Max Ernst - 182 bizarre, darkly humorous scenes of violent dreams and erotic fantasies: serpents in the living room, aristocrats with the head of a lion, floods inside houses, murderous mutants, and dozens of bared breasts

Max Ernst, Une Semaine De Bonte: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage, Dover Publications, 1976.

"The great surrealist's collage masterpiece was printed in 1934 in a limited edition of five now-priceless pamphlets. This single-volume edition contains all of the original publication's 182 bizarre, darkly humorous scenes of violent dreams and erotic fantasies.

"One of the clandestine classics of our century."— The New York Times

"Une semaine de bonté ("A Week of Kindness") is a graphic novel and artist's book by Max Ernst, first published in 1934. It comprises 182 images created by cutting up and re-organizing illustrations from Victorian encyclopedias and novels.

Une semaine de bonté comprises 182 images created by cutting up and re-organizing illustrations from Victorian novels, encyclopedias, and other books. Ernst arranged the images to present a dark, surreal world. Most of the seven sections have a distinct theme that unites the images within. In Sunday the element is mud, and Ernst's example for this element is the Lion of Belfort; consequently, this section features numerous characters with lion heads. The element of the next section, Monday, is water, and all of the images show water, either in a natural setting, or flowing inside bedrooms, dining rooms, etc. Some of the characters are able to walk on water, while others drown. The element associated with Tuesday is fire, and so most of the images in this section feature dragons or fantastic lizards. The last of the large sections, Wednesday, contains numerous images of bird-men.The element of Thursday, "blackness", has two examples instead of one. The first example, "a rooster's laughter", is illustrated with more images of bird-men. The second example, Easter island, is illustrated with images portraying characters with Moai heads. Friday, the most abstract part of the entire book, contains various images that resist categorization. They include collages of human bones and plants, one of which was used for the cardboard slipcase that was meant to house all five volumes of Une semaine de bonté. The final section of the book, Saturday, contains 10 images. The element given is "the key to songs"; the images are once again uncategorizable. The section, and with it the book, ends with several images of falling women.

No full interpretation of Une semaine de bonté has ever been published. The book, like its predecessors, has been described as projecting "recurrent themes of sexuality, anti-clericalism and violence, by dislocating the visual significance of the source material to suggest what has been repressed."[3] An analysis of Sunday was published by psychologist Dieter Wyss, who subjected the work to post-Freudian psychoanalysis in his book Der Surrealismus (1950)." - Wikipedia

"Spend a surreal week in the company of German artist Max Ernst. Une Semaine de Bonté, a rather unsettling book whose title translates as A Week of Kindness, is a piece of surreal art like no other surreal piece of art – and that’s saying something.

Created in just three weeks in Italy in 1934 as Ernst’s native Germany marched to the thump of the Nazi drum, Une Semaine de Bonté is a very bizarre collection of 182 collages where humanity is mixed with mythology and the animal kingdom. There are ladies with serpent wings and gentlemen with lion heads. Many of the dramatic scenes display death, distress, bondage, nudity and violence – all twisted from the expected norms of death, distress, bondage, nudity and violence.

Une Semaine de Bonté was originally published as a series of five pamphlets with less than 1,000 copies of each printed. Now amazingly collectable, those original pamphlets have four-figure price-tags but Dover Publications has been printing an unabridged republication of the 1934 edition since 1976. New copies of this book, complete with the very informative publisher’s note explaining the method behind Ernst’s apparent madness, can be purchased for less than £15.

Born near Cologne, Ernst is the greatest exponent of the surreal collage. He selected images from existing catalogues and pulp novels, and then turned them into a series of lurid and exotic dreams and fantasies – serpents in the living room, aristocrats with the head of a lion, floods inside houses, murderous mutants, and dozens of bared breasts. Perhaps the strongest theme is birds, which fascinated Ernst

Une Semaine de Bonté has seven sections for each day of the week and each one illustrates one of Ernst’s seven deadly elements, including water and fire.

The German’s art was vital in the development of the Dada Movement and surrealism in general following the Great War. However, Ernst’s devotion to the weird and wonderful didn’t fit in with Nazi ideology and the artist, who had fought for Germany in World War I, fled to America before the outbreak of World War II. Along with fellow Europeans Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall, he helped develop abstract expressionism while living in the US. Ernst’s La Femme 100 Têtes (The Woman With One Hundred Heads) from 1929 is also worth a look for fans of surrealism." - Richard Davies

"Now generally acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of Surrealism, the limited-edition work in five fascicles had been underwritten by the dedicated patron and dilettante artist Roland Penrose, who came into possession of the left-over stock when the number of subscribers to the publication failed to match the number of sheets printed in anticipation of sales. In retrospect, it’s unsurprising considering that 1934 was the depth of the Great Depression. I bought a sizeable stack for £20 per sheet; each had four images.

Several I framed for my study; one I framed to put in my luggage when I travel, recalling with relish the story of the touring actress who always took her Antoine Watteau painting with her in a trunk so that the walls of the hotels where she stayed wouldn’t be so dreary. Thanks to Penrose’s misfortune and my scavenger’s luck, I need not envy her either. Surrealism suits Belgrade as well as Berkeley.

The rest I have given away, mostly to students. Thus all the members of my last class at the Institute of Fine Arts received an Ernst of their own. I wasn’t trying to polish apples in reverse but rather to teach an object lesson – or three. First, the seminar was devoted to comics and graphic novels, and Une Semaine de bonté is paradigmatic of the wordless, anti-narrative pictorial narrative. Second, like everything belonging to the larger genre, it is – pace Jean Baudrillard – a prime example of an original work of art consisting entirely of copies. (The cut-and-paste sources are not the work, as is evident from any comparison between their uneven discoloration and the unified field of disjunctive imagery in the printed version.) Third, in a gift economy commodities lose their power and fetishism eases its hold on the imagination, freeing it to dream. This is a good moment to keep that in mind." - Robert Storr

Semiotic Analysis of Max Ernst’s UNE SEMAINE DE BONTÉ by Henrik Schunk