Max Ernst
Dada in Cologne, Surrealism in Paris, and the inventor of frottage, grattage and decalcomania.
Max Ernst was born near Cologne in 1891, served four years in the German artillery, and described himself as having died in 1914 and been resurrected in 1918. He founded Cologne Dada, moved to Paris in 1922 and became central to Surrealism, and invented more techniques than anyone else in the movement: frottage, rubbing paper over grained wood; grattage, scraping paint over a textured surface; decalcomania, pressing pigment between surfaces to generate forests and jungles. He was interned in France, escaped to America with Peggy Guggenheim's help, married Dorothea Tanning, and returned to France, dying in Paris in 1976.
Ernst's collage novels — La Femme 100 Tetes, Une Semaine de Bonte — are among the most important printed works of the century and appear both as bound volumes and as individual plates. The Spies and Metken catalogue raisonne is the necessary reference across the whole output. Sculpture exists in bronze editions, many cast posthumously, so cast date and foundry matter. Provenance across the 1930s and 1940s should be examined, given the confiscations and the artist's own flight. Later lithographic and etched editions are numerous and are a modest, separate market.
If you own a work by Max Ernst
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