L’air lave e leau

MAX ERNST

Born in Brühl on 2 April 1891, he was a German painter, sculptor and writer, French by adoption. Considered one of the greatest exponents of Surrealism, the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century. In 1909 he enrolled in the faculty of philosophy at the University of Bonn, but he was more interested in psychiatry and the history of art it was during this period that he discovered his artistic vocation. His first works were exhibited in Berlin in 1913, where he met and became acquainted with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1919 he moved to Munich, where he learned about the Zurich Dadaist movement. Back in Cologne, he founded the Dada group together with his friends Hans Arp and Baargeld. In 1924 the Surrealist Manifesto was published and the French revolutionary climate made him question the traditional logic of language and figurative expression: he thus proposed an introspection of the irrational and an exploration of the unconscious inherent in the human being. A few years later he took a trip to the East where, inspired by the evocative experience, he developed a new pictorial technique, frottage. He died in Paris in 1976. Ernst is an artist who consistently followed his path and almost fortuitously found consecration.