Max Ernst: Maximiliana: The illegal practice of astronomy : hommage à Dorothea Tanning by Ernst, Max (1974) Paperback
Category: Books
Max Ernst: Maximiliana: The illegal practice of astronomy : hommage à Dorothea Tanning by Ernst, Max (1974) Paperback Details
Reviews
Max Ernst's Maximiliana is a book filled with strange invented celestial bodies, collages, photography, and Ernst's lively asemic Dada cipher poetry. This is an underappreciated work that should be discovered again, like the main subject and muse of this book Guillaume Temple, an amateur astronomer, who is Ernst's "companion in misfortune." I found this work around 1999 as I was developing my personal abstract calligraphic style and it was a catalyst for creative ideas with its "confrontation of script and stars," and as a work that "charms illiterates." It is the most influential book for my own asemic writing and art, and my bookshelf wouldn't be complete without a copy. This lost classic will appeal to fans of the Codex Seraphinianus, the Voynich Manuscript, "alien" writing, automatic writing, and other general titles of asemic calligraphy.