Max Ernst (1891-1976), a German-French painter and sculptor. Born in 1891 in the small town of Bruhl near Cologne, the ancient capital of Germany. Cologne in the Middle Ages was the cultural center of the Rhineland and the birthplace of the famous astrologer Akleba. It had a tradition of alchemy and was also a place full of undead spirits and legends.
Ernst’s father was a teacher and amateur painter, and his creations gave Ernst a certain amount of artistic influence. In his childhood, Ernst was influenced by the strange legends of the ancient capital, and coupled with his own sensitivity, he had various hallucinations. These became the source of his future fantasy painting creations.
Ernst recorded in his book the hallucinations and qualities he experienced as a child. Hallucinations were the basis of his artistic expression and had an important impact on his artistic development. Ernst also studied the thought of Nietzsche and Freud, art history, and German literature at the University of Bonn. He was extremely interested in the emerging psychiatry at that time, and often visited mental hospitals and conducted careful studies on patients.
From 1919 to 1921, Ernst created Dadaist object collages, drawings, and photo mosaics. Together with Jean Arp and Johannes Bargaard, he created a "collective collage" that foreshadowed the so-called "graceful corpse". In 1920, he met Paul Eluard and created illustrations for the latter's poems, bringing the future Surrealists to life on canvas "In the Meeting of Friends".
Since 1923, he has used the "stream of consciousness narrative method" to create, trying to show a surreal world. In the 1920s, the so-called "illusion theme" appeared, which also made a splash in Ernst's works. Using color and distortion, he created dreamlike landscapes: "full of condensations of plant and animal remains." At the same time, he also painted torn forms, bizarre animals and ghostly female figures...
In 1925, he pioneered the rub-printing method, using tissue paper to trace the grooves on the surface of the board to "stimulate the ability of vision." Ernst gradually used other methods, creating scratch paintings, paper stickers, novel collages and pad printings.
In 1942, when he was in the United States, he created a method called "A Young Man Stunned by a Fly Flying from Non-Euclidean Geometry". The technique of "pouring" was later systematically used by Jackson Pollock. Ernst was also fascinated by American Indian art and mask shapes, incorporating their forms into his own work, creating works such as "Dancer Under the Stars."