Museo Nacional de Arte

Exhibitions

Max Ernst. Una semana de bondad

12 de Aug 2010 - 17 de Oct 2010

Max Ernst. Una semana de bondad was an exhibition that showed 184 artworks that integrated the third Collage novel of Max Ernst, a German artist who participated in one of the most renowned avant-gardes: Surrealism. In spite of constituting one of Surrealism’s masterpieces, the original collages of Une Semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness) of Max Ernst, created in 1933, are one of art’s best-kept secrets of the 20th century. In order to elaborate the series of 184 collages (linked to his stay in the Castle of Vigoleno in Italy during the summer), Ernst began mainly with illustrations of different leaflets of the 19th century whose main themes were violence and loving passions. The selected motifs gain, integrated with the collages, a new meaning with which the artist harshly critics the established authority and the conventionalisms of the time. This exhibition followed the structure and the sequence that Max Ernst himself determined for the first edition of Une semaine de bonté (1934) that was published in five books. Each book was identified with a color: Sunday-purple, Monday-green, Tuesday-red, and Wednesday-blue. Due to economic reasons, the last book, yellow, assembled the collages of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.