Une Semaine de Bonté by Max Ernst

So recently I’ve been trying to look at some of the proto-graphic novels.  The graphic novel as it is today more or less starts in the late 1970s with A Contract With God by Will Eisner & Sabre by Don McGregor & Paul Gulacy, but there were a number of books 50 or so years earlier that broke the mold of illustrated books not for children.  One of which is Une semaine de bonté from 1934.  I was vaguely familiar with Max Ernst previously & some of the images in this book I’d seen before.  But the idea that this is a narrative in anyway & a precursor to graphic novels I would say is false.  It’s a book of 182 collages built around different themes with all the source material being woodcuts.  It’s hard for me to look at collages & not think of them as adolescent &, I think especially these days with so many folks cutting & pasting things together using Photoshop, I’ve let go of thinking of it as art & collage only becomes interesting to me when I can see the physical piece with bits of cut paper & texture to it rather than a flat image.  There’s nothing wrong with this book, it’s worth looking at.  The surreal imagery of floors cut away & replaced with water & people’s heads cut out & replaced by lions & chickens is fun, but it doesn’t really do anything for me.