Tag: pablo picasso

Max Jacob: “The Winged Horse Contains My Passion”

Photographers Unknown, The Winged Horse Contains My Passion

The farmers call me by name on the roads
   as they might tell a skylark from a thrush
but they know the names of the animals better
than mine, for my name is Dolor.

If that which I love weighs upon my wound, it pains it;
if it weigh only upon summer, it is the field that suffers.

What will feed summer and my love if not that sorrow,
   since my love and summer can no longer feed on joy?

The swan disappears in the slant of branches,
and the naked muses take me in their arms;
the winged horse contains my passion
and the wild flowers spread for me.

Max Jacob, Ballad of the Country Exile, 1939 (Original French Composition)
Translation by Harvey Shapiro for Poetry, Volume 76 Issue 2, May 1950

Born in July of 1876 in Quimper, a prefecture of the Finistère department of Brittany, Max Jacob was a French poet, writer, critic and painter. His poetry, a complex blend composed of Breton, Parisian, Jewish and Roman Catholic elements, was instrumental to the new directions of modern poetry in the early twentieth-century. In addition to his birth name, Max Jacob used two pseudonyms for his writings, Morven le Gaëlique and Léon David. 

At the age of eighteen, Max Jacob relocated to Paris’s Montmartre artist community in 1894, a time when Symbolism was at its peak. He supported himself through a series of odd jobs including teaching piano and freelancing as an art critic. In the summer of 1901, Jacob met the twenty-year old Pablo Picasso who had arrived in Paris with no knowledge of the French language. Both struggling financially, they shared a studio flat on the Rue Ravignan and named their residence Bateau Laviour for its resemblance to laundry boats floating on the Seine. Through various social connections, Jacob and Picasso became friends with poet and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire and artists Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood, Jean Cocteau and Amedeo Modigliani. 

As a homosexual, Jacob attempted to achieve a sense of belonging in France, whose moral attitudes, politics, and institutions excluded him. Even though homosexuality had not technically been illegal under the Napoleonic Code since 1810, police still harassed gay men in the name of public order. Although Jacob was not involved in politics, he remembered the miscarriage of justice and antisemitism involved in the 1896-1899 Dreyfus Affair and saw first-hand the racist questioning of the French Jewish community regarding their patriotism. 

In the fall of 1906, Max Jacob told friends he received a vision of the Christ. After which, he began to embrace Catholicism and was eventually baptised in 1915. He fictionalized this spiritual vision in the 1911 “Saint Matorel (Saint Matthew)”, illustrated by Pablo Picasso, and the 1919 confessional work “La Defense de Tartufe”. Jacob began to find an audience for his literary work in France with his first collection of unique prose poetry, the 1917 “The Dice Cup” which was well received in Parisian literary circles. In 1921, he published a volume of free verse poetry entitled “Le Laboratoire Central”. 

Disenchanted with his life in Paris, Jacob sought a change and became a lay associate at the Benedictine community in Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, where he lived on a small income earned from selling his gouache paintings. Jacob spent two long periods in association with the Benedictine community, the first from 1921 to 1928 and the second from 1936 to 1944. Though the church met his spiritual needs, he still had a series of infatuations with artistic men which he expressed through letters of spiritual and stylistic advice. Jacob later produced a series of love poems that proclaimed his desires, abeit in a heterosexual style similar to what Marcel Proust wrote about his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli. 

Despite half of his live as a practicing Catholic and being awarded the Legion of Honor, Max Jacob was arrested by the Gestapo in February of 1944. Taken to the city of Orléans, he was place in a ten by ten meter military cell with sixty-five other Jewish men, women and children. On the twenty-sixth of February, Jacob and the others were packed into a train and hauled to the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris. During his stay at this train station, Jacob sent out written pleas for help to his friends and influential people who might possibly intercede.

Jacob was next sent to the Drancy internment camp where, after surrendering his gold watch and money, he was registered and numbered. Given a green sticker, Jacob was scheduled to leave on transport number sixty-nine on the seventh of March. He developed severe pneumonia in the internment camp and, due to the lack of medicine, suffered severely for two days. Max Jacob died in the evening of the fifth of March, two days before the scheduled transport carried 1,501 people to Auschwitz.

Director Gabriel Aghion’s 2007 biographical drama “Monsieur Max” was a film that covered the life of Max Jacob from the First World War until his death in 1944. The role of Jacob was played by French actor and director Jean-Claude Brialy. This was Brialy’s last role before his death in May of 2007; he was survived by his partner, Bruno Finck. 

Notes: For those interested in more information on the life of Max Jacob, there are two excellent online articles worth reading:

Mardean Isaac’s 2021 article “Max Jacob and the Angel on the Wall” at the Arts & Letters section of the online Tablet located at: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/max-jacob-angel

Poetry editor Rosanna Warren’s October 2020 “The Death of Max Jacob”, excerpted from her book “Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters”, at the Arts & Culture section of The Paris Review located at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/14/the-death-of-max-jacob/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Max Jacob”, 1922, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Amedeo Modigliani, “Max Jacob”, 1916, Paris, Oil on Canvas, 92.7 x 60.3 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Third Insert Image: Jean Cocteau, “Manuel Ortiz de la Zarate, Moishe Kisling, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, and Paquerette Meeting for Lunch”,  1916, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Roger Toulouse, “Max Jacob”, 1942, Oil on Canvas, 61.2 x 53 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, France

Flower Field Gif: https://rivermusic.tumblr.com

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “Garçon à la Pipe (Boy with Pipe)”, 1905, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Private Collection

“Garçon à la Pipe” was painted in 1905 when Picasso was 24 years old. It was executed during his ‘Rose Period”, soon after he settled in the Montmartre section of Paris, France. The painting depicts an unknown Parisian boy holding a pipe in his left hand and wearing a wreath of flowers on his head.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “The Bull”, Lithograph, Plate No. 1, December 1945, Norton Simon Museum

Picasso is credited with revolutionizing the art of lithography. The tradition at the time was that artists would send their works to master printers. Picasso, however was in the printers’ shops creating his pieces, working alongside the printers and altering his work as the technicians did their tasks.

The printers didn’t always understand what Picasso was doing, as sometimes the finished print didn’t appear as complete as an earlier state, His iconic series “The Bull” began with a realistic-looking sketch of the creature which Picasso then darkened and gradually reworked into a geometric-styled animal. He decisively and deliberately reduced the details to reveal a simple stick figure bull as the finished piece.

Art’s Reflections on Life

Art’s Reflections on Life

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
― Pablo Picasso

Source: xavier-samre

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “The Crucifixion”, Oil on Canvas, 1930, Musee Picasso, Paris

In this work, Picasso returns to his fascination with the ‘life in death’ paradox, encapsulated perfectly by the Western world’s foremost symbol: the Crucifixion. The whole notion of rebirth and transformation has fascinated artists for centuries, as they see themselves as actively participating in an alchemical process while recreating life in their chosen medium.

“The Crucifixion” has no particular religious significance, although its interpretation of pain and suffering is intensely captured and it is a fascinating forerunner, with the use of certain shapes and expressions, to Picasso’s most famous work, Guernica (1937).

Mithra is the orange and red solar figure to the right of the cross (to the viewer)…in between three Marias: the Holy Mother in white before Christ, Marie-Thérèse Walter in the middle and the blue, skeletal head of Mary Magdalene below Mithra.  The head of Stephaton to the left with his giant moon-like sponge “doubles as a crescent moon, an emblem of Virgin Mary.”

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “Minotauro y Caballo (The Minotaur and the Horse)”, 1935, Pencil on Paper, Museum Picasso, Paris, France

Picasso never committed to a specific explanation of his symbolism: “…this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”

Years after the completion of Guernica, Picasso was still questioned time and time again about the meaning of the bull and other images in the mural. In exasperation he stated emphatically: “These are animals, massacred animals. That’s all as far as I’m concerned…” But he did reiterate the painting’s obvious anti-war sentiment: “My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art.”

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “Night Fishing at Antibes”, 1939, Oil on Canvas, 205.8 x 345.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Picasso spent the months just before the outbreak of the Second World War at Antibcs on the Mediterranean. Here he painted this large composition, which is an exception among his works.

At the center is a boat with two fishermen spearing fish by the light of two gas lamps. This central motif is framed by others: at the right we see two girls standing on the breakwater, one of the girls is holding onto her bicycle while licking an ice-cream cone. At the upper left we can recognize the old town of Antibes; in the center above there is a bright moon in the sky. The work displays a range of colors that has never before appeared in Picasso’s paintings: dark blues and violets are contrasted with various shades of green, and this curious dark triad is brightened by a few yellow accents – which gives it a ghost-like quality.

This painting is exceptional in Picasso’s work, both as a nocturnal scene and for its ghostly colors; it is also unusual in that the artist had rarely before attempted to combine figure and landscape – a combination which is particularly convincing here. The freedom of the composition is in curious contrast with the rigorous architecture of Guernica, so that at first sight the work seems a brilliant improvisation. But closer scrutiny reveals that it, too, has been carefully constructed and organized, and that in its details it recalls many earlier paintings. Like Three Musicians, this work sums up and at the same time marks the end of a period.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “Dying Bull”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 33.7 x 55.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Picasso’s father took him to see his first bullfight in 1889, when he was only nine years old. The spectacle so impressed him that he made it the subject of his very first painting that same year. In 1934 Picasso again took up the subject in an extensive series of drawings, prints, and paintings in which the choreography of the corrida became a metaphor for life and death. Here, Picasso focuses solely on the agony of the dying bull, eliminating the spectators, horses, and matador.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, “Elergy of Ihpetonga”, Lithograph, 1954

This rare and exquisite lithograph was one of four ink wash drawings executed by Picasso on lithographic transfer paper and printed by Mourlot Freres. This is from the English edition of 64 published in New York by The Noonday Press in 1954 for “Elegy of Ihpetonga and Masks of Ashes” by Yvan Goll.

Ihpetonga was the name given by the Canarsie Indians to the part of Brooklyn now known as Columbia Heights. Printed on Arches wove paper with deckle edges, the sheet measures 13 x 9 7/8 inches (330 x 251 mm). The lithograph was issued by the publisher tipped (mounted at the top corners) onto a support sheet of black paper. Not signed.