"Max Ernst: A Retrospective" The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. April 7-July 10, 2005.(Exhibition notes)

As a maker and manipulator of images, Max Ernst was in a very high class. He did not deal simply in surprises, but in surprises that would never fail in their effect.

At the time of his death in 1976, he had French nationality. But he was throughout his life a consummate European. He was born in Bruhl, near Cologne, in 1891. His schoolteacher father, Philippe Ernst, taught deaf-mute children, but he also loved to paint, and especially to make copies after reproductions of the old masters. But he also had a streak of mischief, which Max Ernst was to have in full measure. In Philippe's copies, unbelievers were given the faces of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, while his own family and friends stood in for saints and angels.

Max was raised in Germany, and studied philosophy and abnormal psychology at the university in Bonn. (He also visited asylums for the mentally ill, where he was fascinated by the art produced by the patients.) While in Bonn, he did some art criticism for a local paper and became friendly with August Macke and Hans Arp, two important artists of their day. It was also to his advantage that he reacted strongly against his father, who was an academic artist and a strong disciplinarian. He himself was trenchant, but light in hand.

The young Max was an engaging character who would have gone to the top of the existing art world in Germany. But his true role in life was to inaugurate and personify a different kind of art world. After World War I, it was vital that the art world should readjust itself, and Max set about that forthwith.

He did not, however, think that art should sever its links with the past. He himself had studied art history in Cologne, and had been to Paris with his teacher and visited Rodin in his studio. In 1916, when he was serving in the German army, he was granted leave to go to Berlin for the opening of his first exhibition. (This was at the Herwarth Walden gallery, the best in Berlin at that time.) In whatever he did, he was as brisk as he was bright. He did not miss the chance to meet George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde, who would be the founders of Berlin Dada.

The aim of Dada was to ridicule the art world that dated back to before 1914 and was abhorrent to the postwar generation. Despising the big-moneyed galleries, with their formal openings and their even more formal patrons, Dada artists decided not only to produce art but to present it.

The name "Dada" was in itself an insult to the many-syllabled idiom that had been adopted by the high end of the German art trade. There would come a time when the Dadaists did not disdain the advances of the mainline art trade, but meanwhile kept their distance from it.