Jimmy Ernst (1920–1984)

Hans-Ulrich Ernst, known as Jimmy, was born to a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany, the son of Max Ernst, the Surrealist and Dada painter, and his first wife Luise Straus, a well-known art historian and journalist. His parents divorced when Jimmy was two years old, and he remained with his mother in Germany while his father moved to Paris. Visiting his father in 1930, he met many artists in his circle, including Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and Leonora Carrington. When the Nazi regime rose to power in Germany in early 1933, his mother was a marked woman, and she fled to Paris. Jimmy went to live with his maternal grandparents. He apprenticed at a printing company owned by Hans Augustin, who in June 1938 got him a visa and passage to the USA. Jimmy settled in New York City, where he met many other European émigrés and the city's avant-garde. In 1940, he petitioned the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to obtain his father's release from Nazi-occupied France. With the help of American journalist Varian Fry and philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst escaped France and arrived in New York City in 1941. In 1944, Luise Straus was deported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, where she was killed. Jimmy only learned of her fate years later. He worked in the Museum of Modern Art’s film library, and eventually became a well-known painter himself whose work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. From 1951, he taught in the Department of Design at Brooklyn College. He published his autobiography, A Not So Still Life, shortly before his death in 1984.