Les malheurs des immortels and, together with André Breton, on the magazine Littérature.

  What followed was one of the stranger domestic arrangements in modern art history. Unable to obtain legal papers to enter France, Ernst crossed the border illegally in 1922 and moved in with Éluard and his wife Gala in the Paris suburb of Saint-Brice, leaving his own wife Luise and their son Ulrich behind in Germany. He had already founded the Cologne Dada group in 1919 alongside social activist Johannes Theodor Baargeld. He had co-published short-lived magazines, including Der Strom and die Schammade. Collage had become his signature tool, a method he first explored in 1919 after studying Giorgio de Chirico's paintings and drawing from mail-order catalogues and teaching-aide manuals.

  The ménage à trois with the Éluards eventually strained. In 1924 Éluard abruptly left for Monaco and then for Saigon, Vietnam. He then asked both Gala and Ernst to join him. Ernst sold a large number of works to Johanna Ey, owner of the gallery Das Junge Rheinland in Düsseldorf, to fund the journey. After brief time together in Saigon the trio dissolved; Gala stayed with Paul. Ernst made his way back through southeast Asia and returned to Paris in late 1924, where he signed a contract with Jacques Viot that finally let him paint full-time.

• 4. Frottage and the New Techniques

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  In 1925, working from a studio at 22, rue Tourlaque, Ernst invented frottage. The idea was simple and strange: press paper over a textured surface, rub a pencil across it, and see what emerges. The resulting images were not designed but revealed, as if the object underneath were confessing something. The technique suited perfectly a movement that prized the unconscious over rational control.

  Ernst also developed grattage, in which paint is troweled onto a canvas and then scraped away to expose the imprints of objects placed beneath the surface. He used grattage in his well-known painting Forest and Dove, which is held at Tate Modern. The following year he collaborated with Joan Miró on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. With Miró's help, Ernst refined grattage further, troweling pigment off canvases to uncover what lay beneath. A third technique, decalcomania, involved pressing paint between two surfaces and pulling them apart to create unpredictable patterns.

  Ernst was also active at the Atelier 17 alongside other Surrealists during this period. His 1926 painting The Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter drew significant controversy. That same year his portfolio Histoire Naturelle, a set of thirty-four collotypes made from frottages, was published.

• 5. Loplop

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  Ernst traced his obsession with birds to a childhood night he could not forget. He woke to find that his beloved pet bird had died. Minutes later his father announced that his sister had been born. That overlap of death and birth, bird and human, lodged itself permanently in his imagination.

  His alter ego in paintings became a figure he called Loplop: a bird, often depicted presenting other works of art or other artists. Loplop Presents André Breton is one example. Ernst described Loplop as an extension of himself, rooted in that early confusion between birds and humans. The figure appeared across decades of work, in collages as well as paintings, making Ernst himself a recurring character inside his own art.

  His 1937 painting Fireside Angel, subtitled The Triumph of Surrealism, carries the bird imagery in an explicitly political direction. The work depicts a raging bird-like creature and was described as one of Ernst's few definitively political pieces, symbolizing the wave of fascism that had swept across Europe. When the 2005 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art included Fireside Angel, it stood as a reminder that the bird in Ernst's work was not always dreaming. Sometimes it was screaming.

• 6. War, Internment, and Escape

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  September 1939 brought an abrupt end to Ernst's life in France. As a German national, he was interned as an "undesirable foreigner" at Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence. Fellow internees included the Surrealist Hans Bellmer, who had recently moved to Paris. Ernst's partner at the time, the painter Leonora Carrington, had no news of whether he would return. She sold their house in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche to pay their debts and left for Spain.

  Ernst was released after a few weeks, thanks in part to the intercession of Paul Éluard and the American journalist Varian Fry. He was then arrested again by the Gestapo after the German occupation of France. This time, Fry and Peggy Guggenheim helped him escape. Ernst and Guggenheim arrived in the United States in 1941 and married at the end of that year.

  In New York, Ernst joined a community of European artists and intellectuals who had fled the war, among them Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall. Their collective presence helped shape the development of abstract expressionism in America. Guggenheim had first acquired a number of his works in 1938 for her new London gallery; now their personal and professional lives were fully entangled, though the marriage lasted only until 1946.

• 7. Sedona and Late Recognition

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  In October 1946, Ernst married the American Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet P. Browner in Beverly Hills, California. The two then settled in Sedona, Arizona, where they lived from 1946 to 1953. Sedona at the time was a remote community populated by fewer than four hundred ranchers, orchard workers, merchants, and small Native American communities.

  Ernst built a small cottage there with his own hands on Brewer Road. He and Tanning hosted figures including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Yves Tanguy among the monumental red rock formations. The high desert landscape echoed imagery Ernst had used before, and it continued to shape his work. He completed his sculpture Capricorn in Sedona and compiled his book Beyond Painting there. The publicity from the book helped him begin to reach financial stability.

  From the 1950s onward he lived mainly in France. In 1954 he was awarded the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. He died in Paris on the 1st of April 1976 at the age of eighty-four and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery. The Max Ernst Museum opened in his hometown of Brühl in 2005, housed in an 1844 building integrated with a modern glass pavilion. The collection spans seventy years of his work, and its core traces back to 1969, when Ernst himself donated works to the City of Brühl.