Max Ernst: Beyond Surrealism: An Exhibition of the Artist's Books and Prints

Max Ernst, the great Surrealist artist, produced a body of graphic work that surpassed that of any other artist associated with Surrealism. His innovative printing techniques were the equivalent of the semi-automatic image-making procedures used by the painters and poets of his day, and his collaboration with the literary founders of Dada and Surrealism resulted in some of the most beautiful and evocative books of our time. In honor of the donation by Ernst's widow, Dorothea Tanning, of 150 of Ernst's etchings and lithographs--including the magnificent Maximiliana--The New York Public Library has mounted a major retrospective of his works. More than 200 books, prints, collages, and drawings, taken from the Library's collection and from private American and European collections, were selected for this exhibition--which will be displayed at The New York Public Library from October 11 to December 31, 1986, and will travel from there to the University of Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor. Max Ernst: Beyond Surrealism--An Exhibition of the Artist's Books and Prints is a fully illustrated catalogue of the Max Ernst retrospective, with three essays documenting and interpreting the artist's books and prints, a chronology, selected bibliography, and illustrated checklist of the works in the exhibition. The first essay, by Robert Rainwater, surveys Ernst's printmaking in all media, from the linoleum cuts produced in his student years at the University of Bonn through the complex intaglio prints and transfer lithographs he created in collaboration with master French printers during the last 25 years of his life. The second, by Evan Maurer, discusses the themes and recurring forms in Ernst's prints and examines the artist's three great collage novels--La Femme 100 têtes (1929), Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au carmel (1930), and Une Semaine de Bonté (1934). Maurer views the novels in the light of Ernst's entire career and discusses their sources and motivations. In a third essay, Anne Hyde Greet traces the evolution of the livre de peintre, or artist's book, in 20th-century France. She places Ernst's bookmaking activities in the context of this development, and, in the process, examines all his major illustrated books and gives a detailed study of his collaboration with the Russian futurist poet, printer, and publisher Iliazd (Ilia Zdanevich) on Maximiliana. Not only a guide to the current exhibition, this book will stand as a provocative and insightful study of Max Ernst's contribution to 20th-century print and bookmaking.