Edgar Ende

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Edgar Karl Alfons Ende (February 23, 1901- December 27, 1965) was a German surrealist painter, father of the children's novelist Michael Ende.

Ende attended the Altona School of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1920, and in 1922 he married Gertrude Strunck, a marriage which was to last only four years. He remarried in 1929 and his son Michael was born the same year. Although in the 1930s Ende's paintings received increasing international attention, they were condemned as degenerate by the Nazi government, and he was banned from painting or exhibiting his work in 1936. In 1940 he was conscripted into the German army as an operator of anti-aircraft artillery.

Although the majority of his pre-war paintings were destroyed by a bomb raid on Munich in 1944 Ende continued to paint in the same surrealistic style until his death in 1965 of a myocardial infarction.

Edgar Ende's paintings are thought to have had a significant influence on his son's writing. This is inferred in the scenes depicting the surreal dream-paintings from Yor's Minroud in Die Unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story), and made explicit in Michael Ende's book Der Spiegel im Spiegel (The Mirror in the Mirror), which is a collection of short stories based on (and printed alongside) Edgar Ende's surrealist works.