Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Kindness) A Surrealist Collage Novel By Max Ernst Dover Edition New York 1976 This work is part of a collage novel by surrealist Max Ernst. He uses appropriated images appropriated from the lurid tabloid novels of the time as sources for this work. The practice of appropriation was first practiced by artists in the DADA movement but was taken up by the Surrealists. Surrealism was profoundly influenced by the recently published work of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s Method: Free Association To unpack the various meanings of a dream, take each object, person, situation, etc. and free associate to them, one at a time. What does it remind you of? What comes to mind when you think of that element of the dream? Let your imagination go. Let your attention wander. Come up with as many associations as possible. Do this in your head, or talk out loud. If you let yourself go with this, something will come up - a memory, an idea, a feeling. (You know you are onto something when you experience that AHA!, light bulb-popping experience) Max Ernst Une Semaine de Bonte p. 137 Visual Analysis • Who? • Why? • When? • Where? • What? • How? Who? Max Ernst Ernst was a member of both the Dada and Surrealist art movements. The preface to the Dover edition of Une Semaine de Bonte, describes the surrealist artist as “concerned with the free association of images, with the meaningful reassemblage of disparate objects and with the play element in art.(v)” Self Portrait The punching ball ou l’immortalite de buonarotti AKA dadafex maximus 1920 Collage on photograph and gouache 17.6 x 11.5 cm Why? Ernst began his career as an artist as a member of the DADA movement. Dada developed out of the horrors of World War I. The work of Dada artists, like Ernst and Kurt Scwitters—another artist who worked in collage— represented a political and cultural revolt against the the traditional approaches and social values attributed to the high art culture of Europe. The Dada movement was a precursor to the Surrealist movement which drew on the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud in an attempt to come to terms with the disintegration of European civilization caused by that conflict. Ernst began his career as an artist as a member of the DADA movement and became a surrealist by 1934 when he created this collage Novel. When? Where? Ernst created Une Semaine de Bonte during a three week visit to Italy in 1934. During that year, the Nazis’ condemned Ernst’s work as decadent and that may account for the mood of catastrophe that pervade this collage novel. The work was published in Paris in 1934 as 5 separate booklets just as many graphic novels are published in sections before being collected into book form. What? And How? Une Semaine de Bonte is The individual pages of a visual narrative that is the novel were created constructed using using the collage surrealist imagery such as technique of pasted the bird headed human papers. The images were figures in the section we appropriated from will be examining. These printed engravings that figures are engaged in were used to illustrate various actions to create the melodramatic stories the moments of the in the popular pulp fiction sequence that serves to of the time. develop the story being told. Title Page MAX ERNST A WEEK OF KINDNESS OR THE SEVEN DEADLY ELEMENTS NOVEL FOURTH BOOK WEDNESDAY ELEMENT: BLOOD EXAMPLE: OEDIPUS "Great God, save the earth from ever bearing such monsters. No history has proved that there ever were any such. Through the efforts of the authorities, no one will be exposed to them any longer." (Complainre de Peyrebeille) "It is also called MAMMA by mistake." (Paul Eluard, Exemples) .