Blaise Cendrars, 1887-1961
27 May - 21 Dec 2015
Poet and adventurer
Curator : Mnam/Cci / Jean-Michel Bouhours, Nathalie Ernoult
Blaise Cendrars had already travelled the world before settling in Paris in 1912. Poet of urban modernity, of a world turned upside-down, he moved among the artistic and literary avant-garde of the day: among his friends were Guillaume Apollinaire, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Léopold Survage and Sonia Delaunay, with whom he produced, in 1913, the first “simultaneous book”, Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France. Blaise Cendrars shared with many of his painter friends an artistic approach based on the synthesis of colour, poetry, music and sound. He was thus fascinated by Léopold Survage’s attempt to make an animated film from the drawings Rythmes colorés, representing simple geometrical forms decomposing and recreating a cosmogony based upon a translucent spectrum. After the war, he became an enthusiast for the emerging 20th-century art of cinema, which inspired him to new literary and graphic forms, as exemplified in La Fin du monde filmée par l’ange N. D., published in 1919 with illustrations by Fernand Léger. The call of adventure prompted him to accept an invitation from the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, and in 1924 he embarked on the steamer Formose for a voyage to Brazil, “This Utopialand, a country that belongs to no-one”, a journey he recorded in the poetic travelogue Feuilles de route, illustrated by his friend Tarsila do Amaral. Jean-Michel Bouhours et Nathalie Ernoult, avec la collaboration de Sylvia Bozan
Curator : Mnam/Cci / Jean-Michel Bouhours, Nathalie Ernoult
Blaise Cendrars had already travelled the world before settling in Paris in 1912. Poet of urban modernity, of a world turned upside-down, he moved among the artistic and literary avant-garde of the day: among his friends were Guillaume Apollinaire, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Léopold Survage and Sonia Delaunay, with whom he produced, in 1913, the first “simultaneous book”, Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France. Blaise Cendrars shared with many of his painter friends an artistic approach based on the synthesis of colour, poetry, music and sound. He was thus fascinated by Léopold Survage’s attempt to make an animated film from the drawings Rythmes colorés, representing simple geometrical forms decomposing and recreating a cosmogony based upon a translucent spectrum. After the war, he became an enthusiast for the emerging 20th-century art of cinema, which inspired him to new literary and graphic forms, as exemplified in La Fin du monde filmée par l’ange N. D., published in 1919 with illustrations by Fernand Léger. The call of adventure prompted him to accept an invitation from the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, and in 1924 he embarked on the steamer Formose for a voyage to Brazil, “This Utopialand, a country that belongs to no-one”, a journey he recorded in the poetic travelogue Feuilles de route, illustrated by his friend Tarsila do Amaral. Jean-Michel Bouhours et Nathalie Ernoult, avec la collaboration de Sylvia Bozan