Born in Brühl in 1891, he entered the University of Bonn where he studied philosophy and psychiatry. He enlisted in the German army during the First World War. When Ernst left the army, the Dada movement had already emerged in Switzerland; Attracted by the Dadaist revolution against the conventional, Ernst settled in Cologne and began to work on collage. In 1922 he moved to live in Paris, where he began to paint surrealist works in which human figures of great solemnity and fantastic creatures inhabit Renaissance spaces made with detailed precision (L'eléphant célèbes, 1921, Tate Gallery, London). In 1925 he invented frottage (which transfers the surface of an object to paper or canvas with the help of pencil shading); later he experimented with grattage (technique by which the already dried pigments are scraped or engraved on a canvas or wooden board). Ernst was imprisoned after the invasion of France by the Germans during the Second World War; in the prison he worked in the decalcomanía, technique to transfer to the glass or the metal paintings made on a specially prepared paper. In 1930, he debuted as an actor in film with The Golden Age (L 'Age D' Or), second surrealist film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, where he plays the role of the cruel leader of the bandits. This film caused a real scandal in France, and was banned for more than 50 years. However, Max Ernst continued to collaborate in other surrealist films in the following years. In 1941 he emigrated to the United States with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, who became his third wife in 1942. In 1953 he returned to France and from then on his works enjoyed a remarkable revaluation. Throughout his varied artistic career, Ernst was characterized as an indefatigable experimenter. In all his works he sought the ideal means to express, in two or three dimensions, the extradimensional world of dreams and imagination.