In 1921, the French poet Paul Éluard and his Russian wife Gaya travelled to Cologne where they met the artist Max Ernst, one of the pioneers of the city’s flourishing Dada movement. This encounter marked the start of a tumultuous ménage à trois, which saw Ernst leave his wife and child in Germany to set up shop with the couple at their home in the Paris suburbs. The trio then travelled to Southeast Asia on a journey that provided inspiration for several of Ernst’s subsequent paintings, and prompted Éluard’s 1924 collection of poems, Mourir de ne pas mourir (Dying of Not Dying), whose title hints at the author’s fast-evolving feelings about the love triangle. Soon after they returned to France, Ernst and the couple parted ways, spelling an end to one of art history’s best-documented affairs.

Lesser known, however, are the two books Éluard and Ernst published together right at the start of their relationship, before the heartbreak and the far-flung locations and the anguished love poems. The first, Répétitions (Repetitions), was a more conventional collaboration in so far as Éluard first wrote the poems and then selected a number of preexisting works by Ernst to accompany them. The second, Les Malheurs des immortels (The Misfortunes of the Immortals), was altogether more experimental, one that challenged traditional conceptions of what illustrations could or should do.

The original draft of Les Malheurs, which may have provided some clues as to the exact nature of the book’s composition, has never been found. However, it appears that Ernst, still in Germany at that stage, created the images first: twenty-one collages composed of engravings cut out of nineteenth-century magazines and catalogues. Rather than preserving the telltale signs of collage — the torn edges or overlaps of paper — as was typical in Dada experiments at the time, the artist is careful to disguise the images’ composite nature. He blends each section into a seamless, coherent whole — much like the work of the tailor evoked in the collection’s first poem. Ernst and Éluard then worked together on twenty prose poems to accompany the illustrations, sending fragments of text to each other to revise or supplement, often jotted down on postcards. The result, as scholar Elza Adamowicz writes, is that “the collated texts formed a verbal collage that mirrored the collage processes of the engravings”.

Published two years before André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), which delineated the contours of the capital-S Surrealism movement, Les Malheurs represents a proto-Surrealist experiment par excellence. It subverts traditional conceptions of authorship, not just in its collaborative, two-man composition, but also in the use of found images, echoed in the text by the frequent recourse to clichés and hollowed-out turns of phrase. Certain passages, like the first poem’s repeated refrain, “Le petit est malade, le petit va mourir” (The little one is ill, the little one will die), recall children’s nursery rhymes, with a sing-song quality stripped of sense. In this respect, the reference on page twenty-one to “phrases édentées” (toothless sentences) can be read as a metapoetic reflection on the language of the poems, which is emptied of its semantic force. Meaning is instead generated through what Lauren Van Arsdall calls the “cross-pollination” between text and image, the surprising resonances that arise through their juxtaposition.

Alongside the subversion of authorial authority and the refusal to subordinate image to text, Les Malheurs foregrounds other established hierarchies. These include religion, evoked in the titular “immortals”, and the other great modern means of understanding the world: science. Graphs, charts, instruments, and anatomical drawings reappear throughout Ernst’s collages, which encompass the full gamut of observable phenomena from solar systems to the diaphanous wings of a dragonfly. A caged bird, an upturned crocodile, and a webbed foot transformed through collage into the ultimate symbol of human frivolity, a fan, evoke the classification systems of modern science (and religion before that) as well as their potential misuse in human hands. So too the collages of guns on page sixteen and thirty-six serve as a striking reminder of the potentially nefarious applications of science through human engineering.

Created in the aftermath of World War I, Les Malheurs des immortels was produced in a climate of radical self-questioning, where everything previously taken for granted — be that religion, scientific positivism, or the societal codes at the foundation of romantic relationships — was under scrutiny. The book’s formal experimentation captures something of that broader zeitgeist: sifting through the fragments of what came before, and trying to assemble something new of value.