Max Jacob (born Max Alexandre)

Max Jacob was an artist and poet. He was also an important interlocutor in Montmartre, where he facilitated connectionsbetween members of the avant-garde community of artists and writers in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In 1894 Jacob left his native Brittany for Paris. There, in 1901, he befriended Pablo Picasso, teaching him French and introducing him to Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire, in turn, introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. Picasso’s painting of Jacob (Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany), executed in spring 1907, is just one of many portraits of the poet by members of the prewar Parisian community of artists, including Juan Gris, Louis Marcoussis, and Amedeo Modigliani. Jacob lived among these painters in Montmartre at the Bateau Lavoir, a studio building home to numerous avant-garde artists and intellectuals.

Best known for Le Cornet à dés, a collection of prose poems published in 1917, Jacob developed a new type of poetry that incorporated fragmented narratives and scrambled diction—inspirations drawn from Cubism’s aesthetic principles. Jacob collaborated with Picasso on the book Saint Matorel, published in 1911 by dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler; the four etchings by the artist are regarded as marking the transition to what scholars term analytic Cubism. In addition to his position as one of the key poets among the intellectuals constituting the artistic circle around Picasso, Jacob was also a visual artist. His earliest works, such as his drawing of Picasso as an acrobat, date to 1905. The Parisian gallery Bernheim-Jeune organized Jacob’s first exhibition in March 1920 and Galerie Georges Petit hosted another solo exhibition eleven years later.

In 1921, struggling with alcoholism and wishing to leave Paris, Jacob relocated to Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in central France. A devout Catholic, Jacob lived there in semi-monastic seclusion for two long periods: from 1921 to 1928 and again from 1936 to 1944, the year of his detention by the National Socialist regime. He died within a month of internment in a concentration camp in Drancy in 1944 due to complications resulting from pneumonia. Today the majority of his artworks belong to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quimper, France. The Association des Amis de Max Jacob, established to preserve Jacob’s memory and work, was established in 1949 and remains active today.