Une semaine de bonté

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Une semaine de bonté
Max Ernst , 1934
Collage novel (covers of the five booklets)
Éditions Jeanne Bucher, Paris

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Une semaine de bonté ou Les septs éléments capitaux is the third and last collage novel by the surrealist artist Max Ernst from 1934. It was published in the Éditions Jeanne Bucher in a numbered edition of 816 copies, 800 of which were printed on “papier Navarre” in Paris released. It comprises five booklets with a total of 182 collages. The first collage novel La femme 100 têtes appeared at the end of 1929 with a foreword by André Breton . In 1930 Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel followed . The extensive artist's book is considered a key work by the artist.

Planning and creation

Max Ernst had planned the book as a silent one, without accompanying texts - a visual novel without words. His book A l'interieur de la vue. 8 poèmes visibles from 1931/32 had demonstrated how a recognizable separation into sections without text is possible within individual chapters by putting together similar motifs, as if Ernst wanted to reintroduce the magic of silent film that had been supplanted by talkies at the time.

Max Ernst was inspired by the wood engravings in popular magazines of the late 19th century, as well as by artists such as Max Klinger and Gustave Doré , whose pictures he used to create absurdly fantastic visual visions that revolve around jealousy, murder and death. The pictures were taken in 1933 during Max Ernst's stay in Vigoleno (Northern Italy). He cut out the motifs that interested him and put them back together as collages . The choice of title alludes to the story of creation. The title also refers to the social institution "The Week of Goodness" founded in 1927, which was supposed to promote charitable purposes. Essential elements of the collages go back to the posters of the establishment. The five volumes appeared between April and December 1934 with the cover colors purple, green, red, blue and yellow.

According to Werner Spies , author of numerous publications about Max Ernst's work, the artist said that the papers spoke of his premonition of the disaster of Hitler's Germany and what was to come over Europe.

structure

The collage novel Une semaine de bonté is divided into seven elements: mud, water, fire, blood, the black, seeing and the unknown as well as a recurring mask that makes the days of the week that are illustrated recognizable. An additional separation is given by the five individual issues of the edition. Of the initially seven books planned, the two other works of the planned 184 illustrations were left out due to lack of success.

Une semaine de bonté
Max Ernst , 1934
Collage novel (picture example Le lion de Belfort)
Éditions Jeanne Bucher, Paris

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

First issue. Sunday. Element: mud. Image example: Le lion de Belfort ( The Lion of Belfort ) (purple envelope)

Sunday is identical to the clerical color purple .
Ernst does not follow the chronology of the creation story and begins his week on Sunday, which contrasts provocatively with the Creator's day of rest. This chapter shows different milieus to explore the relationship between the sexes. The focus is on persecution, theft, seduction, torture, punishment, murder and disaster. A recurring figure is the man with the lion's head as a symbol of power; the hybrid , decorated with medals and awards , alternately stands for social, public and religious authority.

Second issue. Monday. Element: water. Sample image: L'eau ( The Water ) (Green envelope)

Monday is identical to water and green .
The power of nature is dedicated to Monday. The water destroys bridges, floods the streets of Paris, invades bedrooms and homes and kills many people. Here the woman is queen.

Third booklet. Tuesday. Element: the fire. Image example: La cour du Dragon ( The Dragon Court ) (Red envelope)

Tuesday is identical to fire and dragons. Fire breathing dragons and red .
Beginning in the “court of the dragon” in Paris, the story continues and takes place in the world of the upper class. Dragons and snakes associate with people who are themselves provided with dragon, bat or even angel wings. The fire of passions - an element that counteracts the element of water - leads to tragedies symbolized with attributes or animals suffocating in bourgeois hell. Surreal motifs that appear on the walls and doors represent dreams, fears and suppressed needs of the bourgeoisie.

Fourth issue. Wednesday. Element: the blood. Image example: Œdipe ( Oedipus ) (blue envelope)

Wednesday is identical to Oedipus , blue , the blood of the king's son.
The collages tell the story of Oedipus, who is represented by a bird's head. They tell of the parricide and the riddle of the Sphinx, as well as his foot injury caused by his parents. He is taken in and adopted by Polybos , King of Corinth. Because of his swollen feet, he was given the name Oedipus. In Max Ernst's work, the injury scene is the result of a surrealistic implementation, in which a bird man pierces the foot of a naked woman with a dagger.

Fifth issue. Thursday Friday Saturday. (Yellow envelope)
Thursday. Element: the black. Picture example 1: Le rire du coq ( The cock crows ); Image example 2: L'ile de Pàques ( Easter Island )

The element black goes with the rooster laughing, which extends the night of the “roman noir” and black goes with the Easter Islands and their unexplained mystery.
The Gallic rooster symbolizes the French state in the first episode. In the second episode, the heads of the horrors that have been seen so far are transformed into stone idols on Easter Island.

Friday. Element: seeing. Image example: L'intérieur de la vue ( The inner face, three visual poems )

The scenes from the previous collages are now followed by emblematic images. Max Ernst uses a technique here that he used above all at the beginning of his career: the "synthetic collage". These compositions consist of heterogeneous elements arranged on a white sheet. To connect them together, the artist completes the spaces with ink or pencil. In general, a scene is created that is reminiscent of a wide landscape.

Saturday. Element: Unknown. Image example: Le clé des chants ( The key of the songs and, thanks to homonymy, freedom, the outbreak )

Yellow , the color of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, could refer to the inner face, to the “sun-like” eye.
Women in a trance state leave their bed and bedroom to fly away. Using these figures, Max Ernst expresses his surrealist fascination for hysteria , a liberating and inspiring disease: “Long live [...] the hysteria and its escort of young, naked women who slide along the roofs. The problem of women in this world is everything that is beautiful and restless. ”(André Breton: Manifestes du surréalisme ( Manifesto of Surrealism ), Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962).

interpretation

The sentence, often quoted by the surrealists, "As beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissection table" comes from the songs of Maldoror (1868/69) by Lautréamont . Max Ernst spoke of the “systematic exploitation of the accidental or artificially provoked meeting of two or more alien realities on an apparently unsuitable level”.

In art history in particular, the prevailing view is that the collage novels cannot be analyzed and interpreted. Werner Spies speaks of "mysteriousness" and "hermetic presence", even of "sense anarchy" in connection with the collage. Spies therefore considers Max Ernst's works, including the collage novels, to be “unexplainable” and “inexplicable” - in the sense of not being interpretable.

Holger Lund analyzes the collage novels in connection with the story of the novel, the collage and the picture narratives. He takes the view that although they represent an attack on the narrative order, in addition to incoherence-creating processes, narrative, cyclical and associatively closely related sequences can be identified. Parody and criticism thus get a precisely definable thrust: the bourgeois world, the Christian religion, sexual morality and the arts.

Exhibitions

The original collages of the work Une semaine de bonté were shown for the first time in March 1936 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Madrid. Only in 2008/09 did exhibitions follow in the Albertina in Vienna, then in the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl and in the Hamburger Kunsthalle .

The work in pop culture and literature

Many collages from Une Semaine de bonté were used in the albums of the American rock group The Mars Volta . Also Barefoot in the Head , a collaboration between guitarist Thurston Moore and saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich Group Borbetomagus used a collage from this book.

The British writer James Graham Ballard was inspired by surrealism and especially by Max Ernst. His title Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown from 1970 was republished in 1992 with illustrations from Une semaine de bonté .

literature

  • Werner Spies (Ed.): Max Ernst. Une semaine de bonté. The original collages . With texts by Werner Spies and Jürgen Pech. Catalog book for the exhibitions in the Albertina, Vienna, in the Max Ernst Museum Brühl / LVR and in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, DuMont, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-8321-9078-1
  • Holger Lund: Attack on the narrative order - Max Ernst's collage novels . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2000, ISBN 3-89528-293-6
  • Max Ernst: Une semaine de bonte. The white week. A picture book of goodness, love and humanity . German edition of two thousand and one , Frankfurt 1975

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Une semaine de bonté ( Memento of February 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), books.simsreed.com, accessed on July 15, 2012
  2. ↑ Werner Spies: Max Ernst. Collages. Inventory and contradiction. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1988, p. 194
  3. ↑ Quoted from the web link Hamburger Kunsthalle
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h The story of creation in five issues ( Memento from December 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), musee-orsay.fr, accessed on July 12, 2012
  5. ↑ Quoted from the Deutschlandradios web link
  6. ↑ a b Werner Spies: Max Ernst. Collages. Inventory and contradiction, Cologne 1988, p. 195
  7. ↑ Uwe M. Schneede: The history of art in the 20th century. From the avant-garde to the present . CH Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-48197-3 , p. 90 f.
  8. ↑ Holger Lund: Attack on the narrative order - Max Ernst's collage novels (PDF; 34 kB), www.holgerlund.de, accessed on July 14, 2011
  9. ↑ Los Angeles Times: Mars Volta , articles.latimes.com, accessed September 28, 2012
  10. ↑ Barefoot In The Head ( Memento of October 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), themodernword.com, accessed on September 28, 2012
  11. ↑ JG Ballard , iath.virginia.edu, accessed on September 28, 2012