Born in 1891, Max Ernst was German painter and sculptor who became an American citizen in 1948 and then a French citizen in 1958. He died in Paris in 1976. His oeuvre encompasses both the Dadaist and surrealist movements.
Max Ernst experimented with different supports and materials. In 1919 he made his first collages and in 1925 he invented frottage, a technique that brings forth more or less imaginary figures. It is related to the automatic writing of the surrealist writers he knew such as Paul Eluard and André Breton. In 1926, with the help of Miró, Max Ernst threw himself into the elaboration of a new technique, grattage, which consists in scratching paint directly on the canvas.
In August 1940 he left France with Peggy Guggenheim. Max Ernst lived in New York where, alongside Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall, he helped to develop abstract expressionism among American painters such as Jackson Pollock.
Museum website in Brühl: http://www.maxernstmuseum.lvr.de/de/startseite_1.html