A game: Max Jacob returns to Céret

Ceret,

Born in the Breton town of Quimper in 1876, Max Jacob abandoned his law studies early on to settle in Paris, barely into his twenties, and became one of the key figures of its avant-garde, both in the field of painting and poetry. While training at the Académie Julian he worked as an art critic and, in 1901, he met Picasso in what would be a decisive encounter for him: the Spaniard would encourage him to dedicate himself definitively to literature. He also maintained artistic and literary closeness with figures such as Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, Marie Laurencin, Jean Metzinger, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau and André Salmon and in 1913 he would immerse himself in Cubism, together with Picasso himself and Eva Gouel, during a stay in Céret during which his production, both written and plastic, became more daring.

Two years earlier, in 1911, the Malaga native had illustrated his text Saint Matorelwhich for that reason and for its narrative structure, fragmented and very original, is considered the first book by a cubist artist; he would also collaborate with Derain and Gris and, in the 1910s and 1920s, he also worked on volumes of poems halfway between spirituality and humor, such as The Cornet to the leftsurely his best-known work, or The central laboratory.

Cubism aside, his legacy cannot be understood without paying attention to his interest in religion, astrology and theatre, a disparity of interests that made him an extravagant, erudite and highly anticipated character at Parisian soirees. That brilliance gradually declined and he spent his last years in the village of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, where he led an almost monastic life until his arrest by the Gestapo due to his Jewish origins, a few months before the liberation of Paris, and his death in the Drancy concentration camp, when his deportation to Auschwitz was scheduled.

The paradoxes and fantasy that are inseparable from his work are being explored until next December in an exhibition at the Musée d´Art Moderne de Céret, “Max Jacob, Poetic Cubism”, curated by Jean-Roch Dumont Saint Priest and Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin, which also highlights the constant dialogue in his work between the serious and the light, and the relationships he established between literature and painting based on Cubist postulates: Cubism in painting is the art of working on the painting for its own sake, outside of what it represents (…) proceeding only by allusion to real life. Literary cubism does the same in literature, using reality only as a means and not as an end.he said in 1917.

There are 120 works collected, most of them by Jacob and many unpublished, but also belonging to contemporaries such as Picasso, Gris, Jean Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, Jean Cocteau, Marie Vassilieff, Modigliani, Alice Halicka, Serge Férat and the Baroness d’Oettingen.

Although, as we said, knowing the author of The Guernicaat the Ambroise Vollard gallery, was a dazzlement for him, his first object of study, while he was working as a critic for the newspaper The Sourire Alphonse Allais’s work was James Ensor. His approach to the Malaga-born artist, when the latter was still almost unknown in Paris, would be the beginning of a long friendship: he portrayed him in the Place Pigalle or in the Rue Ravignan, and the Quimper-born artist also appears in one of the Picasso pieces that form part of this exhibition at the Céret museum, Nature morte au pichet sur le fond de chapeau de Max Jacobarrival from Paris. Both supported each other a lot: Jacob welcomed him into his apartment on the rue Voltaire and acted as an intermediary in the sale of some of his works, Picasso encouraged his friend to write and introduced him to his friends.

Very interested in Kabbalah, which he researched at the National Library of France, Jacob also explored practices linked to esotericism, palmistry, numerology and astrology, making those close to him share his findings: in the exhibition we will be able to see palmistry studies drawn by Pablo Picasso, which represent the lines of his hand surrounded by interpretations by the Frenchman, together with a set of astrological pieces by the latter entitled Astrology consisting of unpublished documents such as horoscopes, interpretations, numerological tables and drawings.

One of the complexities of Jacob’s personality lies in his combination of these studies with Catholicism, a religion to which he converted in 1915 after experiencing the vision of Christ in a cinema. Picasso was his godfather at baptism and from then on he would perform scenes such as The Visitation either The Adoration of the Magiloaned for the occasion by the Museum of Fine Arts of Quimper.

Max Jacob. Nature morte Mozart, 1912. Private collection

First-hand witness of the beginnings of Cubism and the creation of The young ladies of Avignonwas initially part of the painting as a sailor, although his face later disappeared from the image, and he himself experimented with this style in drawings that he titled with irony I am taught in cubismwhich he continued in Céret. A chapter of the exhibition is dedicated to his stay there, recalling the praiseworthy words that the creator gave to this town near Perpignan: It seems that the mountains smell of thyme, dew, lavender and rosemary. He captured these landscapes in numerous gouaches, some closer to realism and others to cubism, transforming the architecture into geometric shapes and the paths into angular lines in the latter. That same year, other authors who were also involved in this project, such as Manolo, Moïse Kisling, Juan Gris and Auguste Herbin, stayed there.

Another section deals with the weight of theatre, ballet and opera in his production; we know that he was associated with Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc, who put music to his poems, and that he collaborated with Henri Sauguet, Nicolas Nabokov and Vittorio Rieti, but also with Guillaume Apollinaire and Serge Férat on the project Mamelles of Tiresiaswhose choir he directed. He portrayed Picasso as an acrobat and let him do the same in sculpture. The Fou; both had in common their frequent attention to clowns, dancers and trapeze artists.