Birth of an Idea (Primary Title)
Jimmy Ernst, American, 1920 - 1984 (Artist)
"It’s the mystery that I as a painter am anxious" to crystallize. —Jimmy Ernst
The son of famous Surrealist artist Max Ernst and art historian Louise Straus-Ernst, Jimmy Ernst grew up immersed in Dada and Surrealist art. While he acknowledged this important influence when he began his own art career in the early 1940s, he ultimately identified with a younger generation of American artists. He also became absorbed with the scientific advances of the mid-20th century and sought to translate concepts such as atomic theory into an aesthetic structures. Unlike most of his colleagues, he did not use broad or quick painterly gestures. He did, however, employ methods that allowed for spontaneity, such as blowing paint with a straw tocreate fine, intricate webs of lines. A close friend, author Kurt Vonnegut, described the surface of one of his paintings as being “executed so meticulously that the paint might have been laid on by a jeweler using a magnifying glass.”
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