American Art Collaborative

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