Max Ernst's 'Une Semaine de Bonté' Collages Published by Gallimard

Gallimard has published a comprehensive volume on Max Ernst's 1933 collage novel 'Une Semaine de Bonté,' edited by Werner Spies. The book reproduces all original collages and exhaustively details their iconographic sources, historical context, techniques, and processes. It coincides with two 2010 exhibitions: one at Fundación Mapfre in Madrid (February 11–May 31) and another at the Musée d'Orsay (June 28–September 13). Ernst's work draws on literary influences from Sade, Lautréamont, and Octave Mirbeau, and visually appropriates 19th-century feuilleton illustrations. Spies reproduces numerous source plates to clarify Ernst's transformations. The collages disrupt spatial and gestural relations, inverting physical and symbolic orders to create a surrealist poetics and erotics of shock. These inversions also renegotiate boundaries between life and death, human and animal, contributing to an aesthetic of disaster and catastrophe that has continually influenced 20th-century art.