SOURCE: Assa, Sonia. “Of Hairdressers and Kings: Ready-made Revelations in Les Malheurs des immortels.” French Review 64, no. 3 (February, 1991): 643-58.

In the following essay, Assa discusses Les Malheurs des immortels, a collaborative work of Eluard and Max Ernst, as a “true surrealist collaboration” which addresses some of the key questions raised by the surrealist movement.

—Quel est ton passe-temps favori? —Voir 

(Max Ernst: Histoire de ma vie)

When in 1922, Paul Eluard and Max Ernst published a book of poems and collages called Les Malheurs des immortels, André Breton had not yet written his first Manifeste du surréalisme and the Surrealist movement was still in what Maurice Nadeau has called its “heroic” period (47). This beautiful work is one of the best examples of a true Surrealist collaboration. I shall argue that it also underscores some of the key questions debated by Surrealism: the nature of the relationship between painting...