57 - Paul ÉLUARD and Max ERNST. *Les Malheurs des immortels*. Paris, Librairie Six, 1922.

Paul ÉLUARD and Max ERNST. *Les Malheurs des immortels*. Paris, Librairie Six, 1922. Small quarto, paperback, with a blue paper slipcase. First edition printed in a limited run on imitation Japanese paper; it is illustrated with 21 full-page collages by Max Ernst. One of the most accomplished illustrated Surrealist—or proto-Surrealist?—books, whose poems were composed by the painter and the poet based on the collages. It was published two years before the manifesto that would name and launch the movement. “The Misfortunes of the Immortals” is the result of the closest collaboration between the two men; each text, conceived after the corresponding collage, is based on the work—by both of them—on every sentence, indeed every word. […] The poems themselves should, moreover, be regarded as verbal collages, with additions and hidden words; the loss of noun hierarchy lends a poetic quality to sentences and aphorisms that might otherwise seem merely descriptive or technical. Masterfully combining deconstruction and construction, two years before the Surrealist Manifesto, *Les Malheurs des immortels* may well be the most surrealist of all the movement’s works” (Julien Bogousslavsky). A charming autographed inscription, itself already surrealist in nature, countersigned by Max Ernst: To André Fontainas, / listen to the sighs of these women / with butterfly hairstyles, / Paul Éluard / Max Ernst A Belgian Symbolist poet living in Paris, André Fontainas (1865–1948) had Stéphane Mallarmé as his English teacher. He later became one of the founders of the Mallarmé Academy. (Paul Éluard and His Painter Friends, p. 106: “An important collection that marks the closest collaboration that ever existed between the artist and the poet.”—Bogousslavsky, From Delacroix to the Surrealists, pp. 262–267.)