Max Ernst (1891-1976)

'...où nous avions dressé un petit purgatoire...' is one of eighty collages executed by Max Ernst in 1930 for Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, one of his books consisting of collaged illustrations and their captions known as 'collage novels' . This form of collage technique was one Ernst began experimenting with in 1919; it 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 full 'collage novels', La femme 100 têtes. Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel was the second of these novels, completed between 1929 and 1930, and published by Editions du Carrefour, Paris.