Jimmy Ernst - Early Life

Early Life

Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus, a well-known art historian and journalist. His parents divorced in 1922 and Ernst staying with his mother in Cologne. He visited his father in France in 1930, where he met many artists, including Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy. In February 1933, a month after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the SS searched Luise Straus' apartment. As a noted intellectual and a Jew she was regarded as suspect by the new regime. Ernst was sent to live with his grandfather, Luise's father, while his mother moved to Paris. In June 1938, Jimmy sailed to New York from Le Havre on the liner SS Manhattan.

There he met many European exiles and the city's avant-garde. In 1940, he petitioned the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to secure the release of his father from internment. The ERC secured his release in 1941 and Max Ernst arrived in New York from Nazi occupied France. In 1944, unknown to Jimmy, his mother was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp from Drancy, a detention camp near Paris. She did not survive.