"A Week of Kindness or The Seven Deadly Elements" by Max Ernst

In the fifth and last book in the series, Max Ernst’s surrealistic novel in collage A Week of Kindness or The Seven Deadly Elements, the artist defines Thursday by the element he calls “Blackness”.  In this novel in collage, all the illustrations began with a base illustration drawn by another artist from a popular novel or publication widely known at the time and incorporated one or more unexpected or found elements into the scene to create a disordered, unexpected or even sometimes disturbing amalgam of the two artist’s work. The artist provides two groups of example collage illustrations to define the element blackness. The first group he subtitles “Example: The Rooster’s Laughter”. Each base illustration within this first grouping depicts a different scene of human suffering, death and despair in which he has incorporated the image of at least one rooster. The inclusion of roosters in such an emotionally distressing human situation seems not only surreal, but also irreverent and completely out of place. The second group of collage illustrations under Thursday’s element Blackness he subtitles “Example: Easter Island”. Each base illustration within this group depicts a scene of rape, sexually charged violence, prostitution, vanity or other similar form of human depravity in which he has added an illustrated version of one of the carved stone heads that had been discovered on Easter Island. The unexpected illustration of a chiseled stone head from Easter Island replacing the face of one of the perpetrators in the midst of an illustration depicting a sexually violent scene, or the irreverent placement of a rooster in the middle of an illustration which portraits human suffering and death is a perfect example of surrealism.  These seemingly random augmented illustrations when grouped into a novel of colleges tell the story of the birth of the surrealistic movement through the work of its founding father.