Max Ernst (April 2, 1891 – April 1, 1976) was a German Dadaist and surrealist artist.

Max Ernst was born in Brühl, Germany, near Cologne. In 1909, he enrolled in the University at Bonn to study philosophy but soon abandoned the courses. He began painting that year.

In 1918 he married the art historian Luise Straus — a stormy relationship that would not last. (She died in Auschwitz in 1944 [1].) In 1919 Ernst visited Paul Klee and created paintings, block prints and collages, and experimented with mixed media. During World War I he served in the German army and after the war, filled with new ideas, Ernst, Jean Arp and social activist Alfred Grünwald, formed the Cologne, Germany Dada group, but two years later, in 1922, he returned to the artistic community at Montparnasse in Paris.

Constantly experimenting, in 1925 he invented a graphic art technique called frottage, which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images. The next year he collaborated with Joan Miró on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. With Miró's help, Ernst pioneered grattage in which he troweled pigment from his canvases.

Ernst drew a great deal of controversy with his 1926 painting The Virgin Chastises the infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter.[2]

In Montparnasse he was a central figure in the birth of Breton's desire to ostracize Ernst's friend Éluard from the surrealist group.

In 1927 he married Marie-Berthe Aurenche. It is said that "his relationship with her may have inspired the erotic subject matter of this painting and others of this year." [3]

Ernst began to sculpt in 1934, and spent time with Alberto Giacometti.

In 1938, the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim acquired a number of Max Ernst's works which she displayed in her new museum in London.

Ernst developed a fascination with birds that was prevalent in his work. His alter ego in paintings, which he called Loplop, was a bird. He suggested this alter-ego was an extension of himself stemming from an early confusion of birds and humans. He said his sister was born soon after his bird died. Loplop often appeared in collages of other artists' work, such as Loplop presents André Breton.

Following the onset of World War II, Ernst was detained as an enemy alien in France but with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry in Marseille, he managed to escape the country with Peggy Guggenheim. He left behind his lover, Leonora Carrington, and she suffered a major mental breakdown. Ernst and Guggenheim arrived in the United States in 1941 and were married the following year. Along with other artists and friends (Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall) who had fled from the war and lived in New York City, Ernst helped inspire the development of Abstract expressionism.

His marriage to Guggenheim did not last, and in Beverly Hills, California in October of 1946, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, he married Dorothea Tanning.

The couple first made their home in Sedona, Arizona, and in 1948 Ernst wrote the treatise Beyond Painting. As a result of the publicity, he began to achieve financial success.

In 1953 he and Tanning moved to a small town in the south of France where he continued to work. He City, and the Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais in Paris published a complete catalogue of his works.

Ernst died on April 1, 1976, in Paris, France and was interred there in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.