Max Ernst (1891-1976)

'...où nous avions dressé un petit purgatoire...' is one of 80 collages executed by Max Ernst for his 1930 collage-novel Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, the 'collage novel' being a book consisting purely of collaged illustrations and their captions. This form of collage technique was one Ernst began experimenting with in 1919, and involved cutting and pasting from reproductions of nineteenth-century engravings to create a dream-like subversion of traditional illustration. He first published his collages in this style to accompany Paul Eluard's 1922 Repetitions, yet it was not until 1929 that he published the first of the three 'collage-novels', La femme 100 têtes [sic]. Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel was the second of the novels, worked on during 1929 and 1930. It was then published by Editions du Carrefour, Paris.