JIMMY ERNST

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BIOGRAPHY

An important and influential artist and educator, Jimmy Ernst was associated with two of the twentieth century’s major art movements—surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.  The son of the Surrealist painter Max Ernst and the art historian Louise Straus, he was born Hans Ulrich Ernst in Cologne, Germany, on June 24, 1920.  His parents divorced two years later, and his father moved to Paris, while Ernst stayed in Cologne with his mother.

In 1930 Ernst traveled to Paris to visit his father, where he met the many of the Surrealists, including Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Andre Masson, Jean Miró, and Man Ray.  After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Ernst apartment in Cologne was searched and his mother began to fear for their safety.  He was sent to live with his maternal grandfather, while his mother moved to Paris.  Five years later, in 1938, Ernst immigrated to the United States.  After settling in New York, he met other European exiles and members of the avant-garde.

Ernst petitioned the Emergency Rescue Committee in 1941 to help his parents escape France.  His father successfully fled Europe in 1941, arriving in America with Peggy Guggenheim.  However, his attempt to rescue his mother was unsuccessful.  In 1944 she was sent to Auschwitz, where she died.

Ernst had his first solo exhibition at Norlyst Gallery in New York in 1941.  On October 20, 1942, Guggenheim’s legendary Art of this Century Gallery opened, with Ernst as director, a role that further associated him with the New York avant-garde.

In 1950 he joined such eminent artists as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko in the famous “Irascible Eighteen.”  The largely Abstract Expressionist group protested the perceived anti-abstractionist bias of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and drew much attention to the New York School.  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Ernst exhibited in the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, Inc., New York, and in various other galleries across in the United States and abroad.

Ernst married Edith Dallas Bauman in 1947.  They had two children, Amy Louise (1953) and Eric Max (1956).  In 1969 Ernst moved to East Hampton, where he lived off and on for the rest of his life.  In 1982 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate by Southampton College of Long Island University.  Shortly before his death, in 1983, Ernst was elected to the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters, both in New York.

Ernst died suddenly of a stroke on February 6, 1984, in New York.  His works are owned by numerous world-class public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

KW

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