Up for auction a RARE! "The Irascible Eighteen" Jimmy Ernst Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1964. 

ES-5448E

Hans-Ulrich

Ernst (June 24, 1920 –

February 6, 1984), known as Jimmy Ernst, was an American painter

born in Germany. Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of Surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus, a well-known art historian

and journalist. His parents divorced in 1922 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 Dalí, 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 sent to Auschwitz concentration camp from Drancy, a detention camp

near Paris. She did not survive. Ernst became director of The Art of This Century Gallery in 1942. A year later he had his first one-person

exhibition. During the late 1940s

he became a member of The Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract painters who

protested against the Metropolitan Museum of Art's

policy towards American painting of

the 1940s, and who posed for a famous picture in 1950. Members of the group

included: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros

Stamos, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. These artists are part of the New York School they

were referred to as The Irascibles in an

article featured in an issue of Life where the infamous Nina Leen photograph was published. In 1951 Jimmy was granted the

post of an instructor at Department of Design, Brooklyn College. In 1969 he moved to East Hampton. He

also built a winter home in Florida in 1980. Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in

1961 and an honorary degree by the Long Island University (Southampton

College) in 1982. Also elected to the American

Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1977, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as

an Associate Academician.