A Feast for Sore Eyes

While preparing the “roman d’été,” i.e. the August beach novel for NOMADICS, here is a little graphic novel: Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté, animated for youtube.

Writes shivabel, who put the Ernst up on youtube:

Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness) is a graphic novel and artist’s book composed in collage by Max Ernst, made during a three week visit in Italy. The novel was first published in Paris in 1934, as a series of five pamphlets of 816 copies each.
The novel consists of found images from Victorian encyclopedias and novels, cut up and re-organized into 182 montages which represent a kind of dark, surreal world. One such image includes a series of bird-men fleeing an unidentified terror, a giant hand reaching out of a window above.
The work is the third of three similarly-themed artist’s books covering similar territory; La Femme 100 Têtes (The woman with one hundred heads, or The woman with no heads) 1929, and Rêve dune Petite Fille qui Voulut Entrer au Carmel (Paris, 1930).
“Each of these books projects recurrent themes of sexuality, anti-clericalism and violence, by dislocating the visual significance of the source material to suggest what has been repressed.”
Music by Krzysztof Penderecki, ‘The dream of Jacob’

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