'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.

The success of these images lies in their simplicity. Collage presents so many possibilities; there are endless sources for imagery, infinite combinations of material, many methods of execution. Ernst set himself very strict boundaries for making collages - firstly, he had a small and very particular set of source material. These were mostly Victorian wood engravings, including the work of JJ Grandville and Marquis de Sade. The similarities in style and the execution of these images would have been crucial for Ernst to ensure his physical interference as an artist was as seamless as possible.

Secondly, Ernst was very careful when composing an image that there weren't any unconvincing jumps in scale, lighting, colour and so on, again to make these images as plausible as possible for the viewer. He would also purposefully select images that were unexciting and mediocre in theme, providing him with a neutral starting point for an idea, ensuring all the strangeness of the images came from himself.

Ernst tried to ensure that his collages were only published in printed or photographic form, again to help foster the idea of these images' feasibility. For me, one of the pleasures of seeing this show was trying to work out where Ernst had doctored an image, which was often fairly difficult. An interesting addition to the show was a selection of Ernst's source images, with the finished collage displayed alongside. I'm not sure Ernst would have been particularly excited about this addition considering the lengths he went to to conceal his method, but I thought it was a great insight and it looked as though the other visitors thought so too.

This is a brilliant exhibition in a great museum, and it's the first time since 1936 that these images have been on show in their entirity. If you can make it to Paris, the show is on until 13th September. Otherwise, the images have been published in full for a bargain price by Dover Books.

All images © Isidore Ducasse Fine Arts© Photo Peter Ertl. © ADAGP, Paris 2009