Max Jacob and his friends, Quimper Fine Arts Museum

A room in the museum is dedicated to Max Jacob, originally from Quimper. There are many works by Jacob himself (gouaches, pencils, engravings, etc.) and his entourage: notably by Jean Cocteau (drawings), Picasso (three etchings), Roger Toulouse and Amedeo Modigliani (drawing).

Biography
Max Jacob, born on July 12, 1876 in Quimper and died on March 5, 1944 in Drancy, is a modernist poet and novelist but also a French painter.

Max Jacob is a Precursor of Dada and the Surrealism without adhering to it. it upsets his free verse and burlesque the French poetry in 1917, after giving up his career. Artist living mainly from his painting, which was assimilated to the School of Paris, he became from 1934 an epistolaryinfluential, in particular on Jean Cocteau, and prolix, whose aesthetic theory, beyond the mysticism that animates his writing, served in 1941 as the foundation of the Rochefort School.

he led in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire the monastic life of a secular oblate attached to the abbey of Fleury. His poetry therefore testifies to the quasi- quietism in which he painfully assumes his life as a sinneras a condition of his redemption.

Post symbolism
Conceived in the shade of Apollinaire and in the intimacy of Picasso, the free verse of Max Jacob, by its simplicity and its profusion, irrevocably inscribes French poetry in modern art. He did it in a smashing way, although still confidential, when, in 1917, during the Great War, a collection of poems, or texts giving themselves for such, appeared during the previous decade, Le Cornet à dés. 1917 is the year when La Jeune Parque, a masterpiece of Mallarmean academism, reveals Paul Valéry.

Thirteen years earlier, Max Jacob had linked up with André Salmon, animator, with Paul Fort and Jean Moréas, of the circle of the review post symbolism Vers et prose. Every Tuesday, a few subscribers of the magazine met at the Closerie des Lilas to celebrate the free and hermetic verse of Stéphane Mallarmé. Among the regulars was Henri-Pierre Roché, who introduced there Marie Laurencin, future sister in clairvoyance and in faith of Max Jacob, and who founded in April 1917 with Marcel Duchamp the first reviewDada, Rongwrong. By its title, Le Cornet à dés responds to Mallarmé’s testament, whose graphic poem Un coup de dés heure ne n’ababol le Chance,inventing a metonymic derivation process that prefigures the calligram, breaks with the symbolist metaphor.

Literary cubism
In 1907, Max Jacob coined the term cubism and made himself the cantor, like Pierre Reverdy, of a “cubist literature”, that is to say a writing where metonymy, alliteration, the counterpoint, the pun, the allusion, the aphorism, the ellipse, the antithesis, the paratax multiply the signifying masks. He explains it. “Cubismin painting is the art of working the painting by itself outside of what it represents, and of giving geometric construction first place, 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. “.

This distance, or “margin”, between the poem, even the work of art in general, and what it represents, is a space for reverie and proceeds from a distancing which is more than the effect of surprise Brechtian, an affirmed choice of the artist to “locate” his work in relation to the reality he describes, which can be, for example, a defined degree of abstraction, nonsense or humor, the only possible release of the derisory and the tragic of the world and prior to any engagement. Max Jacob calls this gap between word and thing the situation of the work. This is what creates the atmosphere of the work and, more than the style, specific to the author who seduces, gives it its intrinsic power, wins the reader or the spectator. This is what he points out to the copy Georges Simenon beginning to invent his detective novels without intrigue. This is what he admires in the precursor of the New novel that is Tropismes de Sarraute then in the first existentialist novel that is L ‘, an author he has supported since 1932 and who has taken a lot from him.

Max Jacob is thus led to be wary of any rhetoric which would not make the first place in the rigor of writing that only its object requires and refuses to register in any literary or artistic movement, going so far as to affirm “What good humor that Cubism and Cezannism; only love matters, the rest is to make a masterpiece; the masterpiece is not predictable. “, as saying a fad, or chance. For the same reason, he does not join the group of surrealists, whom he reproaches for lacking in heart,.

Emotion as a cult of the Sacred Heart
Indeed for Max Jacob, not the artifices of writing, such as automatic writing or any other process, but emotion, literally what makes you come out of yourself, “emotion is the whole of works”. However, he said that one was the necessary condition for the other. “Emotion is not enough in itself, contrary to what I believed for a long time. It takes art! “. The fact remains that “[…] the union of spirit and matter is the real reality for the poet: spiritual reality. Artistic emotion is thus a sign that life becomes aware of life and participates in it ”.

Max Jacob compares this artistic emotion, this elevation of the soul aroused by the work of art, to the blow of lance given to the Sacred Heart, ultimate wound by which the divinity “made man” is separated from the corpse and the spirit, of sin. He sees in the Sacred Heart the place of a union of matter and spirit, of sensitivity and intelligence, which translates into art by “concrete intelligence”, which is intelligence poets. The poet gives life to ideas and spirit to life.

The symbols of the Sacred Heart, with which he mixes alchemical and astrological considerations, are at the center of aesthetic theory by Max Jacob but also of an ethics of compassion, poetic emotion not being a moment of sentimental outpouring but a search for interiority. Max Jacob adds a political or even eschatological concern, hoping that the worship of the Sacred Heart converts a France, that in writer end of century hedecadent judge, to an intelligence at the service of charity and thus hitlerism is defeated.

The new lyricism of the “ceiling” work
It was as early as 1904 91 that Max Jacob developed, without ever ceasing to versify, his aesthetic of the poem in prose, and stripped the Mallarmean verse of its preciousness by giving it the vigor of childish fantasy.

Admirer of Vigny, he did so less by a desire to break away from romanticism or symbolism than by the search for the moment when language reflected an overcoming of consciousness carried away by feelings. He calls lyricism this crossing, conducive to reverie, of the limit of what can be said by the sound of the language, which he spots in “the only lyric poet of French language”, Apollinaire.”I mean by the lyrical radiance, this madness, this exasperation of several lofty feelings which, not knowing how to express themselves, finds an outlet in a kind of vocal melody which lovers of true poetry feel the underside, the lightness, fullness, reality: this is lyricism. There are very few in the world and very few even among the very great poets; there is none in Hugo, this rhetorician. ”

It is a new lyricism in the sense that it is not expressed by the development of the sentence or the stanza around the theme which arouses emotion but by the choice of an epithet which opens the imagination on an unconscious or hidden meaning. It is a lyricism of ideas but an antilyrism of words. This avarice of words, this obliteration of style effects and rhetorical artifices, aims to concentrate the writing effort, through concrete images, on what Max Jacob calls the “idea find”, and which he compares to a ceiling beyond which the vision is lost. It is the spiritual universe of the poet, what he is as a man, and not only his art, at the same time as his capacity to make it an object foreign to himself, which gives to a work of the “ceiling”.

An aesthetic of transfiguration
Max Jacob, “purifying the idolatrous fascination to take a path of contemplation”, illustrates and defends a poetic art where art “without art” tends to fade before mystical revelation, the transfiguration of being the most everyday and its unspeakable.

As early as 1922, as his letters to the future historian of the circus world, Tristan Rémy, show, he became the pedagogue of lyrical poetry whose emotion is goal, the primary goal at least. “ Surrealism and anti- surrealism are dead. Poetry (which has taken and which will become very important) will be a poetry of emotion, sequences and syntactic variations due to feelings. ” His work as an essayist and letter writer therefore became the source of a literary movement more sensitive to everyday poetry than the political role of the poet.. It was only during the Occupation that this young generation, which, without always following the master in his metaphysical and religious constructions, did not deny his Symbolist heritage, will assert himself under the name of the Rochefort school.

Just as his painting will never compete with that of Picasso, the literary work of Max Jacob remains however, as if by the effect of a neurosis of failure or a melancholy feeling of self-mockery and humility, in the wake of the inventions of Apollinaire. If in the extension of the theory of correspondences, Max Jacob approached disciplines and different genres, by becoming a painter, librettist and lyricist, he remains above all a writer whoseeutrapélie hides a candid and anxious faith, listening to the occult mysteries.

“The essence of lyricism is unconsciousness, but supervised unconsciousness. ”

Max Jacob and Quimper
Quimper, birthplace of the poet Max Jacob occupies a major place in his life and in his work. Innumerable poems, a novel, a play attempt to describe every corner and its daily life, the rue du Parc, the footbridges over the Odet, the new theater, the alleys of Locmaria, the alleys which descend from high school… Max Jacob returns regularly to Quimper, finds his friends and family there.

From Paris to Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire
Thanks to multiple donations and legacies from the friends of Max Jacob and a few acquisitions, the museum presents a series of photographs, letters, small objects and the most diverse memories that bear witness to the life of the poet: the pension book, including the cover serves as a palette, a tiny altar, the yellow star, the rosary he held in his hands at his death, the cross of Ivry… Are evoked life in Paris rue Ravignan near the Bateau-Lavoir where with Picasso and Apollinaire, he helped lay the foundations for “modern art”, the two long stays in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire and the frequent trips to Quimper and Douarnenez.

The Portrait of Max with the yellow star by Jean Boullet is an overwhelming testimony of the last days of Max Jacob who died at the Drancy camp in 1944.

unacknowledged painter
In contact with his painter friends, Max Jacob began to draw, especially in gouache. In addition to his poetic work, he led a career as a painter, exhibiting regularly, selling countless small gouaches. Landscapes of Paris and Brittany or Romanesque frescoes, Max Jacob is often content to “copy” photographs. But he can escape from this somewhat tedious writing to translate scenes of daily life with joy and freedom. Later, in the years 1930-1940, he returned to formal research called “cubists” based on geometric games.

Max Jacob’s friends
Max Jacob’s friends are present through several portraits painted or drawn by Roger Toulouse, Christopher Wood, Jean Cocteau or Pierre de Belay. Max Jacob, during his stays in Quimper, also finds the Italian ceramist Giovanni Leonardi to whom he made known the local pottery.

Jean Moulin
From 1930 to 1933, Max Jacob regularly meets Doctor Tuset and Jean Moulin in Quimper. During his stay in Brittany, the latter illustrated poems by Tristan Corbière, “Armor”, extracted from Amours Jaune, in particular the famous “Rapsode foraine” which depicts beggars with forgiveness of Sainte-Anne-la-Palud. The studies of these astonishing illustrations entered the collections at the museum thanks to a legacy from Laure Moulin, sister of Jean Moulin.

Pierre de Belay
The Quimper painter Pierre de Belay, a faithful friend of Max Jacob, occupies a special place in this ensemble. Many paintings and drawings given to the museum by Hélène de Belay allow to appreciate her various talents: evocations of the animation of the ports and markets of Cornouaille, Parisian scenes, paintings “trellisers” of the last years, portraits of Max Jacob including the famous Prophetic portrait, prints or scenes from judicial life. Finally, another Quimpérois, Jean Caveng, traces the portraits of Quimpérois actors of the famous Terrain Bouchaballe, novel and play by his friend Max Jacob.

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper
The Quimper Fine Arts Museum is an art museum located in Quimper. It was born in 1864, thanks to Count Jean-Marie de Silguy who bequeathed his entire collection to his hometown, on the sole condition that a museum be built there to accommodate his paintings and drawings. It is now one of the major museums of art in western France, with rich French painting collections (especially 19th century), Italian, Flemish and Dutch of the xiv th century to today.

In the middle of the 19th century, Quimper, Finistère prefecture and capital of Cornwall, is a modest city of 12,000 inhabitants. It can be compared to regional capitals like Rennes and Nantes, where are created in the late eighteenth th or early 19th century the first museum collections from seizures among emigrants of Church property and deposits Central Museum of the Arts.

In Quimper, considered by Jacques Cambry as a “city without fortune and without enthusiasm for the arts”, the painter François Valentin (1738–1805) tried, during the course, to create a museum from some old works recovered in the region. But without means and without enough works, his project failed. In the middle of the 19th century, the eyes are more likely to archeology and local history. In 1862, the General Council of Finistère voted the principle of the creation in Quimper of a departmental museum, devoted essentially to Finistère archeology, which would receive the collections gathered since 1845 by a learned, archaeological society of Finistère, and kept in a room in the girls’ college.

With the exception of the towns of Saint-Malo which, in 1861, undertook to collect some portraits and historical memories, and of Vannes where archaeological objects gathered by polymath from Morbihan have been stored since 1826, no museum exists in Brittany in the west of the Rennes-Nantes line when Quimper decided to create a museum of fine arts in 1864.

This creation is exceptional. It is not a question of regrouping some local works and some State deposits, but of receiving the considerable collection of Jean-Marie de Silguy which has just disappeared: 1,200 paintings, 2,000 drawings, 12,000 engravings and several dozen of art objects.