Guillaume Apollinaire, In the evocation he wrote of Alfred Jarry in November 1909, after his death, he did not fail to mention the revolver that he frantically drew, even shooting at “a Spanish sculptor” with perverse intentions.
This same revolver was one of the most valuable … fetishes that Picasso, who was a fervent admirer of the author of Ubú Rey, cherished. He grotesque character who enters the stage pronouncing “shit” (sic) extends its scent and its influence in the heroic avant-garde as if its incarnation of the indecency of political power and the revelation of the absurdity of life were necessary symptoms to get through absolutely worrying times. The “anti-fascist” appropriation of this character is not anecdotal, as shown in Picasso’s engraving “Sueño y lie de Franco”.
Emmanuel Guigon had already produced an impressive exhibition at the IVAM at the end of 2000 entitled “Alfred Jarry”. From nabis to pataphysics, and now returns to this passion for “the science of imaginary solutions”, extending the shadow of Ubú to a video by William Kentdridge or paying attention to the different montages of this mythical work carried out, among others, by Els Joglars or Bob Wilson who, in the Aljub de Es Baluard (2022), generated a brilliant rereading of Miró’s “ubuesque” puppets in a denunciation explicit. of totalitarian barbarism.
I despise tyrants
Member of the very select Collège Pataphysique since 1948, Miró paid splendid tributes to Ubú, bringing his contempt for tyrants to the maximum expressive peak in the collaboration he made with the La Claca company for ‘Mori el Merma’ (1978), which, exhibited in one of the rooms of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, continues to impress as warnings, in a touch of black humor, that our destiny can be strictly eschatological.
In a display case is the manuscript of ‘Actes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll’ open to the last page on which, after the word ‘FIN’ and the author’s signature, we read: “This book will not be published in its entirety. until the author has acquired sufficient experience to savor the beauties it contains. Since this cycling writer began pedaling, there has been no shortage of those who have attempted to keep up with his pace, as confusing as it may be. He began as an art critic, fiercely defending artists then completely marginalized like Gaugin, the customs officer Rousseau or Filiger, establishing, in the last decade of the 19th century, friendly relations with Vuillard and Bonnard.
In pictures, different proposals for the mounting of the Jarry exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona
In 1894 Jarry published the magazine “L’Ymagier”, in which he presented both the contemporary artists he admired and the prints of Epinal, images of Dürer or exotic woodcuts from Indochina, fixing his obsessive gaze on the emergence of the monstrous.
One of Jarry’s great admirers was Ambroise Vollard, in the gallery of which poets and painters fraternized in glorious parties, sedimenting an irreverent spirit which still pulsated in the publications that Picasso’s former gallery owner produced from 1917, denouncing the war and colonial policy through Ubú.
“The Initiator and the Illuminator”
Jarry, described by Apollinaire as “a man of letters like few others”, endowed with a joviality where lyricism becomes satirical, is resurrected in a surrealist tone as the “initiator and illuminator” of the adventures programmatically established by Breton.
Max Ernst He represented “Ubú Imperator” as a strange summit, both “human” and architectural; a spinning tower, but on the verge of falling to the ground, while Dora Maar paints a disturbing portrait of the character transformed into an animal who carries the bad fate of this viral pangolin of pandemic times.
The pataphysical echoes of “sublime licentious” They resonated in the “outsider art” of Dubuffet or in those amusing dolls made by Enrico Baj with Meccano parts which maintained the “Ubuesque” conspiracy in the turbulent sixties. The spiral of Ubú’s “creative stomach” continues to hypnotize, like Duchamp’s “anemic cinema”, and perhaps challenges us to think about what we are swallowing in our “shit” age.
Jarry’s jokes, considered by Fernando Arrabal like a kind of Noah of modern floods, they have an untimely tone, echoes of a bohemia dissolved like opium smoke and, at the same time, they seem to fit, in a delirious way, with a present full of geeky politicians, saintly artists and spectators who appreciate new versions of Manolo the one with the bass drum.
‘Ubú Painter: Alfred Jarry and the arts’
Collective. Picasso Museum. Barcelona. Rue Montcada, 15-23. Commissioner: Emmanuel Guigon. Until April 5, 2026. four stars.
Ubu returns as the repressed, disconcerting us, behaving like a chives or perverse-polymorphic grandfather, that is to say strictly and regressively “childish” in the era of post-pataphysical sermons or, to try to clarify things, artistic processes that bore the sheep. In this grotesque character they are reflected, almost grotesquely, our “crappy” mediocrities.
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