Jimmy Ernst

Jimmy Ernst (1920-1984) was a German-born American painter whose distinctive linear abstractions established him as one of the more independent voices within the first generation of the New York School. Born Ulrich Ernst in Brühl, Germany, he was the son of the great Surrealist Max Ernst and the Jewish art historian Luise Straus-Ernst, a lineage that placed him from the very beginning at the heart of European modernism. His parents divorced in his childhood, and his mother would tragically die in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, a loss that shaped Ernst's life and thought profoundly.

Ernst fled Nazi Germany and arrived in New York in 1938 at the age of eighteen. Largely self-taught as a painter, he began his artistic life in America by working as an office boy at the Museum of Modern Art, where his intimate exposure to the world's greatest modernist collection accelerated his own artistic development. He was quickly drawn into the emerging community of American and European artists who would come to define the New York School, and his early work reflected the crosscurrents of Surrealism, Cubism, and the newly emerging vocabularies of American abstraction.

Ernst developed a distinctive personal style characterized by intricate calligraphic lines, delicate architectural structures, and jewel-like passages of color, producing pictures that stood apart from the more overtly gestural work of many of his New York contemporaries. He was among the "Irascibles" who signed the 1950 open letter protesting the Metropolitan Museum's conservative approach to contemporary American painting. His paintings are held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and other major American collections. Ernst also wrote the acclaimed memoir A Not-So-Still Life, an intimate account of his family and the century of art through which he lived.