“Ambiguous Figures (1 copper plate, 1 zinc plate, 1 rubber cloth…),” circa 1919-20. Collage, gouache, India ink, pencil and painting over a print. Collection Judith and Michael Steinhardt, New York. Copyright 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

As emphasized by Met director Philippe de Montebello, thisfirst major survey of the artist’s career in three decades delvesinto “the full spectrum of Ernst’s work – along with itsinventiveness…[I]t mirrors the extraordinary variety of Ernst’soeuvre and…include[s] some of his most celebrated works from thedifferent periods of his life.”

Born in Bruhl, a small German town near the Rhine River between Bonn and Cologne, Ernst was the son of a devout Catholic and accomplished amateur painter who taught at a school for the deaf and dumb. Young Ernst, an avid reader, studied art history, literature, philosophy and psychology at the University of Bonn. He took an early interest in psychoanalysis.

Ernst taught himself to paint, and after three years in the German army during World War I, he applied his intelligence and imagination to canvases in the Expressionist style.

Then he came under the spell of the dreamlike, empty cityscapes filled with mysterious shadows and sleeping statues of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. These mysterious, melancholy images helped shape Ernst’s artistic development. His early works were also rooted in the late Gothic fantasy art of Bosch and Dürer.

In 1919, “inspired by de Chirico’s strange juxtapositions,” writes curator Rewald in the exhibition catalog, Ernst “created his first collages, in which he combined the most mundane and banal materials to the most magical, fantastic and surprising new effect.” Using cutouts from novels, mail-order catalogs and botanical and scientific journals, he achieved astounding results.

Among Ernst’s notable early images is the aptly named “Ambiguous Figures (1 copper plate, 1 zinc plate, 1 rubber cloth…)” circa 1919-20, a collage incorporating gouache, India ink, pencil and painting over a print.

Ernst became an enthusiastic leader of the Dada group in Cologne. That movement, launched in Zurich in 1916 by sculptor Hans (Jean) Arp and others, set out to destroy a seemingly bankrupt social and moral order that had led to the horrendous slaughter of World War I. They aimed, moreover, to wreck all forms of traditional art by a systematic appeal to the arbitrary and the absurd. Reflecting their antirational stance, the founders chose the name “dada” (French for a children’s hobbyhorse) at random from a dictionary.

Ernst’s breakthrough collages, featuring found objects assembled in unusual compositions, attracted the attention of French writers André Breton and Paul Éluard in Paris, who sensed in these works a resonance with their experiments in poetry.

In 1921, Breton, Dada’s major theorist and leader, organized a well-received exhibition of Ernst’s collages in Paris. His reputation on the rise, the next year, at the age of 31, Ernst left his wife and young son and moved to Paris. He never lived or worked again in Germany. By this time Ernst had created the basis for much of what became the Surrealist vocabulary.

The famous pre-Surrealist paintings that Ernst executed between 1921 and 1923 signaled an evolution from Dada to Surrealism. They are among the high points of the exhibition.

Created first in Cologne and then in Paris, these precisely delineated works, with their strange and troubling imagery, probe the world of the subconscious in ways that are dreamy, threatening, often funny – and consistently inexplicable. As curator Spies puts it, these were “deliberately shocking monumental pictures – the puzzle pictures of the century. Their incomprehensibility was intentional; they were meant to foil all attempts at reasonable interpretation.”

Perhaps most memorable is “Celebes,” 1921, a large, enigmatic oil in which a boiler-bodied monster stands on a vast plain against a cloudy sky, gazing at a headless female nude. “Despite the sinister warning of a smoky emission, fish flying in the sky and an enormous pair of tusks protruding from the opposite end of the beast…a seductive but headless female nude beckons whatever may come from Ernst’s Gothic fantasy,” art historians Sam Hunter and John Jacobus have written. It is a decidedly weird image.

“Oedipus Rex,” 1922, shows large male fingers, pierced by a mechanical device, emerging through an open square in a brick structure; they balance above the heads of the two trapped, birdlike creatures. This “jarring image,” writes Spies, “alludes to Nietzsche’s nutcracker of the soul.”

Other sizable works of this period are rife with menace and unfathomable imagery. In “Ubu Imperator,” 1923, an anthropomorphic top spins in an expansive empty landscape, capturing early on the Surrealist notion of estrangement.

These works, writes Rewald, “reveal the painter’s erudition, vast knowledge culled from voracious reading, familiarity with myth and Freudian theories, and sharp, often acid wit.” To this day they perplex and challenge viewers.

In 1924, sensing that Dada had run its course, Breton wrote the “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” seeking to ignite a new movement that would be more provocative and visionary. It would, over the long run, he hoped, undo civilization’s insistence on self-control as the guiding principle for society. Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, dreams, irrationality, fantasy and sexuality were important elements in Surrealist dogma.

By the mid-1920s, Ernst was a full participant in the Surrealist movement. “The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E. and the Artist,” a 1926 oil painting, shows a muscular Virgin spanking the infant Jesus, while Breton, Éluard and Ernst look on. Viewers found this large picture scandalous. It was denounced by Ernst’s own father and the archbishop of Cologne, who had the exhibition in which it was shown closed down. Today, this “blasphemous narrative,” says Rewald, is among the “icons of Surrealism.”

In the 1920s, Ernst began to make drawings he called “frottage” (from the French verb meaning to rub) in which he placed a piece of paper on a textured surface and rubbed over it with a pencil. “The resulting image,” according to art historians H.H. Arnason and Marla Prather, “was largely a consequence of the laws of chance, but the transposed textures were consciously reorganized in contexts, and new and unforeseen associations were aroused.”

Applying frottage to painting – what he termed “grottage” – resulted in the strange birds, idiosyncratic figures and ghoulish animals that populate Ernst’s “Histoire Naturelle” series.

By the late 1920s, Ernst’s art displayed increasingly ominous moods, suggesting premonitions of the conflagration that would engulf Europe in the next decade. Starting in 1933, Ernst’s work often featured images of cataclysm, prompted by the rise of fascism in Spain, Germany and Italy. Paintings such as “Europe after the Rain,” 1933, were condemned by the Nazis.

“Fireside Angel,” 1937, fantastic, frenetic and downright scary, was a direct reaction to the menacing threat of fascism.

Around 1940, Ernst started using the technique “decalcomania,” in which he pressed various materials against the surface of a still-wet painting, then pulling them away, leaving abstract patterns suggesting such things as trees, rocks and shrubs. An example of this approach is “The Robing of the Bride,” 1940.

When the war started in 1939, Ernst was interned in France as an enemy alien and rearrested by the Germans in 1940. In July 1941, he escaped to New York in the company of flamboyant heiress/art collector Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married in December. (They divorced two years later.)

Ernst was already well-known in New York for a solo gallery show in the early 1930s and a large number of works in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Fantastic Art: Dada and Surrealism” exhibition in 1936. He joined an émigré Surrealist colony that included Breton, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson and Yves Tanguy. During their brief stays, these European artists had a great impact on American art, helping to stimulate Abstract Expressionism, among other things.

Ernst was featured in gallery shows and was the subject of many articles soon after his arrival in this country. Over the next dozen years he created a characteristically diverse body of work.

A painting finished in America, “Surrealism and Painting,” 1942, depicts a birdlike beast made of smoothly rounded sections of human anatomy, serpents’ and birds’ heads. “The monster, painted in delicate hues, is composing an abstract painting, perhaps ‘automatically,'” Arnason and Prather point out. Measuring a whopping 77 by 92 inches, it is owned by The Menil Collection in Houston.

In 1946, Ernst and American Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning moved to Sedona, Ariz., where they built a house set against a backdrop of sandstone buttes that blaze red in the sun. Ernst felt he had discovered his artistic and spiritual home in this Southwestern setting. “There I found the old familiar landscape that had continually been in my mind’s eye, and which has repeatedly appeared in my paintings, too,” he said. He and Tanning spent a seven-year idyll in Sedona, painting, sculpting and touring around.

Ernst’s large (60 by 7915/16 inches) and complex “Vox Angelica,” 1943, evoking the life he left behind with the onset of the war, is considered a manifesto on European art in exile. “[T]he various motifs are concise allusions to homelessness and exile,” says Spies, who calls the painting “one of the most important works of the 1940s.” The artist’s association with this poignant memory picture is underscored by the word “Max” in the lower right corner.

Among the works created in America filled with memories and foreboding is “Europe After the Rain 11,” 1940-42. This compelling 211/2-by-581/8 -inch oil, painted with the decalcomania technique, reflects Ernst’s antipathy toward fascism and what it was doing to Europe. This masterwork, with its decaying landscape, has been described as a “requiem for a war-ravaged continent.” It is in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Ernst became a US citizen in 1948, but, with Tanning, he returned to live permanently in France in 1953. In 1958, he became a French citizen.

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“Oedipus Rex,” 1922. Oil on canvas, private collection. Copyright 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

ne of his most interesting late works is “The Garden ofFrance,” 1962, which depicts the lower half of a woman’s bodywedged between “La Loire” and “La Indie.” It is, as always, apowerful, enigmatic image.

Ernst died in France in 1976, just short of his 85th birthday.

The Max Ernst Museum, dedicated to his life and work, has recently opened in his hometown, Bruhl, Germany.

“Max Ernst: A Retrospective” does justice to the large and complex oeuvre in many media of this prolific and complex artist. It offers food for thought to viewers, and provides fresh stimulation for adventurous artists.

The exhibition catalog, published by the Metropolitan Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, was edited by organizing curators Spies and Rewald. It contains contributions by them, as well as art historians Ludger Derenthal, Thomas Gaehtgens, Pepe Karmel and Robert Storr. It seeks to shed new light on diverse aspects of Ernst’s life and work, including his influence on contemporary art.

The Met is offering a variety of educational programs, including lectures and gallery talks, in conjunction with the run of exhibition, ending July 10.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, 212-535-7710 or www.metmuseum.org.