The Dadaist and Surrealist Max Ernst doubtlessly counts among the most important artists of the 20th century.
Being an educated philosopher and art historian "pictor doctus" in the truest sense of the word, Max Ernst may have always been a self-taught artist, however, he was one with an extraordinary visionary ingenuity. "To find oneself is to loose oneself", was the motto, and thus Max Ernst remained a highly innovative artist who was active in various artistic fields such as painting, print, collage, stage design and costumes throughout his life. In doing so, he again and again reinvented his fantastic-figurative but also biomorph-abstract style. In terms of the development of new artistic techniques Max Ernst also went down in art history: His frottages, grattages, décalcomanies and fumages helped coincidence, being the tool of the artist's "hallucinatory powers", to establish the artistic effect.
Max Ernst's exhibitions and honors are almost uncountable, his first grand retrospective took place in the renowned New York Museum of Modern Art in 1961.