Poetry and painting at the Blaise Cendrar Gallery… Blood saturated with starlight
The Big Apple is a good place for innovation. The Swiss poet Frederic Louis Sauzer had good reason to restart his career here in the spring of 1912. At the age of 25, he arrived in New York Harbor empty-handed. He was almost broke after trying his luck in Russia and Brazil, and could barely feed himself.
On Sunday 7 April 1912, which was Easter Sunday at the time, when he was denied entry to the public library, the young poet went to the First Presbyterian Church in Greenwich Village, from which an officiating priest had excommunicated him after Sawser could not pay a donation. .
That day he went home furious, and slept with difficulty, but it was in this mixture of anger and exhaustion that the young poet finally began to write and ended up writing his landmark modernist poem “Easter in New York,” which is a collection of The verses that have become a national anthem at the city level.
Exhibits (The Morgan Library and Museum)
New York City gave him a new life, and Sawser gave himself a new name there resembling a phoenix, and from then on he was called Blaise Cendrar, a name meaning poet of fire and ashes.
One of the most eye-catching and dazzling shows this summer is the exhibition Blaise Cendrar: Poetry Is Everything, which is being held at The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan, New York. In rich colors printed.
And in case you haven’t heard of Cendrar before, you’re not alone, but it is likely that you were introduced to his good friend Guillaume Apollinaire in the introductory class of French poetry, which is a more famous example of the school of modern alienation.
Success Cendrars
But Cendrar was a dominant presence in modern French arts and literature, collaborating with artist Fernand Legere, director Abel Gans, composer Darius Milhaud, and just about every avant-garde (a literary term referring to experimental or innovative persons or works specifically in relation to art, culture, politics, philosophy, and literature). ) in Paris a century ago, and he also had a passion for advertisements and commercial displays, which were a novelty at the time, as he considered them equal in importance to poetry.
The Morgan exhibition capitalizes on Cendrar’s passion for multimedia, particularly in the masterpiece at the heart of this show: “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France,” an unrestrained poetic journey with almost no punctuation. Dated 1913, published by Cendrar himself on an accordion-folded booklet 6.5 feet long, framed in partly colored abstract frames by the great Franco-Ukrainian artist Sonia Delaunay-Terke.
The cover of one of Sander’s most important books bears drawings by the French-Ukrainian artist Sonia Delaunay Turk (The Morgan Library – Blaise Sander)
Cendrar was born in 1887 to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother, but he was barely in his teens when he set out for life. Both in “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France,” and in later interviews, he spoke of his youth as an adventure. Interestingly, he seems to have witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1905, although it is not certain if he actually shoveled coal on Chinese locomotives at the time, as biographies have often been exaggerated, this is a classic case of modernism wanting to combine art and life.
Sendrar’s poetry seems similar to the school of the famous American poet Walter Whitman Jr., who is considered one of the most influential poets in the history of the United States in its breadth and glamor, but it was more intense and intense, as it included the liberation of the writings of the French poet Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud, who was famous in the symbolist movement He significantly influenced modern poetry, his love of adventure and travel, and then stripped of all these feelings, leaving something completely strange and modern.
A few months after his breakthrough in New York, Cendrar returned to Europe again, this time with a new name and a new sense of confidence. He printed the poem “Easter in New York” at his own expense in Paris, but no copies were sold. At the beginning of 1913, he read his poetry in the apartment of his friend, French poetry Apollinaire, and there he met the artist Robert Delaunay and his wife, the artist Sonia Delaunay, and at that time the latter thought of collaborating with him, and indeed we were able together in “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France.” Produced by one of the greatest publications of contemporary art, it was a rhythmic, fast-moving experiment of painting and poetry that constituted, in their words, “the first simultaneous book”.
The Morgan Museum and Library acquired one of the few dozen surviving copies in 2021, and a wonderful digital service is available to the public on the museum’s website in which all the paintings are enlarged to see them clearly, and a full translation of the poem into English by Ron Padgett is also available.
The exhibition includes 22 paintings, each showing Cendrar’s free verse in 30 different fonts (laise Cendrars/Succession Cendrars).
This work of art includes 22 panels, under each of which shows Cinderar’s free verse appearing in 30 different fonts. At the top right, above the poem’s title, is a replica of the Michelin map of Russian Railways. The poem is about a very bad poet named Blaise, who is He crosses Siberia and northern China with Jane, whom he meets in a bar and describes as an “innocent flower”.
Throughout “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France” audiences will find references to the war, as a year after its publication, the Swiss poet joined the French Foreign Legion (a military service branch of the French army), where he was lost. Cendrar’s right arm at the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915, and while convalescing and teaching himself to write with his left hand, he befriended Légier, a fellow artist specializing in urban retail, who was also a veteran, having nearly died from a mustard gas attack in the trenches. Argonne Forest.
Illustration featuring Blaise Cendrar’s collaboration with artist Fernand Legere (Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)
The exhibition at The Morgan includes several works by Cendrar and Léger, including a 1918 book called J’ai tué (I killed), in which Léger’s winding cubic gears and cylinders are combined.
There was another strong collaboration in the 1920s, when Cendrar traveled to Brazil and met Liègere’s greatest student there, Tarsila do Amaral. The Swiss poet joined the latter and Osvald de Andrade on a journey from São Paulo to the Brazilian interior, where he painted Amaral of the Hills. and the colonial mining towns that later appeared in Cendrar’s book Feuilles de Route. It is no exaggeration to say that this was the journey through which modern Brazilian art was born, as Andrade wrote shortly thereafter a historical manifesto of a national art liberated from imagination. European, while Tarsila combined African, indigenous and European influences into an entirely new Brazilian art.
Drawing by the Russian artist Chagall accompanying a poem by Cendrar (The Morgan Museum and Library – Blaise Sander)
True, Poetry Is Everything is the smallest of the four shows of 19th and 20th century art at The Morgan this summer, but it is the most exciting of them all.
The famous American novelist Henry Miller wrote about Cinder’s poetry and stories, saying: “Everything in him is written in blood, but it is blood saturated with the light of the stars.”
The exhibition Blaise Cendrar (1887-1961): Poetry Is Everything is on view through September 24 at The Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Neighborhood at 36th Street, Manhattan, New York.
The New York Times Service.
“Everything with him is written in blood, but it is blood saturated with the light of the stars.”
Famous American novelist Henry Miller on Cinder
