Repetitions & Misadventures of Immortals

Repetitions and Misadventures of Immortals represent a collaboration between two of the premier figureheads of the Surrealist movement. In 1921, the French poet Paul Éluard became acquainted with Max Ernst's artwork. Éluard wrote a collection of thirty-three poems and then selected a number of Ernst's collages to accompany his poems, which became Repetitions. For Misadventures of Immortals, Ernst initially created twenty collages and then Éluard began drafting prose poems to both accompany and comment on the collages. On one level, the prose poems were constructed via ekphrasis but the composition process was more synergistic, with artist and poet responding to each other's compositions and modifying them into an organic whole in an iterative revision process. Both works are considered to be premier examples of proto-Surrealism. Both collections were first published separately in 1922.