Max Ernst

Maximilian Maria Ernst was born on 2 April 1891 in Brühl, near Cologne, into a strict Catholic, lower-middle-class family. He studied philosophy and art history at the University of Bonn before teaching himself to paint, and served in the German army during the First World War — an experience that would leave a permanent mark on his imagination. In the years that followed, he became a central figure in Cologne Dada, producing works such as The Hat Makes the Man (1920–21), a collage that dismantled bourgeois identity through the subversive reassembly of found imagery. By 1921 he had completed Elephant Celebes, an oil on canvas now held at Tate, London, in which a monstrous machine-creature derived from a Sudanese grain silo looms over fragmented female figures — a work widely regarded as marking the transition from Dada toward Surrealism. Ernst moved to Paris in 1922, joining the Surrealist circle and participating in the First Surrealist Exhibition in 1925. The works that followed defined the movement's visual language: The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard and the Painter (1926) fused blasphemous irreverence with technical refinement; Forest and Dove (c. 1927) deployed frottage and grattage to conjure dense, unconscious woodland; and Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924), now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, dissolved the boundary between painting and sculpture by incorporating three-dimensional elements into the pictorial frame. His collage novels — La femme 100 têtes (1929) and Une semaine de bonté (1934) — extended this practice into wordless narrative, assembling cut nineteenth-century engravings into labyrinthine Surrealist sequences that remain cornerstones of the genre.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Ernst's circumstances became precarious. He was aided by the collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim, who supported him financially and helped him emigrate to the United States in 1941; her collection, now housed at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, preserves several of his major works, including The Robing of the Bride (1940). His American years produced Europe After the Rain II (1940–42), a monumental apocalyptic landscape held at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, and The King Playing with the Queen (1944), a sculptural work that opened toward more biomorphic and spatially experimental forms. He was granted American citizenship in 1948, the same year he modelled Capricorne, a totemic large-scale sculpture synthesising mythic, animal, and human imagery. Returning to Europe, he received the Gran Premio per la Pittura at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and was granted French citizenship in 1958. He continued painting into his later decades, producing works such as The Garden of France (1962), which carried his forest and landscape motifs forward with lyrical refinement. Ernst died in Paris on 1 April 1976 and is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

His work is held by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the dedicated Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR in his birthplace. Recent exhibition activity has included a solo presentation at Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger in Paris in 2024 and a group exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2025. Secondary market representation extends across galleries in New York, Paris, Munich, Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Brussels, reflecting the sustained international engagement with his legacy.