Werner Spies was born in Tuebingen in 1937, and since 1975 he has been a professor of 20th century art at the D sseldorf Art Academy. He was head of the MusEe National de l'Art Moderne at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris from 1997-2000. Spies has gained international recognition as a critic and essayist, authoring several seminal works on 20th-century art in addition to editing a catalogue raisonnE of the works of Max Ernst.

The relevance of the art of Max Ernst (1891-1976) has boomed again in recent years, as a younger generation of painters takes inspiration from his hallucinated image horde and embraces his example as an artist devoted to self-renewal and the realms of the fantastical. Rock musicians and writers as diverse as Mission of Burma, Thurston Moore and J.G. Ballard have also drawn fruitfully on his achievements. Ernst's German Romantic iconography, reconceived in the Surrealist looking glass, is endlessly suggestive and generative: nighttime forests, caves and cliffs, dead moonlight, spectral faces and figures all populate his scenarios, and his ongoing relevance is further assured by his combination of this iconography with techniques such as collage, frottage, grattage and decalcomania, several of which were his own innovations. Max Ernst: Dream and Revolution assesses the entirety of this unique career.