Max Ernst | MoMA
A key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to both personal memory and collective myth. By combining illusionistic technique with a cut-and-paste logic, he made the incredible believable, expressing disjunctions of the mind and shocks of societal upheavals with unsettling clarity. After serving for four years in World War I, the German-born Ernst returned traumatized to Cologne (near his birthplace of Brühl) in 1918. It was there that he produced his first collages alongside fellow Dadaists Jean (Hans) Arp and Johannes Baargeld. In his works from this period, he used mechanically-reproduced fragments, such as the image of a chemical bomb being released from a military plane in the background of Here Everything is Still Floating, to reflect a world of rubble and shards. Ernst is most closely associated with Su