About this work
Max Ernst began making highly inventive collages and photomontages in Cologne from 1918, and continued to champion these media when he joined the Surrealists in Paris in the early 1920s. By the end of the decade he had developed the innovative form of the collage novel, in which the story is conveyed without text through a sequence of surreal collages. Ernst’s collages were constructed using clippings from illustrated Victorian penny dreadfuls and popular books on science and natural history and reproduced by lineblock. Une Semaine de bonté was Ernst’s most extensive collage novel, comprising 182 collages specifically devised for the publication.