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140408: Albertina: Max Ernst - Une Semaine de Bonté
Albertina: Max Ernst – Une Semaine de Bonté
The Perfect Crime
The Albertina is currently presenting Max Ernst’s illustrations for the book “Une semaine de bonté” - for the first time in more than 70 years. For many years Max Ernst kept the original collages of this five-volume novel locked up. Werner Spies, the Max Ernst specialist and publisher of the catalogue, points out that Ernst tried to keep the making of theses collages secret: “somewhat comparable to the perfect crime, the collages attempt to evade from any evidence or cogitations regarding scissors or knives.”
The interfaces between the scrapped printed illustrations from the 19th century and the new, absurd, and eerie combinations of the pasted collages had become invisible. Max Ernst was a great expert at this and it is really extremely difficult to detect where the illustrations had been appended.
Max Ernst was a member of Dada Köln and discovered the collage as an artistic form at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1922 he (illegally) arrived in Paris and in 1929 his first collage-novel “La femme 100 tetes” was published. In 1930 he played the bandit chief in Luis Bunuel’s and Salvador Dali’s surrealistic classic movie “L’age d’or” and in the same year published his second collage-novel “Réve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel”. He assembled the 182 collages for his third novel “Une semaine de bonté” during the summer of 1933 during his vacation in Italy. The images in this novel are among the most enigmatic and fascinating manifestations of Surrealism, and they offered all kinds of dramtic scenes such as murder and the appearances of ghosts. He not only intervened subtly into these cliché-like pictures, but also enjoyed to shock the onlooker, by showing a hanged man with a chicken’s head or a postman with dragon’s wings. Max Ernst considered his first movie (1929) “Un chien andalou” as a “desperate appeal for murder”. In comparison to the movie, the ingeniously brutal, gloomy images of the novel with its obliterated interfaces truly come across as the “perfect crime”.
Albertina
1010 Wien, Albertinaplatz 1, until 27. 04.08
www.albertina.at
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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140408
Albertina
1010 Wien, Albertinaplatz 1
Tel: +43 1 534 83 -0, Fax: +43 1 533 76 97
Email: info@albertina.at
http://www.albertina.at
Öffnungszeiten: Tägl. 10-18h, Mi 10-21 h
Albertina
1010 Wien, Albertinaplatz 1
Tel: +43 1 534 83 -0, Fax: +43 1 533 76 97
Email: info@albertina.at
http://www.albertina.at
Öffnungszeiten: Tägl. 10-18h, Mi 10-21 h
