Max Ernst

Max Ernst was an artist active in Germany, France, and the United States. Throughout his career, he participated in Dada and Surrealism and was closely associated with an international network of artists, writers, and collectors. He shared with many of his contemporaries an abiding interest in Indigenous and non-Western art, seeing in them alternatives to bourgeois cultural norms. Not only influenced by such work, Ernst was also an active collector of African, Asian, Native American, and Oceanic sculpture and textiles.

The third of nine children, Ernst began drawing and painting at a young age, though he received no formal artistic training. He became involved in the arts community around Cologne in the early 1910s, befriending the artists Hans Arp and August Macke and joining the latter’s group, Die Rheinische Expressionisten, in 1911. In 1912 he exhibited his work at the Galerie Feldman in Cologne and published art criticism in the Bonn newspaper Volksmund. That same year, he encountered examples of modern painting from France through the work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne.

Ernst continued to show in group exhibitions, notably participating in the 1913 Erster deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) in Berlin. His art practice was interrupted, however, with the onset of World War I, which saw Ernst conscripted into the German army. He fought on both the eastern and western fronts for eight months, though largely worked charting maps during his four years of service. This relative distance from battle allowed him to continue his painting practice; it was during this time that Ernst began collecting, acquiring Polynesian tapas, textiles made of bark and used in both domestic and religious contexts.

In 1916 Ernst met the artists George Grosz and John Heartfield, members of the subversive “anti-art” group Berlin Dada. Returning to civilian life at war’s end in 1918, Ernst rejoined Arp and the painter Johannes Baargeld to found a chapter of Dada in Cologne. That year, he married the art historian Louise Straus in 1918 and had a son, Jimmy.

Ernst’s first solo exhibition, Exposition Dada Max Ernst, was organized in 1921 at Galerie Au Sans Pareil in Paris with the help of the city’s Dada group. Though Ernst was unable to enter France to see the show himself, the poet Paul Eluard encountered his work and, deeply impressed, traveled to Cologne to meet him. There, Eluard purchased two of Ernst’s paintings, Celebes (1921; Tate) and Oedipus Rex (1922; private collection), and six collages that would serve as illustrations for his collection of poetry, Répétitions. In 1922 Ernst joined Eluard in Paris, where he entered into a romantic relationship with the poet and his wife, Gala. Together in France, Eluard and Ernst joined the Paris Surrealist group, which was formally founded in 1924 by André Breton.

Throughout this time, Ernst continued to collect objects from Asia and the Pacific, and sometimes deployed these as models for his own work. He purchased a barkcloth tapa from the French dealer Pierre Loeb and traveled throughout Southeast and East Asian with the Eluards in 1924, visiting China and parts of present-day Vietnam. A double figure from Lake Sentani in Indonesia, acquired by Ernst’s dealer Jacques Viot, likely served as inspiration for the artist’s sculpture Les Asperges de la lune (Lunar Asparagus, 1937; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). In 1936 Ernst published his memoir, Au-delà de la peinture (Beyond Painting), in a special edition of Cahiers d’Arts, in which he identifies his Surrealist approach with the Indigenous peoples of Oceania, believing them to have privileged contact with a reality beyond the visual world.

Ernst entered into a relationship with the painter Leonora Carrington in 1937. Identified by the French as an enemy alien during the Second World War, he was interned twice, first in 1939, when he shared a cell with fellow German artist Hans Bellmer, and again in 1940. Escaping his confinement in 1940, he traveled to Marseille, the site of Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee, an organization that aided artists attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France. Through the group, Ernst met the American collector Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he retreated to New York via Lisbon in the summer of 1941; the two married later that year.

In 1942 Ernst met the artist Dorothea Tanning at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. The two quickly became romantically involved, and Ernst moved into Tanning’s apartment, bringing with him his art collection. Of the myriad works in Ernst’s possession, Tanning remarked in her 2001 memoir, Between Lives, that “he brought everything he had. A glory of objects and pictures expanding my rooms, making other worlds out of my walls. And as if that were not enough, the Hopi idols, Northwest Coast wolf mask, New Guinea shields. There was a totem pole that just touched the ceiling. . . . Over a door a Papuan paddle, on the desk a carved spoon, totem-handled.” Ernst divorced Guggenheim in 1946 to marry Tanning. That year the couple moved to Sedona, Arizona, before returning to France in 1953, where Ernst would remain until his death. In 1985 the National Gallery of Australia acquired from Tanning ninety-six objects formerly in Ernst’s collection, comprising examples from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.