By Max Ernst
Located in Surfside, FL
Max Ernst (German, American, 1891-1976)
Color lithograph
Titled, "Poster For The Jewish Museum"
1966
Hand signed lower right
Hand numbered HC I/XVII
Dimensions: 34.75 x 28.5 sight 25 X 19.25
Max Ernst (German 1891 – 1976) was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath.
Max Ernst showed for the first time in 1912 at the Galerie Feldman in Cologne. At the Sonderbund exhibition of that year in Cologne he saw the work of Paul Cezanne, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. In 1913 he met Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and traveled to Paris. Ernst participated that same year in the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon.
In 1914 he met Jean Arp in Cologne who was to become a lifelong friend. In 1921 Ernst exhibited at the Galerie au Sans Pareil in Paris. He was involved in Surrealist activities in the early 1920s with Paul Eluard and André Breton. His work was exhibited that year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, and then in several group exhibitions in 1913. In his paintings of this period, Ernst adopted an ironic style that juxtaposed grotesque elements alongside Cubist and Expressionist motifs.
Ernst fought in world war I. Several German Expressionist painters died in action during the war, among them August Macke and Franz Marc. In 1918, Ernst was demobilised and returned to Cologne. He soon married art history student Luise Straus, of Jewish ancestry, whom he had met in 1914. In 1919, he visited Paul Klee in Munich and studied paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. In the same year, inspired by de Chirico and mail-order catalogues, teaching-aide manuals and similar sources, he produced his first collage works (notably Fiat modes, a portfolio of lithographs), a technique which later dominated his artistic pursuits. Also in 1919, Ernst, social activist Johannes Theodor Baargeld and several colleagues founded the Cologne Dada group. In 1919–20, Ernst and Baargeld published various short-lived magazines such as Der Strom, die Schammade and organised Dada exhibitions.
Ernst and Luise's son Ulrich Jimmy Ernst was born on 24 June 1920; he later would also become a painter. In 1921, he met Paul Éluard, who became a lifelong friend. Éluard bought two of Ernst's paintings (Celebes and Oedipus Rex) and selected six collages to illustrate his poetry collection Répétitions. A year later the two collaborated on Les malheurs des immortels and then with André Breton, whom Ernst met in 1921, on the magazine Littérature.
Ernst developed a fascination with birds which was prevalent in his work. His alter ego in paintings, which he called Loplop, was a bird. He suggested that this alter-ego was an extension of himself stemming from an early confusion of birds and humans. In 1927, he married Marie-Berthe Aurenche and it is thought his relationship with her may have inspired the erotic subject matter of The Kiss and other works of that year.
He collaborated with Joan Miro on designs for Sergei Diaghilev Ballet that same year. The following year the artist collaborated with Salvador Dali and the Surrealist Luis Bunuel on the film L'Age d'or. His first American show was held at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, in 1932. In 1936 Ernst was represented in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ernst began to sculpt in 1934 and spent time with Alberto Giacometti. In 1938, the American heiress and artistic patron Peggy Guggenheim acquired a number of Max Ernst's works, which she displayed in her new gallery in London.
Ernst and Guggenheim were married from 1942 to 1946.
In September 1939, the outbreak of World War II caused Ernst, being German, to be interned as an "undesirable foreigner" in Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence, along with fellow surrealist, Hans Bellmer, who had recently emigrated to Paris. He had been living with his lover and fellow surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington who, not knowing whether he would return, saw no option but to sell their house to repay their debts and leave for Spain. Thanks to the intercession of Paul Éluard and other friends, including the journalist Varian Fry, he was released a few weeks later. Soon after the German occupation of France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo, but managed to escape to America with the help of Fry and Peggy Guggenheim, a member of a wealthy American art collecting family. 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. In October 1946 he married American surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet P. Browner in Beverly Hills, California. The couple made their home in Sedona, Arizona from 1946 to 1953. He and Tanning hosted intellectuals and European artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Yves Tanguy. Sedona proved an inspiration for the artists and for Ernst, who compiled his book Beyond Painting and completed his sculptural masterpiece Capricorn while living in Sedona. As a result of the book and its publicity, Ernst began to achieve financial success. From the 1950s he lived mainly in France. In 1954 he was awarded the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale.
In 2005, "Max Ernst: A Retrospective" opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Contemporary artist tapestries have had their true believers. He produced a tapestry for Gloria Ross...
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