Max Ernst painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the main pioneers of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward creating art resulted in his invention of frottage, a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and raised surfaces to create images, and grattage, an analogous technique in painting. that paint is scraped off. through the canvas to reveal the traces of objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods, as well as the creation of novels and pamphlets using the collage method. He served as a soldier for four years during the First World War and this experience left him shaken, traumatized and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable alien" while living in France.

Max Ernst was born in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family. His father Philipp was a teacher of the deaf and an amateur painter, a devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian. He inspired in Max a penchant for defying authority, while his interest in painting and sketching in nature influenced Max to take up painting. In 1909, Ernst enrolled in the University of Bonn to read philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry. He visited asylums and became fascinated with the art work of the mentally ill patients; he also started painting that year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle, and portraits of his sister and himself. In 1911, Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist.

Ernst's son Jimmy Ernst, a well-known German/American abstract expressionist painter, who lived on the south shore of Long Island, died in 1984. His memoirs, A Not-So-Still Life, were published shortly before his death. Max Ernst's grandson Eric and his granddaughter Amy are both artists and writers.