Ernst rubbed floors into forests and fled as an undesirable
By his own account, Max Ernst died on the first of August 1914 and came back to life on 11 November 1918, the span of his war service. The self-taught German (1891–1976) then helped start Dada in Cologne, invented frottage and grattage, and was interned in France as an undesirable foreigner before escaping to America.
Brühl-born third of nine under a strict deaf-school teacher father, he read philosophy and psychiatry at Bonn from 1909, sketched asylum patients, joined August Macke's Rheinischen Expressionisten, and met Hans Arp before the 1914 draft. He served on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, briefly charting maps, which let him keep painting. Cologne Dada with Baargeld, de Chirico-inspired collages, and marriage to Luise Straus produced son Jimmy before an illegal 1922 French entry into a ménage with Paul and Gala Éluard.
A 1925 contract with Jacques Viot freed full-time painting; frottage pencil rubbings and grattage scrapes—Forest and Dove among them—joined decalcomania and the bird alter ego Loplop. Controversies such as The Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus, Diaghilev designs with Miró, sculpture after 1934, and Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or kept him central. War brought Camp des Milles internment, Gestapo arrest, escape with Varian Fry and Guggenheim, 1941 U.S. arrival, and a brief Guggenheim marriage.
In October 1946 he married the painter Dorothea Tanning at a Beverly Hills double wedding shared with Man Ray and Juliet Browner. The couple lived in Sedona, Arizona, then home to fewer than 400 people, from 1946 to 1953; there he built a cottage with his own hands, compiled Beyond Painting and finished the sculpture Capricorn, and the book's publicity at last made him money. The Venice Biennale gave him its painting prize in 1954, and he died in Paris aged 84 and was buried at Père Lachaise. Brühl's museum, opened in 2005, holds over 70 of his bronzes and more than 700 documents and photographs.
Loplop, he said, grew from a childhood night when he woke to find his beloved bird dead and, minutes later, heard his father announce that a sister had been born. The forest around his boyhood home fed six Forest and Sun canvases; in the 1927 version, frottage builds a petrified wood, paint scraped off almost dry leaves the ringed sun, and the trunks spell out a capital M from his name.
Source: Max Ernst
