Max Ernst was a German-born painter and sculptor. He studied philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry at the University of Bonn. His visits to asylums inspired him to paint, fascinated by the artwork of mentally ill patients.

He served in the First World War and emerged traumatised and critical of Western culture. He was drawn to Dadaism, an anti-art movement that rejected logic, tradition and conventional aesthetics, using absurdity, chance and provocation to challenge the values that had led to conflict and cultural collapse. He formed a Dada group in Cologne and created striking collages and photomontages. Moving to Paris in 1922, he became an originator of surrealism, using automatic drawing from the subconscious to create dreamlike images, and began sculpting in 1934.

Peggy Guggenheim collected and exhibited his work in her London gallery, and when war broke out, he fled with Guggenheim to the United States. (They later divorced.) Friends Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall had also escaped to New York, where, between them, they inspired early abstract expressionism.

Ernst married the American Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning in 1946, spending time in Arizona before returning to France in the 1950s. In the later years of his career, he worked with the Atelier Mourlot on a series of lithographic posters and graphic works. Although printmaking was never central to his practice, these collaborations helped circulate his Surrealist imagery and placed his graphic work within the modernist print tradition fostered by Mourlot.