NEW YORK, NY.- Ubu Gallery announces an exhibition which explores Max Ernst's creation of Une Semaine de bonté ou les septs éléments capitaux ["A Week of Kindness or the Seven Deadly Elements"], a collage novel and artist's book published by Jeanne Bucher in Paris in 1934. Spanning five volumes, the finished publication comprises 182 images (173 collages and 9 drawings) created by cutting up and reorganizing illustrations from Victorian encyclopedias, natural history journals, pulp novels and mail-order catalogs.
Ernst completed Une Semaine de bonté in a breathtaking three weeks during a visit to Vigoleno in Italy in 1933. Working with ardor and brilliant creativity, he repurposed a certain number of reproductions from popular illustrated novels, natural science journals and even commercial sales catalogs from the 19th century. These engravings form the basis for his collages, creating an illustrated story without text, made of images which straddle fairy tales, snippets of dreams, mythological allegories and nightmares, all of which oscillate between humor, violence, catastrophe and absurdity. They achieve such quality and complexity of composition that one must carefully scrutinize them to distinguish Ernst's additions to the initial engravings.
The recurrence of characters throughout the book suggests continuity, while the heterogeneity of circumstances, settings and situations evoke ruin. Ernst further complicates this "narrative logic" by arranging, within the images, elements of later or earlier illustrations of the same story using, to do this, mirrors and paintings that appear in the sets as receptacles or screens. This "picture in picture" reflects the near past or the future. From then on, the temporal dimension of these images is dramatically altered: the couple have just met, but the mirror already reflects the rape which will occur later. Or Ernst provides a detailed close-up from another angle of an overall scene.
What enhances this "doubling" is the intervention, within the images themselves, of an added character, the animalization of another, and/or the substitution of a head, a gesture, a decor... Where two protagonists are confronting or embracing, Ernst introduces a third party who intervenes, haunts or disturbs the setting, often that of a bourgeois interior. Behind a half-open door, a furious wave now roars, a naked woman is hung on a wall, a corpse lies behind a piece of furniture, improbable reptiles or invertebrates undulate and insinuate themselves, convulsive or frightened figures are placed in levitation or in free fall..
Ubu Gallery recently acquired 87 vintage photographs made directly from the original collages under the supervision of Max Ernst and which were used to make the reproductions in the 1934 book. Ubu is exhibiting a number of these photographs, including two of collages which were not included in the 182 reproductions in the final book, as well as the five volumes themselves. Also on view are some original printed pages for the book which were never bound into one of the copies. Some later editions of the book are presented as well.
