'Une Semaine de Bonté' or 'A week of kindness' was the third collage-novel by Dada artist Max Ernst, made and published in 1933. The original collages that form this novel currently make up an excellent exhibition in Paris at the Musée D'Orsay, which I had the pleasure of visiting on a recent break.
Ernst was born in Germany in 1891. He began painting after abandoning his philosophy studies at Bonn University, but after 5 years he was enlisted to serve in World War I. This caused a big interruption to his career as an artist, but nonetheless fueled his imagination ready to resume his work once his service was over.
After the war Ernst founded a prominent Dada group in Cologne, Germany with several other artists, and began his experiments with collage. In 1922, Ernst moved to Paris to join another Dadaist group. Rather than transporting masses of paintings from Germany to France as a German ex-soldier, Ernst was able to post an exhibition's worth of collages to himself in Paris. At this time the Parisians were just beginning to come to terms with the Dadaist movement, where existing standards in art were rejected and replaced with more chaotic and nonconformist ideas, which many referred to as 'anti-art'. Ernst's new collages made a big impression, giving him a new found notoriety on the art scene. These collages marked the first of a series of three collage-novels that Ernst would make over the following decade.
It is the final novel in this series, 'Une Semaine de Bonté', that is currently displayed at the Musée D'Orsay, and is made up of 184 collages. As you might expect, the themes running throughout the images are rather sombre, and the images strange, uncanny and unsettling, but also exciting.
Here are a few images from the series.

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