Max Ernst presents an early graphic novel. It’s a cross between the Terry Gilliam “Monty Python” animations, William Burroughs, and that dream you can’t quite remember from when you had the flu. Highly recommended.

A 1934 classic by one of the central figures in surrealism, a collage novel making use of images from Victorian encyclopedias and pulp paintings, pasting images (usually animal heads) on them and creating some sort of continuity through dreams and erotic fantasies. I would have first read it decades ago and found it then strange and wonderful and bizarre, and reading it again, felt similarly, though I may have “understood” it differently, maybe “better”.

This text now reads to me like a very Freu
A 1934 classic by one of the central figures in surrealism, a collage novel making use of images from Victorian encyclopedias and pulp paintings, pasting images (usually animal heads) on them and creating some sort of continuity through dreams and erotic fantasies. I would have first read it decades ago and found it then strange and wonderful and bizarre, and reading it again, felt similarly, though I may have “understood” it differently, maybe “better”.

This text now reads to me like a very Freudian study of dream images, with lots of animals, sex, some violence, always bizarre. Divided up in seven sections, each for a day of the week, it features epigraphs by other surrealists with of course little obvious connection to the visual art. 182 images. One section is described as a “visual poem” but it feels like all of it could maybe be described that way.

This is an art collection and a graphic novel, a commentary on Victorian life and what is repressed beneath carefully constructed images of gentility and upper class style. A novel because he calls it a novel. A constant theme is women (never men, for Ernst) in distress, so that part of it is occasionally disturbing, which may also be a commentary on violence against women under all the Victorian affectation, or maybe Ernst’s own fantasies, but I really think it is the former here, it is critique.

Ernst was denounced (as were others in Germany in the thirties, of course, and many surrealists and dadaists and expressionists) by the Nazis as decadent, and he put this work together as if in part to say: So? And Hitler liked art and opera and read and classic German arts in general. What was lurking beneath the gentile artsy surface of all his and his partners in Holocaust? It’s interesting stuff, collage as art to explore the unconscious, power and privilege. A commentary on maybe both Victorian and Nazi society, but on society, surely.

…more