German painter who entered France without papers in 1922 on Paul Éluard's passport, helped found Surrealism, and kept inventing techniques for it — frottage, grattage, the collage novel. Twice a war's enemy: a German artilleryman in the first, an interned 'undesirable foreigner' in the second.
Max Ernst's first Paris exhibition opened without him. At Au Sans Pareil on 2 May 1921, the Dada circle celebrated on the pavement — Philippe Soupault up a ladder with a bicycle, André Breton in the doorway — while Ernst, a German national refused a visa three years after the war, stayed in Cologne. The next year he solved the border his own way, entering France without papers on Paul Éluard's passport, and moving in with Éluard and his wife Gala — a ménage à trois the three of them kept for two years.
In Paris he became Surrealism's chief inventor of means: frottage, the pencil rubbing of floorboards and leaves that let images arrive by accident; grattage, its scraped-paint cousin; and the collage novel, cut and pasted from Victorian engravings. A 'degenerate' artist to the Nazis and an enemy alien to wartime France, he was interned at the Camp des Milles, escaped to America in 1941 with Peggy Guggenheim's and Varian Fry's help, and came back for good in 1953. He died in Paris in 1976, on the eve of his eighty-fifth birthday, and is buried at Père Lachaise.
Ernst was born on 2 April 1891 in Brühl, near Cologne, third of nine children of a Catholic schoolteacher who painted on Sundays. He studied philosophy, psychology and art history at Bonn — the psychiatric collections he saw there, and the art of patients, stayed with him — and never formally trained as a painter. The First World War took him as a German artillery gunner on both fronts; his autobiography compressed the four years into one sentence: 'On the first of August 1914 M.E. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918.'[1]
Resurrected, he founded Cologne Dada with Johannes Baargeld in 1919 — one exhibition was entered through a public lavatory, with an axe provided for visitors who wished to destroy the works — and began the collages of engravings and catalogue plates that caught Paris's attention. The Au Sans Pareil exhibition of May 1921 introduced the work to Paris while its refused-visa maker stayed home.[2]
In 1922 Ernst crossed into France without papers, carrying the passport of his friend the poet Paul Éluard, and settled outside Paris at Saint-Brice and then Eaubonne — inside Éluard's household, as the lover of his wife Gala, with Éluard's knowledge. The arrangement lasted about two years before Éluard abruptly left for Indochina and the couple followed him; Gala later left Éluard altogether for Salvador Dalí. Ernst painted the Eaubonne house's walls and doors; panels recovered from under the wallpaper decades later hang in museums.[3]
When Breton's circle constituted itself as Surrealism in 1924, Ernst was one of its first painters, and its most technically restless. Frottage arrived in 1925 in a seaside hotel, when the grain of the scrubbed floorboards under his paper began yielding forests and birds; grattage translated the accident to paint scraped over textured objects. The collage novels — La Femme 100 Têtes in 1929, Une Semaine de Bonté in 1934 — cut Victorian engravings into calm, impossible melodramas, and remain the form's masterpieces. A recurring bird-headed alter ego, Loplop, presided.[1]
From 1938 Ernst lived at Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche in the south with the young English painter Leonora Carrington, covering their farmhouse with cement reliefs of guardian beasts. The war broke the idyll twice over: France interned him in 1939 as an 'undesirable foreigner' — a German whose work Hitler's regime had displayed as degenerate — at the Camp des Milles brickworks near Aix, and Carrington, alone as the Germans advanced, broke down and fled to Spain.[3]
Released, re-interned, and escaped, Ernst got out through Marseille in 1941 with the help of Varian Fry's rescue network and of Peggy Guggenheim, the collector who flew him to New York and married him in 1942. The marriage lasted the war; in 1946, in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Beverly Hills, he married the painter Dorothea Tanning, and the two built a house and a decade in the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona.[4]
Ernst and Tanning returned to France in 1953, and the following year the Venice Biennale gave him its Grand Prize for painting — which the Surrealists, on doctrinal principle against honours, expelled him for accepting. The last two decades were sculpture, chess sets, collages and retrospectives. He died in Paris on 1 April 1976, the day before his eighty-fifth birthday, and is buried at Père Lachaise.[5]
The passport Paul Éluard lent Ernst in 1922 was the start of an arrangement rather than a favour. Ernst moved in with Éluard and his wife Gala at Eaubonne, north of Paris, and the three of them lived together for about two years.
Ernst painted the house. Murals went onto the walls, the doors and the ceilings of almost every room: figures, birds, hands, plants, a woman with her arms raised, painted directly onto the plaster.[3]
Éluard left abruptly in 1924, disappearing to Asia without telling anyone; Gala and Ernst followed him as far as Saigon, and the household broke up on the way back. The house changed hands, the murals were papered and plastered over, and they were not rediscovered until 1967. Several have since been detached and conserved.
From about 1929 a figure recurs through Ernst's work who is not quite a person. Loplop, Bird Superior, is his alter ego: a bird-headed creature who presents pictures within the picture, holding up or framing the image the viewer is looking at.
He also made novels out of other people's images. La Femme 100 têtes, published in 1929, and Une semaine de bonté, published in 1934, are built from Victorian engravings — catalogue illustrations, penny-dreadful plates, anatomical diagrams — cut apart and recombined so precisely that the joins are invisible.[2]
The result reads as a narrative with no text and no explanation. Une semaine de bonté runs to about 180 collages across five volumes, and it is the fullest thing Surrealism produced in the form.
Ernst was given the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1954, at sixty-three, after a career in which he had rarely sold well.
André Breton expelled Max Ernst from the Surrealist group for accepting the prize. The objection was that an official prize from a state institution was exactly the kind of honour Surrealism existed to refuse, and that taking it was a surrender.[4]
Ernst kept the prize and went on working for another twenty-two years. He is one of several figures whose expulsion says more about how Breton ran the movement than about the work.
Born on 2 April in Brühl, near Cologne.
Drafted into the German artillery. His autobiography: 'On the first of August 1914 M.E. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918.'
Founds Cologne Dada with Johannes Baargeld; one show is entered through a public lavatory.
His first Paris exhibition opens at Au Sans Pareil on 2 May without him — France refuses the German a visa.
Enters France without papers on Paul Éluard's passport and joins the Éluard household at Saint-Brice — poet, wife and painter, by agreement.
Paints murals directly onto the walls, doors and ceilings of the Éluards' house at Eaubonne, where he is living with Paul and Gala.
Éluard leaves for Asia without warning. Gala and Ernst follow as far as Saigon, and the household breaks up.
Invents frottage when a hotel floor's scrubbed grain starts yielding forests through the paper; grattage follows in paint.
Publishes the collage novel La Femme 100 têtes, and introduces Loplop, the bird-headed alter ego who presents pictures within his pictures.
Publishes Une Semaine de Bonté, the collage novel cut from Victorian engravings.
France interns the 'undesirable foreigner' at the Camp des Milles, ending the Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche years with Leonora Carrington.
Escapes through Marseille with the help of Varian Fry's network and Peggy Guggenheim, whom he marries in New York in 1942.
Marries Peggy Guggenheim in New York. The marriage ends in 1946.
Marries Dorothea Tanning in a Beverly Hills double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner; they settle in Sedona, Arizona.
Wins the Venice Biennale's Grand Prize for painting; the Surrealists expel him for accepting it.
Is expelled from the Surrealist group by André Breton for accepting the Venice Biennale prize.
The Eaubonne murals are rediscovered under later plaster and wallpaper.
Dies in Paris on 1 April, the day before his eighty-fifth birthday; buried at Père Lachaise.
Painting
A figure in a floor-length coat of dark red fur walks to the right across a frozen plain, carrying a green glass lantern with a small white horse standing inside it. One leg shows a stocking striped yellow and dark green. Leonora Carrington painted it about 1939 at the farmhouse she and Max Ernst kept in the Ardèche. The National Galleries of Scotland bought it in 2018.
Painting · Surrealism
A sun split in two hangs at the top of a black sky. Below it, the lower halves of a naked man and woman float joined together under a yellow crescent, and fine threads run down to planets, a gloved hand over the earth and a heap of flesh-coloured shapes on the ground. Max Ernst painted it in 1923 and gave it to André Breton, with a poem on the back that explains it in riddles. Tate has owned it since 1960.
Painting · Surrealism
A man in a bowler hat kneels and holds a stiff young man in a white shirt across his lap, like the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ. The young man has the grey head of a Greek statue, and Tate says he is Max Ernst himself, held by his father. A man with a bandaged head is sketched on the wall behind them. Max Ernst painted it in 1923 at Saint-Brice, outside Paris, in the house of the poet Paul Éluard. Tate has owned it since 1981.
Painting · Dada
A huge round creature with a bull's head and a hose for a trunk stands on a bare floor, while fish swim in the sky and a headless woman beckons from the corner. Max Ernst painted it in Cologne in 1921, and it was his first large painting. The body began as a photograph of a clay corn-bin from the southern Sudan. The poet Paul Éluard bought it soon after it was finished. Tate has owned it since 1975.
Painting · Surrealism
A tiny bird in a blue sky frightens two girls: one runs at it with a knife and the other lies fainted on the grass. A man on the roof of a toy house carries off a child and reaches for a knob fixed to the frame. The gate, the house and the knob are real wooden objects. Max Ernst made it in 1924, the year Surrealism was founded, and traced it to a fever he had as a child. Paul Éluard owned it in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art bought it from him in 1937.
Collage · Dada
Printed images of hats combined with paint and drawing create strange, partly human-like structures.
Met · 1921
Met in Cologne in 1921 when Eluard sought out the Dada collagist; in 1922 Ernst entered France on Eluard's passport and lived inside the Eluard household at Saint-Brice as Gala's lover, with the poet's knowledge, for about two years.
Met · 1922
Gala and Paul Éluard met Ernst in 1922. Ernst became Gala's lover, lived with the couple at Eaubonne, and painted her as the only woman in Au rendez-vous des amis. The affair ended in 1924.
Partner of · 1937–1940
Met at a London dinner party in 1937 - she twenty, he forty-six and married - and lived together in Paris and at Saint-Martin-d'Ardeche, whose farmhouse they covered with cement beasts. The war ended it: his internment as an enemy alien, her breakdown and committal in Spain. They met again in Lisbon in 1941 and never lived together after.
Met · 1930
Fini met Max Ernst before settling in Paris and became part of the artistic circle around Surrealism without formally joining Breton's group.
Met · 1928
Tanguy and Ernst exhibited together in the Paris Surrealist movement, belonged to the wartime émigré network in the United States, and Tanguy visited Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Arizona in 1951.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
A founding painter of the movement in 1924 and its chief inventor of techniques - frottage, grattage, the collage novel. The association ended on doctrine: the Surrealists expelled him in 1954 for accepting the Venice Biennale's Grand Prize.
Depicted in · Painting
Tate's display caption says the painting shows the artist himself, held by his father, in the place of Christ in a Pietà. Tate's catalogue entry adds that the son's head is painted like a classical Greek statue.
— Max Ernst, Pietà or Revolution by Night, 1923 (T03252), T03252; display caption and catalogue entry
Max Ernst's 1925 technique of placing paper over a textured surface — floorboards, leaves, sacking — and rubbing with a pencil, then developing the images the texture suggests. He invented it in a seaside hotel when the scrubbed grain of the floor began yielding forests and creatures through the paper. Grattage is its painting equivalent: paint scraped away over textured objects. Both were ways of letting images arrive by accident, which was the Surrealist point.
Illegally. As a German three years after the First World War he was refused a visa — his first Paris exhibition, in May 1921, famously opened without him — so in 1922 he crossed the border carrying the passport of his friend the poet Paul Éluard and lived in France without papers, inside the Éluard household at Saint-Brice, as Gala Éluard's lover with her husband's knowledge.
France interned him in 1939 as an 'undesirable foreigner' at the Camp des Milles, a brickworks near Aix-en-Provence — a German whose work the Nazis themselves had exhibited as degenerate. Released and re-interned as the front collapsed, he escaped through Marseille in 1941 with help from Varian Fry's rescue network and Peggy Guggenheim, reaching New York in July 1941. His companion Leonora Carrington, left alone at their Ardèche farmhouse, broke down and fled to Spain; they never lived together again.
Four: the art historian Luise Straus (1918), the painter Marie-Berthe Aurenche (1927), the collector Peggy Guggenheim (1942, in New York, dissolved after the war), and the American painter Dorothea Tanning (1946, in a Beverly Hills double wedding alongside Man Ray and Juliet Browner) — a marriage of thirty years, from Sedona, Arizona to France, that lasted until his death in 1976. Between the second and third came Leonora Carrington, the English Surrealist, never married to him but central to both their stories.
A book that tells its story entirely in collages — Ernst's invention, cut from Victorian engravings, catalogue plates and pulp illustrations. La Femme 100 Têtes (1929) and Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) are the masterpieces of the form: bird-headed men, flooded bedrooms and calm impossible violence, assembled so seamlessly the originals seem always to have contained them.
Books built entirely from cut-up Victorian engravings — catalogue illustrations, penny-dreadful plates, anatomical diagrams — recombined so precisely that the joins are invisible. La Femme 100 têtes appeared in 1929 and Une semaine de bonté in 1934. The latter runs to about 180 collages across five volumes and has no text at all.
Max Ernst's alter ego, a bird-headed creature he called Bird Superior, who appears in his work from about 1929. Loplop presents pictures within the picture, holding up or framing the image the viewer is looking at.
Ernst lived with Paul Éluard and his wife Gala at their house north of Paris for about two years from 1922, and painted murals over the walls, doors and ceilings of nearly every room. Éluard left for Asia without warning in 1924 and the household broke up. The murals were plastered over and not rediscovered until 1967.
For accepting the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1954. André Breton held that an official prize from a state institution was exactly what Surrealism existed to refuse. Ernst kept the prize and worked for another twenty-two years.
Associated with · 1924–1954
A founding painter of the movement in 1924 and its chief inventor of techniques - frottage, grattage, the collage novel. The association ended on doctrine: the Surrealists expelled him in 1954 for accepting the Venice Biennale's Grand Prize.
Met · 1921
Met in Cologne in 1921 when Eluard sought out the Dada collagist; in 1922 Ernst entered France on Eluard's passport and lived inside the Eluard household at Saint-Brice as Gala's lover, with the poet's knowledge, for about two years.
Met · 1922
Gala and Paul Éluard met Ernst in 1922. Ernst became Gala's lover, lived with the couple at Eaubonne, and painted her as the only woman in Au rendez-vous des amis. The affair ended in 1924.
Partner of · 1937–1940
Met at a London dinner party in 1937 - she twenty, he forty-six and married - and lived together in Paris and at Saint-Martin-d'Ardeche, whose farmhouse they covered with cement beasts. The war ended it: his internment as an enemy alien, her breakdown and committal in Spain. They met again in Lisbon in 1941 and never lived together after.
Met · 1930
Fini met Max Ernst before settling in Paris and became part of the artistic circle around Surrealism without formally joining Breton's group.
Met · 1928
Tanguy and Ernst exhibited together in the Paris Surrealist movement, belonged to the wartime émigré network in the United States, and Tanguy visited Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Arizona in 1951.
Depicted in · 1939
The National Galleries of Scotland's object record for GMA 5600 carries a Depicted field, and the name in it is Max Ernst. The museum's own text describes the painting as showing him holding a lantern with a horse inside it. The date is approximate because the museum gives it as about 1939.
Depicted in · 1923
Tate's display caption says the painting shows the artist himself, held by his father, in the place of Christ in a Pietà. Tate's catalogue entry adds that the son's head is painted like a classical Greek statue.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Max Ernst and their work.
The Dorothea Tanning Foundation's chronology, for the marriage and the years in Arizona and France.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Max Ernst. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
Explore more resources