Max Max Ernst: The Life Of Max Ernst

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Jason Howard Professor Harley Acres ART1101N1 Art Appreciation: AH1 29 October 2017 The Life of Max Ernst “All good ideas arrive by chance” (Max Ernst). Max Ernst born 1891 in Bruhl, Germany. He was a painter, sculptor, graphic artist and a poet. Max Ernst came from a large middle-class family of nine and was the third born. His father Phillipp was an amateur painter and was a teacher to the deaf. A good deal of Ernst's work as an adult sought to undermine authority including that of his father. Max was a founding member of the Surrealist group in Paris. Although many speculate on the ideas that Max had there are numerous pieces of artwork that are an amazing sight. His works and iconic paintings have been seen all around the world and …show more content…

Ernst was one of multiple artists who emerged from military service emotionally wounded and alienated from European traditions and conventional values. It is believed that many or Ernst’s views and expressions of some of his works are from the emotional impact and devastation came while serving in the war. After his war service, he began to develop his own style. “He made a series of collages, using illustrations from medical and technical magazines to form bizarre juxtapositions of images” (Hopkins 3). In 1918 Ernst was demobilized and he returned to Cologne. He then married art history student Luise Straus, who he met in 1914. He and Luis had a son Ulrich ‘Jimmy’ Ernst who was born on June 24, 1920. Ernst’s marriage soon began to fall apart shortly after the birth of his …show more content…

The conciliation of contradictory forces, the expression of the universal, was accomplished in the face of great personal tribulation, two world wars, an errant life-style and an unwillingness to repeat himself in his art. A highly cultivated intelligence and an equally formidable intuition, a ferocious wit and a penchant for irony were nurtured by the general ambience of both Dada and Surrealism but are, of course, ultimately inherent in the man himself. And it is to Max Ernst himself that we must turn for the initial clues to the reality of his existence as an artist. Several other dramatic events in Max Ernst's early life shaped his later development. At the age of three his father took him on an outing to the forest surrounding Briihl. There, to the child's astonishment, the density of the foliage transformed day into night. Exhilarated and frightened, Max retained a vivid impression of the forest. Subsequently the forest became a symbol of night for him, and night assumed the mantle, as Novalis has stated, of "the place of revelations." When he was six, his elder sister Maria, with whom he had been very close, died, and death began to play a crucial role in his existence. In 1906, when he was fifteen, he discovered the death of his favorite bird, a pink cockatoo, at the same time his youngest sister

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