Join us for a tour of the exhibition Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being at the Morgan Library and Museum led by Sheelagh Bevan, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator for Printed Books & Bindings. The tour will take place on Thursday March 12th at 6:00 pm. Please meet at the staff entrance of the Morgan Library and Museum located at 24 east 37th St.
The subversive works and personality of the French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) played a crucial role in the transition from the nineteenth-century avant-garde to the emergent modernist movements of the early twentieth century. An inspiration for Dada and Surrealism and a touchstone for the Theatre of the Absurd, Jarry is most renowned for his play Ubu roi and the legend of its sensational premiere in 1896. To his contemporaries, however—figures such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Oscar Wilde, and Guillaume Apollinaire—Jarry’s prestige extended beyond theater. He applied his genius to poetry, the novel, and operettas; he was a graphic artist, an actor, a puppeteer, a critic, and the inventor of an imaginary science called pataphysics. For Jarry, engagements with technology, popular imagery, and the performance of everyday life could constitute works of art.
Some of the many ideas and innovations he brought to multiple mediums also found expression in his maverick book and magazine designs. Jarry was one of the first writers to experiment with visual typography. His concept of authorship and unorthodox approach to illustration, employing anachronism, assembling, collage, and appropriation, anticipated practices at play in modern and contemporary artists’ publications. By exploring his enterprises in print, this exhibition contributes to an ever-broadening appreciation of Jarry’s role in the radical upheaval in the arts more than a century ago.
https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/alfred-jarry
