Jimmy Ernst
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Hans-Ulrich Ernst (June 24, 1920 – February 6, 1984), known as Jimmy Ernst, was an American painter born in Germany.
Early life
Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of German Surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus-Ernst, a well-known art historian and journalist.<ref name="obio"/><ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref> His parents separated in 1922 and divorced in 1926 and Ernst remained with his mother in Cologne.<ref name="obio"/> He visited his father in France in 1930, where he met many artists, including Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy, as well as his father's lover Leonora Carrington.<ref name="obio"/> In February 1933, a month after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the SS searched Luise Straus' apartment.<ref name="obio"/> As a noted intellectual and a Jew she was regarded as suspect by the new regime.<ref name="obio"/> Ernst was sent to live with his grandfather, Luise's father, while his mother moved to Paris.<ref name="obio"/> In June 1938, Jimmy sailed to New York from Le Havre on the liner SS Manhattan.<ref name="obio"/>
There he met many European exiles and the city's avant-garde.<ref name="obio"/> In 1940, he petitioned the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to secure the release of his father from internment.<ref name="obio"/> The ERC secured his release in 1941 and Max Ernst arrived in New York from Nazi occupied France.<ref name="obio"/> In 1944, unknown to Jimmy, his mother was killed in Auschwitz concentration camp after being sent there from the Drancy internment camp in France.<ref name="obio"/>
Career
In 1941 Jimmy Ernst became the assistant/secretary to Peggy Guggenheim (who was also his stepmother). Shortly afterwards Ernst became director of The Art of This Century Gallery in 1942.<ref name=":0" /> A year later he had his first one-person exhibition.
During the late 1940s he became a member of The Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract painters who protested against the Metropolitan Museum of Art's policy towards American painting of the 1940s, and who posed for a famous picture in 1950. Members of the group included: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. These artists are part of the New York School they were referred to as The Irascibles in an article featured in an issue of Life where the infamous Nina Leen photograph <ref>The Irascibles, retrieved October 25th 2008 Template:Webarchive</ref> was published.
In 1951 Jimmy was granted the post of an instructor at Department of Design, Brooklyn College.
In 1969 he moved to East Hampton. He also built a winter home in Florida in 1980.
Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, a Carnegie Foundation grant in 1967, and an honorary degree by the Long Island University (Southampton College) in 1982.<ref name=":0" /> Also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1977, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician.
Personal life
Ernst married Edith Dallas Bauman Brody (known as Dallas), a talent scout for Warner Brothers, on January 3, 1947.<ref>Kuspit, p. 149</ref> They had two children, Amy Louise (1953) and Eric Max (1956),<ref>Kuspit, pp. 150,152</ref> both of whom are artists.Template:Citation needed
His memoir, A Not-So-Still Life, dealing with his youth and early years in the United States, was published shortly before his death in 1984.<ref name="obio"/><ref>Ernst</ref><ref name=":0" />
Dallas Ernst established the Jimmy Ernst Award in memory of her husband. The award of $10,000 is given to a painter or sculptor "whose lifetime contribution to his or her vision has been both consistent and dedicated".<ref name="jea">Template:Cite web</ref> The American Academy of Arts and Letters has presented the award annually since 1990.<ref name="jea"/>
Notes
Further reading
- Template:Cite book
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- C. Bau, A. Dieckhoff, edd., Zwiebelfische: Jimmy Ernst, Gluckstadt - New York (2011. Edition Klaus Raasch) [with DVD]
External links
- Pages with broken file links
- 1920 births
- 1984 deaths
- Painters from Cologne
- 20th-century American painters
- American male painters
- Abstract expressionist artists
- Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
- Emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
- Burials at Green River Cemetery
- Brooklyn College faculty
- 20th-century American male artists
- Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters