Max Jacob
A Life in Art and Letters
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- US$30.99
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- US$30.99
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A comprehensive and moving biography of Max Jacob, a brilliant cubist poet who lived at the margins of fame.
Though less of a household name than his contemporaries in early twentieth century Paris, Jewish homosexual poet Max Jacob was Pablo Picasso’s initiator into French culture, Guillaume Apollinaire’s guide out of the haze of symbolism, and Jean Cocteau’s loyal friend. As Picasso reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry with compressed, hard-edged prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics, the product of a complex amalgamation of Jewish, Breton, Parisian, and Roman Catholic influences.
In Max Jacob, the poet’s life plays out against the vivid backdrop of bohemian Paris from the turn of the twentieth century through the divisions of World War II. Acclaimed poet Rosanna Warren transports us to Picasso’s ramshackle studio in Montmartre, where Cubism was born; introduces the artists gathered at a seedy bar on the left bank, where Max would often hold court; and offers a front-row seat to the artistic squabbles that shaped the Modernist movement.
Jacob’s complex understanding of faith, art, and sexuality animates this sweeping work. In 1909, he saw a vision of Christ in his shabby room in Montmartre, and in 1915 he converted formally from Judaism to Catholicism—with Picasso as his godfather. In his later years, Jacob split his time between Paris and the monastery of Benoît-sur-Loire. In February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, where he would die a few days later.
More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.
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Poet, critic, and translator Warren (Fables of the Self) brings French writer and artist Jacob (1876 1944) to life in this exhaustive biography. Drawing on over three decades of archival research, she carefully traces Jacob's journey, from his provincial childhood, to his student days in Paris, though his Zelig-like path through the French avant-garde. Jacob met Picasso at the latter's first Paris show in 1901, and by 1903 the two were living in a converted Montmartre piano factory that became a gathering place for artists and the incubator for Cubism. While assisting friends, including Apollinaire, Cocteau, and Satie, with their creative efforts, Jacob also produced his own celebrated paintings, poetry, and novels. These were profoundly influenced by the vision of Christ he experienced in 1909, which inspired his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism in 1915 and a newly mystical aesthetic. Jacob continued to expand his creative vision and promote fellow artists up until near his tragic death; arrested by the Gestapo, he died of pneumonia in a concentration camp outside Paris in 1944. Warren paints Jacob's life and times in vibrant colors, providing expansive views into this too-little-known writer who exerted a large force in creating modern French literature and art.
