Max Ernst
Surrealism's inventor of techniques.
Max Ernst invented frottage and grattage, in which he rubbed or scraped textures into being. He painted fantastical forests and birds.
Max Ernst was born in 1891 in Brühl near Cologne. His father was a teacher of the deaf and an amateur painter. Max studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Bonn and took an early interest in the art of psychiatric patients. He was largely self-taught as an artist. During the First World War he served in the artillery, which he later described as having “died” in 1914 and been resurrected in 1918.
After the war he founded Dada in Cologne together with Hans Arp and others. He made collages from pictures in catalogues and textbooks, which became enigmatic, dreamlike scenes. In 1922 he moved to Paris and became one of the founders of Surrealism. Celebes of 1921, an elephant-like machine, is in Tate Modern in London.
Ernst was a tireless inventor of techniques. In 1925 he began working with frottage, rubbing pencil on paper laid over floorboards, leaves and fabric and letting the textures suggest images. Grattage is the same idea in oil paint, in which he scraped paint away over a textured surface. Later he used decalcomania, in which paint is pressed between surfaces. Forests, monsters and birds grow out of these chance textures. The bird Loplop became his alter ego. He also made collage novels, such as The Hundred Headless Woman of 1929.
When the Second World War broke out, he was interned in France as a German citizen. With the help of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim he reached the United States in 1941 and married her, but the marriage was short-lived. Europe after the Rain of 1940–42, a bleak landscape in decalcomania, is in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. In 1946 he married the painter Dorothea Tanning, and they lived in Arizona.
They moved back to France in the 1950s. When Ernst won the main prize at the Venice Biennale in 1954, he was expelled from the Surrealist group, which disapproved of such honours. He died in Paris in 1976. There is now a museum devoted to him in Brühl.