An American surrealist artist. She moved to New York in 1935, supporting herself with commercial illustrating jobs, and discovered Dada and Surrealism at MOMA's exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, in 1936. By the early 1940s, she was working on her own surreal paintings while still supporting herself as a commercial artist. She was introduced to the circle of émigré Surrealists whose work was then being shown in a New York gallery, including the German painter Max Ernst, whom she married in 1946, in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, after Ernst's divorce from Peggy Guggenheim. After initially living in the Arizona desert near Sedona, the couple moved to France.

In the mid 1950s her paintings became semi-abstract, with mysterious erotic or violent imagery as if it were enveloped in mist. Since 1965, she also made some sculpture.

After Ernst's death in 1979, she returned to the USA.