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Art of the 20th Century
Max Ernst
Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in 1948.
Max Ernst
(b Brühl, nr Cologne, 2 April 1891; d Paris, 1 April 1976).
German painter, printmaker and sculptor, naturalized American in 1948 and French in 1958. He was a major contributor to the theory and practice of SURREALISM. His work challenged and disrupted what he considered to be repressive aspects of European culture, in particular Christian doctrine, conventional morality and the aesthetic codes of Western academic art. Until the mid-1920s he was little known outside a small circle of artists and writers in Cologne and Paris, but he became increasingly successful from c. 1928 onwards. After 1945 he was respected and honoured as a surviving representative of a ‘heroic’ generation of avant-garde artists.
