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Misfortunes of the Immortals is one of Ernst’s first illustrated books—a format that would become increasingly significant for him. Marking the beginning of his close friendship with French poet Paul Éluard, the book pairs the semantic dislocations of Éluard’s poems with the visual disjunctions of Ernst’s recent collages. Ernst cut up wood engravings he found in books and magazines and pieced the fragments together to create strange new compositions. The uniform texture of the wood-engraved lines gives these images a disquieting seamlessness. To Ernst’s delight, this effect was enhanced when the collages were printed photomechanically.
Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, September 23, 2017-January 1, 2018.
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Max Ernst
French and American, born Germany. 1891–1976 234 works onlineA key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to both personal memory and collective myth.
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