someone else really likes birds

sometimes my job introduces me to artists that really catch my eye and have never heard of. today was one of those days. a fellow scanner received the book  une semaine de bonte, a surrealistic novel in collage by max ernst. translatable into "a week of kindness", it is a fantastical book filled with found images from victorian encyclopedias and novels. its the mixture of horror and romance, violence and propriety, dreams and reality that really draw me to his collages. created during a three week visit in Italy around the time of adolf hitler's rise to power in germany, the images still create a sense of tension with a modern audience.