Grove Koger
April 2 is the birthday of Max Ernst, an artist I would rank as the most important member of the Surrealist movement, which arose in the aftermath of World War I.
Born in the Rhineland in 1891, Ernst never studied art formally, but developed his own methods and techniques. If you aren’t familiar with him, you’ll find more than enough information online, but today I want to talk about a specific work of his, Une semaine de bonté: ou, Les sept Éléments capitaux, or, in English, A Week of Kindness: or, The Seven Deadly Elements.
“Work” probably isn’t quite the right word, as it’s more of a project, although I’ve been surprised to learn that its creation occupied Ernst for only three weeks in 1933, while he visited friends in Italy. My surprise was prompted initially by the fact that Une semaine consists of quite a few images, 182 in all, but then I learned that these are divided among … five pamphlets.
There are, of course, seven days in a week, even for Surrealists. The explanation is that the project didn’t meet the success that Ernst anticipated, so he included the final three days of the week, Thursday through Saturday, in the final pamphlet. (I find most of the images fascinating, but I’m sure they confounded most of those who first encountered them, so I’m not sure why the artist would have anticipated greater success than they achieved.) In any case, Ernst created the images by cutting up and combining images from several other sources, most of which have been identified by critics. These include a little-known illustrated novel by Jules Mary (1851-1922), Les damnées de Paris, and a volume of prints by Gustave Doré (1832-1883).
The pamphlets are thematic, with each assigned an “element,” an example of the element, and an illustrative quotation. Sunday’s element, for instance is “Mud,” and the example Ernst provides is “The Lion of Belfort”—a reference, more or less, to a large sandstone sculpture by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi celebrating the 1870-71 Siege of Belfort during the Franco-Prussian War. The quotation is from the 1899 autobiographical work L’Amour absolu by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), an “absurdist” writer often cited as a predecessor to the Surrealists: “The ermine is a very dirty animal. In itself it is a precious bedsheet, but as it has no change of linen, it does its laundry with its tongue.” The section abounds with images of lion-headed figures.
Capturing a mood of disorientation and impending doom, the images are at once a document of their nightmarish, unravelling times and, at our remove of nearly a century, a reminder that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Here are lion-faced beasts, bird-winged and bat-winged figures, men and women in frenzied postures and poses, serpents, dragons, and so on, all scattered among what would otherwise be scenes of placid bourgeois life. In other words, they could be a commentary on life in the early twenty-first century.
Une semaine de bonté was printed in Paris in 1934 by Georges Duval and published by Editions Jeanne Bucher in an edition of 828 sets. Each of the five volumes is dated—beginning with April 15 and concluding with December 1—to indicate the day the printing of that particular volume was completed, and each was bound in a distinctly colored cover. They were exhibited together for the first time two years later in Madrid at the Museo de Arte Moderno.
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