Ernst (Max Ernst) [German]

This co-founder of the short-lived 1920s, dada movement, in addition to being an antiestablishmentaralist, was also the "Surrealist's surrealist. " Like Picasso, Ernst's paintings were an artistic editorial of our times, many serving as bookends that bracketed the last three generations. Like news from afar, they reported on the symbolic meaning of the major events of our times. His "Europe After the Rain" has been compared to Picasso's "Guernica," in its power to summarize the horrors of war. Of his own work, Ernst is quoted as having said: "My work is unacceptable to specialists of art, culture, and morality. But it does have the ability to enchant my accomplices: poets, pataphysicians (the science of the realm beyond metaphysics) and a few illiterates. Rebellious by nature, Ernst was a nervous but precocious and an impressionable young boy, in constant friction with those in authority. Once he read Freud's "Interpretations of Dreams," the course was irrevocably set for his entrance into the demonic mode of expressing fantastic content and forms that spewed from both sides of his brain, his mind and his soul. However, it was WW-I that clinched Ernst's attitude towards authority as well as towards the conventional norms of both society and formal artistic training. After that war, along with others in his Paris Left Bank peer group, he set out to found the dada movement, which was then regarded as the proper reaction to the imbecilic First World War. That movement took advantage of, and was obsessed with "finding the artistic in any and everything," including what others considered "junk." Collages were often the centerpiece of the "dada movement " and of much of Ernest's artistic influenced output. His work was of course the inspiration for the work of Jackson Pollack and others of his genre of "slap bucket paint" art. This collection of both black and white, and color plates, captures all of his major works up until his death in 1976. Arguably, next to Dali, Ernst was not just the founder, but also the best of the Surrealists, and certainly heavily influenced all of the serious surrealists that followed, including Dali. A true trail blazer of the modern artistic genre. Five Stars