Presentation and Visit to the Exhibition Ubú Painter: Alfred Jarry and the Arts at the Museu Picasso | Activity
The Museu Picasso invites us to the presentation of this exhibition, by Emmanuel Guigon, director of the museum and curator of the exhibition, and María González Menéndez, associate curator.
The session will serve to share the broad lines of the project and offer interpretation clues to navigate the creative universe of Alfred Jarry.
With provocation, humor and a sharp lucidity, Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) created in Ubu Roi a universal figure: Ubu – grotesque, violent and absurd, a distorting mirror of power and humanity. A poet, dramatist and illustrator, linked to the Nabis painters, Jarry made his character into a lifelong adventure and aesthetic that made its mark on modernity. Jarry had a decisive influence on the Avant-Gardes. Picasso, fascinated by the subversive universe of Ubu, reinvented him in his Dream and Lie of Franco (1937) as a symbol of the modern dictator. The surrealists, like André Breton, Michel Leiris, Max Ernst and Joan Miró, recognized him as a precursor. In 1948, the Collège de Pataphysique continued his legacy, turning his “science of imaginary solutions” into a laboratory of freedom.
The exhibition brings together works, books, graphic work and drawings by Jarry, together with pieces by artists in his circle, such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Charles Filiger, Georges Rouault and the Cranberries. It also includes the mark made by the dramatist on surrealism and on artists in the Collège de Pataphysique, like Jean Dubuffet and Enrico Bajas well as contemporary work like that of William Kentridge and a final section devoted to the reception of his work in Catalonia.
