Printer: Unknown

Dimensions: 76 x 45 cm

Condition: Good 

Frame: Unframed

Description: This original lithographic poster was produced for the "Festin" book exhibition at Galerie Alphonse Chave in December 1974.

Artist: Max Ernst (1891-1976) was a German-born painter and sculptor. He studied philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry at the University of Bonn. Visiting asylums, he became fascinated with the artwork of mentally ill patients and was inspired to paint. During the First World War, he was a soldier and emerged deeply traumatised and critical of western culture. He converted to Dada, a nihilistic art movement, and formed a group of Dada artists in Cologne creating startling collages and photomontages. Moving to Paris in 1922, he became one of the originators of surrealism who channelled automatic drawing from his subconscious to create dreamlike images. He began sculpting in 1934. The art collector and gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim acquired some of his pieces which she displayed in her London art gallery. At the outbreak of World War II, he escaped the Gestapo and fled to the United States with Peggy who became his third wife. They divorced after four years. Other friends, Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall had also fled from the war to New York City and between them, they inspired the development of abstract expressionism. He married his fourth wife, the American surrealist painter, Dorothea Tanning in 1946 and for a few years settled in Arizona. He returned to France in the 1950s and died in Paris in 1976.