Max Ernst Volume IV: Oedipus (Volume IV: Oedipe) from A Week of Kindness or the Seven Deadly Elements (Une Semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux) 1933–34, published 1934

A Week of Kindness (Une Semaine de bonté), is the most elaborate of Ernst’s inventive “collage novels.” Its 182 images were created by cutting up and reorganizing illustrations from nineteenth-century novels, scientific journals, and other sources. By printing these collages photomechanically, Ernst transformed them into the seamless images he desired. The surreal constructions, alternately dark and humorous in their subversion of bourgeois gentility, are rife with suggestions of repressed sexuality, violence, anti-militarism, and anticlericalism. Though originally planned as seven volumes, one for each day of the week, the last three “days” were combined into the fifth and final volume. Ernst released them consecutively, like popular serial stories.

Volume IV from a five volume serial novel with 182 line blocks after collages
page (each): 10 3/4 x 8 1/16" (27 x 20.5 cm)
2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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