Artist

Jimmy Ernst

born Cologne, Germany 1920-died New York City 1984
Media - portrait_image_113196.jpg - 90131
Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Born
Cologne, Germany
Died
New York, New York, United States
Active in
  • East Hampton, New York, United States
Biography

The son of Surrealist Max Ernst, Jimmy Ernst attended several European craft schools and served an apprenticeship in printing and typography before immigrating to the United States in 1938. He worked in advertising agencies and art galleries for several years, and not until age twenty did he decide to become a painter. Ernst's early canvases were tinged with Surrealism, and his first solo show featured organic abstractions. His interpretations of jazz themes during the 1940s, in which discrete color areas were used to approximate syncopation and rhythm, yielded in the 1950s to experiments with line that determined his future directions. In his mature work, Ernst used complex inter-locking webs of line to manipulate pictorial space and to create architectonic structures. Always abstract, his later paintings possess the spatial quality of panoramic cityscapes.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)

Works by this artist (2 items)

Myra Tso Kaye, Bean Pot with Ear of Corn Appliqué, 1988, fired clay with piñon pitch, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chuck and Jan Rosenak and museum purchase made possible by Mrs. Gibson Fahnestock, 1997.124.158
Bean Pot with Ear of Corn Appliqué
Date1988
fired clay with piñon pitch
On view
Myra Tso Kaye, Ram Pot, 1992, fired clay with piñon pitch, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chuck and Jan Rosenak and museum purchase made possible by Mrs. Gibson Fahnestock, 1997.124.157
Ram Pot
Date1992
fired clay with piñon pitch
Not on view