Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of painter Max Ernst and art historian Louise Straus-Ernst. Jimmy's parents divorced in 1922, and he was raised by his mother, with occasional but memorable stays with his father, then living in Paris. From an early age Jimmy was exposed to some of the most influential European arts and literary figures of the 1920s.

Ernst's childhood was subject to the harsh economic political realities of post-World War I Germany, which saw a devastating recession and the rise of the Nazi party. Ernst was very much caught in the wake of these tensions, as his mother was Jewish and his father Catholic. By 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, Louise Straus-Ernst could no longer find work and was forced to immigrate to Paris. She left Jimmy first with her parents, then found him an apprenticeship with a friend, an important printer in Hamburg named Hans Augustin. Augustin would eventually use his influence to secure Jimmy's passage to the United States, in June of 1938.

Jimmy Ernst arrived in New York and eventually found work at the Museum of Modern Art's film department. It was during this lonely time that Ernst began for the first time to paint. Influenced by Hopi Indian ceremonies, jazz music, and the European art that was his personal heritage, Jimmy Ernst brought a unique combination of influences to his canvases that would prove to be harbingers of the New York School.

In 1941, thanks to the Emergency Rescue Committee and Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst obtained a visa and passage to the United States, where he was released into Jimmy's care following a short hearing on Ellis Island. The following year Peggy Guggenheim started her influential gallery Art of This Century, with Jimmy as its director. By this time Max and Peggy had married, and Art of This Century was showcasing the work of many of the Surrealist artists who were similarly exiled in America. Jimmy's personal art career also began to gain traction. One of his paintings was acquired by MoMA, and his work was featured as part of the lectures by Gordon Onslow Ford at the New School, which would prove to provide a crucial link between European Surrealism and what became Abstract Expressionism. In 1943 Ernst had his first solo show at the Norlyst Gallery.

In 1947 Jimmy Ernst married Edith Dallas Brody, and they had two children: Amy in 1953 and Eric in 1956. Ernst became a U.S. citizen in 1952 and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961. While always retaining some elements of the Abstract Surrealism that he had helped to evolve in the 1940s, Ernst's work took on a quiet intimacy that relies on patterning, elaborate detail work, and painterly rigor.

Jimmy Ernst died in 1984, having just published his memoir, A Not-So-Still Life.

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