And speaking of Max Ernst… These are pages from a catalogue for a exhibition of Ernst’s prints and book illustrations held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1975. Ernst was such a versatile and prolific artist that any collection can only show a small sample of the available work which here ranges from Dadaist collages and Surrealist frottages, to pages from his three collage novels plus later works like Wunderhorn which featured illustrations based on the writings of Lewis Carroll. Some of the captions erroneously assign collages from Une semaine de bonté to La femme 100 têtes, not the kind of thing you expect from a national library. Several of the images towards the end are from Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy, an art-book that Ernst created in 1964 which features the curious hieroglyphic figures that proliferate in his drawings and paintings from this period. Peter Schamoni made a short film about the project which may be viewed here.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Max Ernst by Peter Schamoni
• The nightingale echo
• Max Ernst’s favourites
• Max Ernst album covers
• Maximiliana oder die widerrechtliche Ausübung der Astronomie
• Max and Dorothea
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier