Max Jacob

Max Jacob (also: Jacob, born July 12, 1876 in Quimper, † March 5, 1944 in a camp in Drancy ) was a French poet, painter and writer.

Life

Jacob spent his youth in the western French city of Quimper. In Jacobs fictional autobiography, the proposed section as a preface of his novel Saint Matorel, he describes himself born and went to sea " five years as a sailor " as " on the border of Brittany ".

After that Jacob settled in Paris and decided in 1897 for an artistic career. He often visited the Montmartre, Montparnasse lived in the neighborhood, where he shared on the Boulevard Voltaire with Pablo Picasso a room. By Guillaume Apollinaire, he met Picasso know, through him, he made ​​contact with Jean Cocteau, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who portrayed him several times. He was also with the later politician and resistance fighter Jean Moulin, who was known under the pseudonym Romanin time, friends.

In 1915, Max Jacob converted from Judaism to Catholicism. These induced him in his own words a vision:

Max Jacobs artistic work represents an important link between the symbolists and surrealists, clearly that is issued, for example, in his prose poems Le cornet à dés (1917 ) and in his paintings, in 1930 and 1938 in New York City.

After 1921-1928, a reclusive life in the Benedictine monastery of Saint- Benoît- sur -Loire done some traveling and briefly detained in Paris, he returned in 1936 back there.

On February 24, 1944, the Gestapo arrested him after attending the morning mass and took him to the prison of Orleans. Previously, his brother, his sister and her husband had already been deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. Max Jacob was later taken to the transit camp Drancy, where he died on March 5, 1944 of pneumonia. First buried in Ivry -sur -Seine, his body was transferred at the instance of his friends Jean Cassou, Pablo Picasso and René Iché after the war ended in 1949 at the cemetery of Saint -Benoît- sur -Loire.

Works

Writings

• Advice to a Young Poet. Translated by Friedhelm Kemp. Alexander, Berlin, 1985, ISBN 3-923854-16-1.