Max Ernst, the Surrealist artist, who was conspicuous even before World War I for his exceptional gifts and his power to startle and provoke, died in Paris yesterday. He would have been 85 years old today. Ernst was prominent in the Dada movement as well as in the Surrealist movement; he made his mark as painter, sculptor, writer and maker of enigmatic objects. But above all he functioned as a source of imaginative energy and as a witness to the evolution of the century. He was an indispensable observer, but he was also an indispensable participator: a one- man early-warning system who over and over again suggested that Europe was in a bad way and likely to get worse. His importance was not so much that he made covetable works of art--though he did indeed do that, and in great numbers--but that, as much as Sigmund Freud or Franz Kafka, he was a part of his time. Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in the little town of Bruhe, near Cologne, Germany. His father, Phillpp Ernst, was a schoolmaster who taught the deaf. He was also a stern disciplinarian, something of a mystic and a particularly pedestrian Sunday painter. Max Ernst was brought up in the strictest Roman Catholic tradition, but his inquiring and insubordinate nature soon brought him into conflict with his family, his school and his church. Deciding that small-town thoughts and small-town ways were not for him, he became a precocious student both of Nietzsche and of Freud, whose "Interpretation of Dreams" came out while Max Ernst was in high school. He also concerned himself with abnormal psychology and in particular with the artistic achievement of mental patients, which were then beginning to be investigated. Good Judge of Talent He traveled as and when he could from the age of 15, visiting museums, painting and drawing from nature, discovering a kinship with the early German painters who could be seen, then as now, in the museum in Cologne. By the time he entered the University of Bonn in the winter of 1908-9 he had read all the new books and seen many of the new paintings that were setting the tone for the 20th-century in Europe. He learned fast, and he was a very good judge of talent in others. He soon came to know the "Young Rhineland" group, which included Franz Marc and August Macke, both of whom made a considerable mark as painters before being killed in the first weeks of World War I. He was one of the young Germans who met the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the French painter Robert Delaunay when they visited the Rhineland in 1913. This confirmed him in the belief that Paris was the city in which he most wanted to live. Meanwhile, he showed his work in the First German Autumn Salon in Berlin in 1913; his fellow exhibitors included Paul Klee, Marc Chagall and members of the Italian Futurist group. He got to Paris briefly in 1913, but any plans for a longer sojourn were confounded in August 1914 by the outbreak of World War I. Ernst served throughout the war in the German Army, partly in France and partly in what is now Poland. He was a reluctant but apparently invulnerable soldier whose immunity to even the heaviest blow on the head was such that his comrades nicknamed him "the man with the iron skull." He managed to go on painting, and in 1916 he again showed his paintings in Berlin; on that occasion he made the acquaintance of George Grosz. Through his contacts in the art world he knew of the Dada movement, which had begun in New York and Zurich and eventually made its way to Cologne, Hanover, Berlin and Paris. One of its co-founders, Jean Arp, had been a friend of his since 1914; and when Ernst was discharged from the Army in 1918 and made his way back to Cologne, it turned out that he and Arp were of one mind about the state of the world and the state of art. "We young people came back from the war," he said later, "in a state of stupefaction at the absurdity, the total swinishness and imbecility of what had gone on for four years. We had to get back somehow at the 'civilization' which was responsible for the war." Magic in His Fingers Ernst was ideally suited to the provocative and wholly unexpected methods of the Dada movement. Like its other progenitors--Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters and Arp--he took it for granted that the physical life of what he produced might be short. Using whatever materials lay at hand--old engravings, objects found in the street, news photographs--he turned out to have magic in his fingers' ends. (It was a magic that was still in full operation nearly 60 years later). He wanted to restate the claims of the imagination at a time when Europe had ground to a halt and every single one of the beliefs on which the prewar world had been founded had proved to be false. Dada in Cologne was a matter of intense exasperation both to the British army of occupation and to the German police. Ernst was delighted when the police closed the Cologne Dada exhibition, and even more delighted when they came to him a few days later and said: "Would you mind opening up again? Having to shut it down has given the police such a bad name." Not long after his return to Cologne he married Louise Strauss, an art historian, and in 1920 his son, Jimmy, was born. (Jimmy Ernst has for many years been well known in New York as a painter). The circumstances of Max Ernst's life did not, however, favor a settled domesticity. He was determined to get to Paris, where he already had a certain reputation with Andre Breton, the future author of the "Surrealist Manifestoes," and with Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dadaism. His first Paris exhibition was held at the Galerie au Sans Pareil in 1921; it consisted of collages that he had mailed in a brown paper parcel, and it established him immediately as an artist conspicuous for his nimble wit, his seemingly unlimited powers of invention and his dazzling way with the French language. Known for 'Celebes' During the summer of 1921 Ernst's links with France were further consolidated by his meeting with the poet Paul Eluard, who thereafter became one of his closest friends. In 1922 he entered France illegally and set up house with Eluard and his wife, Gala (later to become Mrs. Salvador Dali). Before long he became known for such monumental paintings as "The Elephant Celebes" (now in the Tate Gallery in London), "Oedipus Rex" and "Ubu Imperator." These combined solid craftsmanship with imagery that has never lost its power to disturb. But the notion of settling down as a man who kept office hours, painted regularly for an annual exhibition and, in general, fitted into the traditional patterns of the art world was abhorrent to Ernst in the mid-1920's as it had been immediately after his discharge from the Army. He acted by instinct and on impulse. In 1924, for instance, he sold his entire output to a dealer in Dusseldorf and set out for the Far East to join Eluard on what seemed to their friends to have been an unmotivated escapade. Unfettered Imagination By the time he returned to Paris in October 1924, Breton had published his "First Surrealist Manifesto." The role of the unconscious in art had been formulated in terms not altogether unlike those that Ernst might have formulated for himself as a student before 1914; and he himself was regarded as one of the principal ornaments of the Surrealist movement. He continued to invent new ways of making and combining images, some of them calculated, others involuntary. He aimed at all times to keep his imagination unfettered; and for that the procedures of traditional painting in oils often seemed to him too slow, too labored, too lacking in spontaneity. It was for this reason that so many of his most memorable achievements were owed to techniques of a freakish or idiosyneratic sort. Rubbing on wood, cutting with a sharp pair of scissors, importing ready-made elements like the ones used in the "Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale," which is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he kept expectation at bay. In his art he was a born solitary, even if at times he drew close to friends like Arp and Joan Miro or was delighted to join with Eluard in publishing a book of poems in which it is very difficult to tell which lines were owed to which hand. In the Surrealist Group, over which Breton ruled as an absolute autocrat, he was an irreducible renagade to whom the very name of discipline was odious. It was not surprising that in 1926 he fell afoul of Breton for having made stage designs (with Miro) for a Diaghilev ballet called "Romeo and Juliet." There ensued between Ernst and Breton a hostility that continued until the day Breton died. It was in 1927 that Ernst began on the great series of premonitory images that were in effect a portrait of the Europe that was to come. In "The Horde," he showed a demonic army on the march. In "A Vision Inspired by the Porte St. Denis at Night," he showed for the first but by no means the last time a great city shuttered and shattered. Disquiets of a more intimate sort were hinted at in painting after painting. (After his divorce from his first wife Ernst, in 1927, married Marie-Berthe Aurenche; but it was not until his long and happy third marriage to the American painter Dorothea Tanning that he ceased to take the gloomiest possible view of the conjugal tie). In 1929, Ernst published what he called his "collage-novel," "La Femme 100 Tetas." Like its successor, "Une Semaine de Bonte" (1934), this was made up primarily of altered engravings: plates from 19th-century pulp novels, magazines of adventure or manuals of technical instruction he recombined in ways that could never be predicted. Taken together, these two books form an encyclopedia of our century's anxieties; and one astonishing for its resource, its fiendish wit and its rare moments of lyrical repose. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power in Germany, Ernst painted "The Petrified City," in which an unnamed acropolis is seen to have been turned to stone in the aftermath of an unidentified catastrophe. Paintings like "The Barbarians March West" (1935) and "The Angel of Hearth and Home" (1937) left the spectator in no doubt that Ernst considered both society in general and the institution of domesticity to be in the worst possible way. The war dance of the supposed angel in "The Angel of Hearth and Home" is indeed one of the most sinister images in modern painting. Moved to Avignon Ernst had been singled out for disfavor among the Nazis ever since 1933, when he made it quite clear in "Europe After the Rain I" that in his view Europe was threatened by a calamity that could be likened to a great flood tide of filth. All Nature was poisoned for him by the changes that he saw in mankind. But instinct led him even at the worst of times to build an ark for himself; and in 1938 he moved with the painter Leonora Carrington to a house not far from Avignon, France, which he set himself to restore and decorate as if he would be living there forever. With the outbreak of World War II he found himself, on the contrary, in trouble with the French, who interned him as an enemy alien. When the German armies forced the French to surrender, it became a matter of life and death for him to escape from France. Few men could be more difficult to imprison, but even after repeated escapes it was as much as he could do to make his way, with the help of his son, Jimmy, and other Americans, to the United States. In 1941, he arrived in New York with Peggy Guggenheim, who eventually became his fourth wife. He had his first show in New York at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, and in 1936 Alfred Barr included him in the "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Though not unknown, therefore, he found it difficult to make a living by his work in the United States during World War II. Once again he decided to make himself an ark: this time in Sedona, Ariz., which he first visited in 1943. It was during that year that he painted the large picture called "Vox Angelica," which is in effect a pictorial autobiography divided into well-judged compartments. Unlike many Europeans who came to the United States as exiles at that time, Ernst took an enormous delight in the landscape, the speech habits and the imaginative traditions of the United States. What he did not so much care for--and what never ceased to rouse him to a fine fury of imprecation--was the accusation of "moral turpitude" that came his way when his tempestuous private life finally came to an idyllic culmination in the company of the young painter Dorothea Tanning. This accusation was silenced when he and Miss Tanning were married in 1946, but it never ceased to rankle him that it should ever have been leveled. Arizona and the Colorado River were a source of unending pleasure to Ernst, as were the films of W. C. Fields and his new wife's natural gaiety of spirit and freedom of speech. But fundamentally he was still a European, and once World War II was over, he began to think of returning to France. A first postwar visit to Paris in 1950 was the occasion of heartwarming re-encounters with Arp, Eluard, Tzara, Alberto Giacometti and others. But in practical terms it was not quite so successful, since Ernst even at the age of 59 had nothing like the reputation he deserved. He was, indeed, the last of the old masters of modern art to be given his due. But when he was awarded the grand prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1954, public feeling at last began to swing his way; and over the next 20 years his reputation mounted steadily and without interruption. He was, almost to the end of his life, a terrific worker. Nothing stopped him. If his doctor was worried about his heart, Ernst took the cardiogram and used it as an ingredient in a picture. If his doctor told him to stop working altogether, Ernst took off his painting overalls and used them too as an ingredient in a picture. If illness came his way, he bore it with a Roman stoicism. He had all the honors that he cared to accept in the 1960's and 70's. All the exhibitions, also. (The last great Ernst show was one that began at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1975 and later moved to the Grand Palais in Paris). To those who met him at those times it seemed as if fame had long ago taken him by one hand and fortune by the other. But it had not been so: for him to survive at all had needed a heart of iron and a nature of steel. The late work lent itself even so to a euphoric interpretation. It had an enforced gaiety, a freshness and a felicity of invention that rarely failed him even when the demands for new work came in at a rate that would have daunted a man half his age. There was still magic in his fingers' ends, just as he had the same command of language, the same upright and fiery stance before life and the same spectacularly fine looks that had astonished his new friends in France more than 50 years earlier. He carried himself to the end as what he was: the only one of his kind.