Max Ernst: Life and Work

A penetrating, intimate portrayal of the creative life of an individual artist and of the artistic life of the twentieth century.

Throughout his career, Max Ernst created fantastic worlds through images. But it is only when one sees his work in relation to the images of his personal life—his letters, photographs, poetry, and diaries, so brilliantly reproduced on these pages—that one begins to understand his world, a world spent at the epicenter of twentieth-century artistic life.

Max Ernst: Life and Work draws on an unprecedented collection of source material, much of it published here for the first time, to present a compelling portrait of the artist's life and an intellectual portrait of the period. Edited by Werner Spies, a close friend of Max Ernst and the leading authority on his extraordinarily rich, surreal world, it includes letters and notes by friends and contemporaries that provide insight into the reception of Ernst's oeuvre and shed light on his biography. The vast range of documents includes texts by Hans (Jean) Arp, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul éluard, Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Benjamin Perêt, Lotte Lenya, Leonora Carrington, and many others.

Ernst's life and work were intimately interwoven, and the hundreds of documents here are interspersed with numerous reproductions of his work, all of which recall the variety and richness of the artist's discoveries and innovations. Ernst—dubbed "Dada Max"—played a vital role in the history of Dada and Surrealism in Cologne, Zurich, and Paris, and shaped the face of the New York art scene during his exile there. 615 illustrations, 154 in color.

Werner Spies has organized numerous major exhibitions in Europe, and has published widely on twentieth-century art, notably on the Surrealist movement. He is the general editor of Max Ernst's catalogue raisonné.