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Jimmy Ernst is the son of
Dada/Surrealist artist Max Ernst and art historian and journalist
Louise Straus-Ernst. The biomorphic and surreal compositions of
his father, the art of Jean Arp, Paul Klee, André Breton, and Lyonel Feininger, early encounters with Native American symbols,
and the friendship of William Baziotes and Kurt Seligmann all
influenced the young artist. His two dimensional, black and
white, central biomorphic abstractions in German Disography II
(1975) are framed by a geometric color field inspired by Josef
Albers' Homage to the Square series. Ernst's work
reflects his familiarity since childhood with the tools,
techniques, disciplines, and attitudes of famous and influential
American and European artists, including Baziotes, de Kooning,
Gottlieb, Hofmann, Motherwell, and Newman.
Born in Cologne, Germany,
Ernst emigrated to the United States in 1938 during Hitler's reign
of terror. He worked at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1941
Peggy Guggenheim hired him as her personal assistant. Ernst's
work is found in over 100 museum collections in the United States,
including the permanent collections of the Pasadena Art Institute
in California, the Toledo Museum in Ohio, New York's Metropolitan
Museum of Art, and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.
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