A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil

By Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning

In the course of browsing an illustrated book of objects—umbrellas, watches, tools, clothes—artist Max Ernst was struck by the items' unusual juxtapositions. By manipulating the Victorian-era engravings into striking tableaux and adding brief captions, Ernst invented the collage novel and transformed banal advertising art into revealing dramas rooted in his dreams and secret desires.
A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil was originally published in 1930 as Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel. Its hallucinatory visions center on the nightmares of a girl who loses her virginity on the day of her first communion and resolves to become a nun. Ernst, a pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealistic art, blends humor and irony in his exploration of the nonrational but very real intersection of religious ecstasy and erotic desire. A century after its debut, this profoundly peculiar book retains its shock value as well as its imaginative power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Jun 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780486823386

Book preview

A LITTLE GIRL DREAMS OF TAKING THE VEIL

MAX ERNST

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

MINEOLA, NEW YORK

Copyright

English translation copyright © 1982 by Dorothea Tanning

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2017, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published as Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel by Editions du Carrefour, Paris, in 1930. Dorothea Tanning translated the work into English.

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-81452-0

ISBN-10: 0-486-81452-1

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

81452101    2017

www.doverpublications.com

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

In this the second of Max Ernst’s collage novels, published in Paris in 1930, the author has added a new dimension of psychic violence to the already fraught pictures in which night and dream are the sovereign forces that not only color but provoke the inexorable procession of events that defines the dilemma of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil.

Each one of these collages uses cuttings often from the most banal of the pre-photography illustrated penny novels, and from popular tomes about nature, science, exoticism. Each collage, then, could be analyzed as the sum of its varied components were it not for the dazzling fact that with his art Max Ernst completely transformed his humble materials and so imposes on our retinas and on our minds a formidable blueprint for amazement.

A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil may be seen to embody our most frequent tragedies, our wriest enslavements, our most terrible solutions. Specificity dissolves in the timeless and the general. Max Ernst’s collages, telling their oblique story, will be treasured as art and idea. And we will