(after) Max Ernst

"Les chiens ont soif" lithograph

1964

Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor artist and poet. Ernst, living through two World Wars along with other artists who forever transformed the possibilities of human expression, was one of the founding fathers for the (Cologne) Dada and Surrealist movements. After the German occupation of France in WWII, Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo as an "undesirable foreigner" but managed to escape and flee to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim and friend journalist Varian Fry. Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim arrived in the United States in 1941 and were married at the end of the year. Along with other artists and friends (Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall) who had fled from the war and lived in New York City, Ernst helped inspire the development of Abstract expressionism. His marriage to Guggenheim did not last and in Beverly Hills, California in October 1946, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet P. Browner, he married Dorothea Tanning. For Ernst there was always an emphasis on ceaseless experimentation. He began his pursuit of radical new techniques that went "beyond painting" to articulate the irrational and unexplainable in the wake of World Wars I and II. His unconventional methods experiment with free association writing and the techniques of frottage, created from a rubbing from a textured surface; grattage, involving scratching at the surface of a painting; and decalcomania, which involves altering a wet painting by pressing a second surface against it and taking it away.