PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Oneiric visions and erotic fantasies were the stock in trade of the
Surrealists. For artists concerned with the free association of images,
with the meaningful reas-semblage of disparate objects, and with the play
element in art, collage was the quintessentially appropriate technique.
Raised to a significant art form by the Cubists and Futurists, given new
potentialities by the Expressionists in Germany and Russia and the
Dadaists throughout Europe, collage reached its height among the
Surrealists (many of whom had been Dadaists earlier), and Max Ernst is
generally recognized as its greatest exponent.
Born in the Rhineland in 1891 and a self-taught painter, Ernst was
exhibiting in Cologne by 1913, in which year he met Jean Arp, soon to be
one of the founders of Dada in Zurich. In 1919 Ernst became one of the
Cologne representatives of Dada, and in the same year became intrigued
with the images to be found in mail-order catalogues. He moved to Paris in
1922, and before the year was out published two works in collaboration
with the outstanding poet Paul Eluard: Repetitions and Les
malheurs des immortels, the beginning of the series of collage books
that was to culminate in Une semaine de bonte (others were ha
jemme 100 tetes in 1929 and Reve d'une petite fille qui voulut
entrer au Carmel in 1930). In his individual collages Ernst used paint
and the most diverse materials, and the act of pasting was not always a
part of the creation, but in these public." tions he relied solely on
cutting and pasting pictures from old books and catalogues. The printing
process concealed the joins completely, and the results are incredibly
effective.
Une semaine de bonte was finished in three weeks during the
artist's visit with friends in Italy in 1933. The fateful events of that
year in Ernst's homeland, including the Nazis' condemnation of his work,
may account for the mood of catastrophe that pervades this collage
"novel."
The Semaine appeared in five booklets in the course of the year
1934- All five were printed by Georges Duval and published by the Editions
Jeanne Bucher in Paris in a limited edition totaling 828 sets. The first
booklet, "Sunday," in a purple paper cover, bears the acheve d'imprimer
(date on which printing was completed) 15 April; the second, "Monday,"
in a green cover, is dated 16 April; the third, "Tuesday," in a red cover,
is dated 2 July; the fourth, "Wednesday," in a royal blue cover, is also
dated 2 July; the fifth, completing the "Week," in a yellow cover, is
dated 1 December.
In his earliest collage books Ernst generally made up completely new
scenes out of many separate pieces, but for most of Une semaine de
bonte he used complete existing illustrations as base-pictures,
altering them with pasted-on additions. His base-pictures were chiefly the
relatively crude and usually lurid wood-engraved illustrations of French
popular fiction that were plentiful in the books and periodicals of the
late nineteenth century. The subject matter of such literature was torrid
love, torture, crimes passionnels and the subsequent incarcerations
and executions (by guillotine), hatreds and jealousies among the very
wealthy and the very indigent: the inferior spawn of Eugene Sue and Emile
Zola. Ernst made his trip to Italy with a suitcase full of such pages.
The art historian Werner Spies has identified three of the
base-pictures (those for pages 20, 169 and 170) as illustrations from the
1883 novel Les damnees de Paris by Jules Mary. It is also known
that Ernst stopped at Milan on his way to his friends' place in Italy, and
there purchased a Dore volume (said to have been used in the "Cour du
Dragon" sequence). By adroit manipulation of elements in these pictures,
he created a phantasmagoric "novel" that touches secret springs of
laughter and horror.
Ernst's "Week of Kindness" is also a collage of concepts and language.
Instead of the traditional seven deadly sins (peches capitaux), we
have deadly elements {elements capitaux) ; and while two of Ernst's
elements, water and fire, belong to the traditional four, he gives us
seven and includes five unusual ones. The "examples" of the elements also
appear to be quite capricious, but even there we find some subtle
relationships. Each section of the work is preceded by an epigraph from
the writings of a Dadaist or Surrealist (Ernst's friends Arp and Eluard;
Tzara, the co-founder of Dada; Breton) or an adoptive forebear of the
Surrealists (Jarry, nineteenth-century author of Ubu ro'i). In the
present edition, each bit of titling or text is translated into English on
the page following its appearance in French.
As we begin the "Week" (with Sunday), we find that the "example" of the
"element" mud is the Lion of Belfort. This is the name of a patriotic
statue by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi (sculptor of Liberty Enlightening
the World') erected in the town of Belfort in eastern France after the
Franco-Prussian War. Many of the figures in this section of Ernst's
"novel" have the head of a lion. (Ernst's most illustrious predecessor in
the creation of animal-men was the French artist Grandville, 1803—1847,
much revered by the Surrealists.)
On Monday, the watery element pervades every picture, whether the
locale is a bedroom or a city street: an anxiety-dream situation and
perhaps an allusion to Noah's flood.
On Tuesday, large or small dragons (sometimes bats or serpents) are
almost universally present, or else wings sprout from people's backs. The
odd details found within the picture frames on the walls of rooms are also
reminiscent of Grandville. The Cour du Dragon formerly opened off the Rue
du Dragon in Paris (between St. Germain des Pres and St. Sulpice). Ernst's
hosts in Italy had a mediocre "old-master" painting of St. George and the
dragon over their mantelpiece, and during his stay Ernst painted a
replacement for it. It is likely that this dragon inspired those in the
Semaine.
On Wednesday, the "example" of the "element" blood is Oedipus—is this
not because his marriage violated the direst taboo associated with
consanguinity? The Eluard epigraph, with its reference to "mamma," ties in
with the Oedipus legend. The other epigraph is an extract from a
complainte, a type of popular ballad commemorating a notorious crime
or catastrophe. Complaintes, which used to be printed on
broadsheets and chanted by street singers who hawked the sheets, are the
equivalents in verse of the illustrations Ernst was using in Une
semaine de bonte. The leading figures in the pages of this section
have birds' heads; Ernst claimed to have a bird-headed visitant named
Loplop (often portrayed in his work) who made revelations to him. The
Sphinx, also associated with Oedipus, makes a brief guest appearance.
In "The Rooster's Laughter" at least one rooster or rooster-headed
being appears in every picture. The heads of many of the figures in
"Easter Island" are shaped like the stone heads of the idols discovered on
that island in the southeastern Pacific.
The "Three Visible Poems" are the most abstract section of the work and
include some of the most haunting inspirations. The Eluard epigraph to the
"First Visible Poem" could well serve as the motto for the entire book:
"And I object to the love of ready-made images in place of images to be
made." (In 1947 Ernst and Eluard published further "visible poems.")
In "The Key to Songs" the work ends vertiginously with a series of
falling figures.
A book of this sort, appealing equally to the emotions and the
intellect, can be freely interpreted by each reader according to his own
experiences, by the lights of his own mental baggage. No full "reading"
seems ever to have been published, but the psychologist Dieter Wyss, in
his book Der Surrealismus (1950), has provided a strict
post-Freudian analysis of the "Lion of Belfort" section: the lion-headed
figure in its various guises represents a lust for power in the superego;
the woman who (in this interpretation) gradually submits to the lion's
blandishments, sinks into vice and is finally destroyed, is identified as
the "psyche" or "anima"; and the fully human male who undergoes much
suffering and is eventually guillotined, is the psychoanalytic subject or
patient, presumably the artist himself. If Wyss's somewhat casuistical and
simplistic reasoning is not fully convincing, his picture-by-picture
analysis is nevertheless absorbing and abounds in finely observed details.
From its first publication, Une semaine de bonte has been highly
admired, and a stimulus to further creation. Most notably, some of its
plates (particularly pages 49 and 50) inspired Hans Richter's 1946 film
Desire (Ernst also wrote the dialogue and acted in it), released in
1947 as the first part of the avant-garde episode film Dreams That
Money Can Buy.
