Max Ernst

After four years in the German army during the First World War, Ernst emerged with a deep hostility toward the society that had produced the conflict. He channelled this into Dada, co-founding a Cologne group with Johannes Baargeld and Jean Arp in 1919. His Dada collages cut apart Victorian engravings from technical manuals and natural history books, assembling figures that could not exist but read, unsettlingly, as if they should. In 1922 he moved to Paris without official documentation and joined the nascent Surrealist circle, becoming a signatory of Andre Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

The mid-1920s produced two techniques that would define much of his subsequent output. Frottage, developed in 1925, involved laying paper over rough surfaces, rubbing with pencil, and reading the resulting textures as latent images: forest floors became canvases populated with birds, figures and hybrid creatures. Grattage applied a similar logic to oil paint, scraping pigment across a prepared surface to reveal patterns beneath. Both methods deliberately reduced the role of conscious decision-making, a core ambition within Surrealist practice.

His major paintings from this period reward close attention. The Elephant Celebes (1921), now in Tate Modern, built a menacing machine-animal from a photograph of a West African grain bin. Europe After the Rain II (1940-42), made during his wartime exile in New York, covers a canvas more than a metre wide with a geological apocalypse: towers of fused rock, bone and vegetation through which two barely human figures move without direction. The Fireside Angel (1937) was painted immediately after the fall of the Spanish Republic and depicts a roaring, destructive entity Ernst described as the face of counter-revolution. His three collage novels, La Femme 100 Tetes (1929), Reve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (1930) and Une Semaine de Bonte (1934), assembled hundreds of Victorian engravings into narratives of surreal violence and desire that bypassed language altogether.

The Second World War forced Ernst out of France. Interned twice, he escaped with the assistance of Varian Fry and the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married on arriving in the United States in 1941. He settled in New York, then in Sedona, Arizona with the painter Dorothea Tanning, his fourth and final wife. In 1948 he became an American citizen. He returned to France in the early 1950s, acquiring French citizenship in 1958, and died in Paris on 1 April 1976, one day before his eighty-fifth birthday. He is buried at Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

In 1954, Ernst received the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, an honour he accepted with some ambivalence given his lifelong scepticism toward institutional recognition. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, which opened in 2005.

On the Nordic auction market, Ernst's prints and multiples appear most consistently at Crafoord Auktioner, Bukowskis and Stockholms Auktionsverk, with around 50 lots recorded in the Auctionist database. His collage publications command the highest prices, with Une Semaine de Bonte reaching 25,000 EUR and etchings from signed editions trading in the 6,000-25,000 SEK range. Auction results on Auctionist.