Mother and Son (Lou Straus-Ernst with Son Jimmy), 1928
August Sander (German, 1876 - 1964)
"Luise Straus-Ernst, was a Jewish German art historian, writer, journalist, and artist, sometimes using an artistic Dadaist alias, Armada von Duldgedalzen.
She was the first wife of surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst and mother of painter Jimmy Ernst.
Being a Jew, when the Nazis came to power, she emigrated to France in 1933. With the outbreak of World War II she could not emigrate further and found refuge in a hotel in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France, together with a group of other Jewish emigrants. There she wrote her autobiography Nomadengut. The manuscript survived and was published in 2000. On April 28, 1944, she was arrested in a raid and on June 30 deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she was killed on an unknown date." - Wikipedia
"Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of German Surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus-Ernst, a well-known art historian and journalist. His parents separated in 1922 and divorced in 1926 and Ernst remained with his mother in Cologne. He visited his father in France in 1930, where he met many artists, including Luis Buñuel, Salvador DalÃ, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy, as well as his father's lover Leonora Carrington. 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 killed in Auschwitz concentration camp after being sent there from the Drancy internment camp in France." - Wikipedia
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Philadelphia Museum of Art