Birth of a master of anti-capitalist, surreal works

April 3, On This Day

Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet Max Ernst was a primary pioneer of Dadaism, and surrealism.

Born on April 2, 1891 the prolific artist had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude led him to invent both frottage and grattage — while the former technique uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images, the latter involves paint scraped across canvas to reveal imprints of objects placed beneath.