Max Ernst: Surrealism, Art and Cinema

The volume offers a critical approach to Max Ernst (1891–1976) and his life, seen for the first time through the lens of the Seventh Art. Indeed, the media of cinema and film represent a parallel and ever-present path in the artist’s wide-ranging career, which connected many individuals and artistic groups and offered original points of view on seven decades of the twentieth century. Ernst was a painter, sculptor, draftsman, graphic artist, poet, and art theorist, who took endless pleasure in experimentation. His work has massively inspired Surrealist cinema, but also film directors of later years and up to the present. His artistic practice contributed to overcoming traditional and two-dimensional media – painting and drawing – which remained frozen in stillness, experimenting with new techniques that would go Beyond Painting, as the title of his theoretical writing from 1936 recites. Secondly, the kaleidoscopic and unmistakable life of the Dadaist, Surrealist, Romantic, Paraphysicist and Humanist greatly inspired by the Renaissance has become the subject of many films and documentaries. A handsome man with a striking aura, he starred as an actor in notable films and documentaries and also worked as a respected member of film juries and as an original designer of film award trophies. This book is a journey in Max Ernst’s work between art and cinema with different media and unpublished materials.