Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

Max Ernst's house, located in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche, is an 18th-century farmhouse purchased in 1937 by Leonora Carrington. She lived there with Max Ernst from 1938 until the declaration of war in September 1939. Ernst, arrested because of his German nationality, was interned in Largentière and then in Camp des Milles. Released at the end of 1939 thanks to Paul Éluard's intervention, he was again imprisoned in May 1940. After his arrest, Leonora Carrington remained alone in the house before leaving France in June 1940, leaving the property to be sold by proxy.

During their stay, Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington made surrealist sculptures and paintings in and around the house. The works still visible include a large exterior relief (Loplop) and sculptures such as the Mermaid and the Minotaure. Other elements, such as interior decorations or canvases (Europe after the rain), were detached or sold after the war. The house, classified as a Historic Monument in 1991, remains a unique testimony to their artistic collaboration, although its integrity was partially altered by sales in the 1980s.

The house also illustrates the upheavals of the period: the exile of artists under occupation, arbitrary arrests of foreigners, and the dispersion of works of art. After the war, Max Ernst returned to France to recover some canvases, such as the European rain. Today, the site is not open to the public, but its exterior wall retains visible traces of this creative and tormented period. The house is protected for its role in the history of surrealism and as a place of memory of the Second World War.

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