Ubu Painter. Alfred Jarry and the Arts

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Image courtesy of Museu Picasso.

The first performance of Ubu Roi, by Alfred Jarry, in 1898, was a scandal. It dealt with an exaggerated and cruelly comic character that would later become a myth: “King of Poland, that is to say, from nowhere,” an “henorme” tyrant with greed, an infamous glutton and his “merdra,” which lets out all six letters from the first line. Thanks to this character, Jarry became famous at a very young age and even became a kind of celebrity. He adopted, in the most unforeseen circumstances, the role of Ubu with his accent, his extravagances, his manners, etc. That same year he wrote Gestes et pinions du Dr. Faustroll, pataphysicien, a work that would not appear published until 1911. In it, Jarry defined “Pataphysics” as “the science that is added to metaphysics, either in itself or outside itself, and extends beyond it, as far as the latter is from physics [...] Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions that attributes to symbolic mental lines the properties of objects described by their virtuality.” When Jarry died in the Charité hospital in 1907 at the age of thirty-four, he left behind a dense literary body of work. Although he wrote about painting with great difficulty, Jarry was passionate about it, even creating his own works in this field—something that did not fail to attract the attention of Guillaume Apollinaire.

In addition to the woodcuts with which he illustrated his publications, Jarry is known for numerous drawings and some oil paintings. Among the artists who became interested in him to the point of becoming friends were Henri Rousseau, Paul Gauguin and Charles Filiger. He also maintained friendships with the artists Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, as well as Félix Vallotton, who illustrated some of his works. After Jarry's death, another artistic group took over, which included Jean Puy and Georges Rouault, who illustrated several books by Ambroise Vollard about Ubu.  The Surrealists maintained a deep and ambitious relationship with the character of Ubu and assigned him a privileged place in their iconography.

The exhibition not only gathers together the works of Alfred Jarry, but also puts on the table the transcendence of his legacy, which is maintained to this day. It brings together the work of the French playwright and that of the artists of his immediate circle such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Charles Filiger and the Nabís. It includes a special section that deals with the impact of the playwright on the surrealist generation: André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner and Dora Maar. The exhibition also dedicates a chapter to contemporary artists such as Robert Wilson and William Kentridge who explore the validity of the themes that Jarry dealt with in his work with despotic, corrupt and totalitarian characters.

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