PRESS KIT BLAISE CENDRARS AT THE HEART OF ARTS 16th November 2014 to 1st March 2015 Opening night Saturday 15th November 2014 at 6pm INTRODUCTION.......................................................................... 2 EXHIBITION PLAN ....................................................................... 4 EXHIBITION GUIDE ..................................................................... 5 VISUALS FOR THE PRESS .............................................................. 12 PRACTICAL INFORMATION .......................................................... 19 CONCEPTION AND DEVELOPPEMENT ............................................ 20 AROUND THE EXHIBITION ........................................................... 23 A SEASON AT THE HEART OF ARTS WITH BLAISE CENDRARS……………. 25 1 Rue des Musées 33 CH-2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds T + 41 32 967 60 77 F + 41 32 722 07 63 [email protected] www.mbac.ch INTRODUCTION Novels and books of memories like L'or (Gold) or Bourlinguer established Blaise Cendrars (1887 – 1961) as the ultimate writer of adventures and travels. But few people know he was also one of the great adventurers of modern art. Amongst the thousand life stories he has told, the least extraordinary were not those he dedicated to painting, music, cinema, graphic design, ballet, advertising or African art. This well-kept secret has remained so for years, mostly because Cendrars always preferred the excitement and fire of new beginnings to patient developments: he let others tap the opportunities he pioneered. In accordance with the name he chose for himself, his desire was always to rise again where one least expected him to, where a new breath could revive the embers (braises) of creation hidden beneath the cinders (cendres). Each of the twelve sections of the exhibition is tied to one of these successive or parallel lives of Blaise Cendrars: first of all we meet a young writer in the process of learning, tormented and haunted by Symbolism. In order to tell his story of travel and exile, he invented a new lyricism and revolutionised the art of the book with Sonia Delaunay. A prolific poet, his "elastic poems" appeared in avant-garde journals all over Europe. They enter in a dialogue with the works of Chagall, Robert Delaunay, La Fresnaye or Modigliani. Following the trauma of war, in which he enlisted as a volunteer. He returned in 1915 with his right arm amputated. Yet like a phoenix he rose again, this time a "left handed writer", the prophet of a "profound today" in which the magic of primitive art and the wonders of the modern world coexist. Always one to pick up on new trends, Blaise Cendrars became an elusive actor of the art world, a catalyst for talents and ideas that seemed to wait for him alone to bring them out into the light. He dreamt of music with Honegger, Milhaud, Satie and Stravinsky, of cinema with Fernand Léger and Abel Gance, or even advertising and typography with poster designer Cassandre. However this vibrant artistic activity became paradoxically less significant as the writer and reporter achieved more and more success in the 1930s; until a new metamorphosis of the writer into an author of memoirs that are "memoirs without being memoirs" brought it back to life as subject material for literary work, transfigured in "the dark room of imagination". The exhibition is thus a rich journey, a crossroads of the arts and proposes through the more than 400 works, audiovisual extracts and rare documents exposed, a constant dialogue with Cendrars' writings. EXHIBITION CURATOR Gabriel Umstätter 2 Rue des Musées 33 CH-2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds T + 41 32 967 60 77 F + 41 32 722 07 63 [email protected] www.mbac.ch With the partnership of the Swiss Literary Archives (Swiss National Library) and Miriam Cendrars. LENDERS Bibliothèque Nationale Suisse ( Fonds Blaise Cendrars, Archives littéraires suisses), Berne; Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie (Musées d’art et d’histoire), Genève ; Bibliothèque du Conservatoire de musique, Genève ; Bibliothèque Jean Bonna, Genève ; Bibliothèque de la Ville, La Chaux-de-Fonds; Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, Neuchâtel ; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle, Paris; Cinémathèque française, Paris; Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne ; Collections d’art de la Confédération, Berne ; Collection François Ditesheim, Neuchâtel; Dansmuseet, Stockholm; Fondation Beyeler, Bâle; Fluxum Foundation, Genève ; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Kunstmuseum, Soleure; Kunstmuseum – Fondation Im Obersteg, Bâle; Lobsters Films ; Matik SA, Etagnières; Merzbacher Kunststiftung; MK2, Paris ; M.T. Abraham Foundation, Paris ; Musées d’art et d’histoire, Genève; Musée d’histoire naturelle, La Chaux-de-Fonds ; Musée du Petit Palais, Genève; Musée Picasso, Paris; Pathé, Paris ; SKF Machine Tools Competence Center, Fribourg; Société des amis du Musée des beaux-arts, La Chaux-de- Fonds; Collections et fondations privées 3 Rue des Musées 33 CH-2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds T + 41 32 967 60 77 F + 41 32 722 07 63 [email protected] www.mbac.ch EXHIBITION PLAN Room 8 – Introduction: Lives and faces of Blaise Cendrars Room 9 – 1. Before Cendrars Room 10/11 – 2. In the cage of the meridians Room 12 – 3. Publishing and the avant-garde Room 13 – 4. Elastic poems – the poet and his painters Room 14 – 5. I Killed 6. The Eubage and the birth of the left-handed writer 7. The ABC of Cinema 8. Unnatural Sonnets Room 15 – 9. The Creation of the World 10. A dangerous life 11. Seven Wonders of the Modern World 12. The dark room of the imagination Epilogue. By zero latitude Entrance Hall – Under Orion's Sign 4 Rue des Musées 33 CH-2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds T + 41 32 967 60 77 F + 41 32 722 07 63 [email protected] www.mbac.ch EXHIBITION GUIDE 1. Before Cendrars In his childhood, Frederic Sauser, who was yet to become Blaise Cendrars, moved frequently between La Chaux-de- Fonds, Naples, Bern and Neuchatel, following his father, whose career as an entrepreneur fluctuated in diversity as much as in success. Such instability affected his mother's health. She found solace in teaching her youngest to read and play the piano. A gifted organist, he dreamt for a while of becoming a composer. But his passion for books soon took over: taking root in the illustrated natural history albums of his mother, it was set ablaze when he discovered his father's library and, later, the Imperial Library of Saint Petersburg. Three years spent in the Russian city doing an apprenticeship with a Swiss jeweller put the finishing touches to a cosmopolitan and disorganised education. He returned from Russia in 1907 with a will to write and study medicine, amongst other subjects, at the University of Bern. Did his interest in psychiatry lead him to visit the Waldau Institute and to meet outsider artist Adolf Wolfli, still unknown at the time, and who bears a striking resemblance with the hero of future novel Moravagine? What we do know for sure, is that he met Fela Poznanska while at university. The young Polish student would become his companion in the first Bohemian years of his life, and inspired a few poems still very marked by Symbolism. This influence is also notable in his tastes regarding visual arts, as testified by the description of the theatre sets for a play that was never published. 2. In the cage of the merdidians After several months of misery and wanderings between Brussels, Paris and Saint Petersburg, he met up with his partner Fela in New York. This is where one can truly say that Blaise Cendrars was born. The isolating and discouraging night of Easter 1912 inspired a new poem, Les Pâques. (Easter in New York), published upon his return to Paris that same year, under the name Blaise Cendrars. The doors to the Parisian avant-garde rapidly opened up to him. He met painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay while visiting the poet Apollinaire. Their friendship and passionate discussions led to the writing of La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France), "first simultaneous book", a two metre long dialogue of free verse and colourful rhythms. Did Cendrars ever travel on the Trans-Siberian? His famous retort to Pierre Lazareff avoided him both to answer and to be asked further questions: "why do you care ? Didn't you all take the trip thanks to me?" Nobody ever asked him, however, whether he and his parents had visited the famous "Trans-Siberian Panorama" of the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900 … Either way, Cendrars was still dreaming about the railway ten years later in America: he brought back timetables and line maps from his trip, which he used to illustrate his third great poem, Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (Panama - Or The Adventures Of My Seven Uncles) – a work that expands his travelling legend to his family and the whole world. 5 Rue des Musées 33 CH-2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds T + 41 32 967 60 77 F + 41 32 722 07 63 [email protected] www.mbac.ch 3. Publishing and the avant-garde The fame of Cendrars soon expanded to reach an international avant-gardist audience: thanks to the connections of Apollinaire and the Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien is presented in Saint Petersburg and Berlin; articles and poems are featured in Montjoie! and Les Soirees de Paris, as well as German expressionist periodicals (Der Sturm, Die Aktion). The war did not stop the international circulation of his work: sometimes unbeknownst to him, his poems continued to appear in various movement periodicals: Dadaist (Cabaret Voltaire), expressionist (Der Sturm), futurist or post-futurist (Noi, Valori Plastici). These are the same Italian futurists that Cendrars taunts in Le lotissement du ciel (Sky: memoirs) in 1949. Even then he is far from having forgotten the rivalries between the various avant-garde movements of the time … After the war, however, Cendrars grew increasingly wary of organised group adventures.