NEW YORK, NY.- The Morgan Library & Museum is currently presenting Blaise Cendrars (1887– 1961): Poetry Is Everything, the first American exhibition to explore Cendrars’s achievements as a radical poet, publisher, and instigator at the heart of European modernism. Opened on May 26 and on view through September 24, 2023, the exhibition is anchored in La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913), Cendrars’s monumental collaboration with the Ukrainian- born painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1885–1979). The focused installation traces Cendrars’s subsequent collaborations with figures in the visual arts, music, ballet, film, and graphic design, in his attempts to articulate what was at stake for poetry in the context of new media and the profound transformations of modern life in the years surrounding the First World War.

An intrepid spirit, Cendrars left his Swiss homeland at the age of seventeen to explore Saint Petersburg, New York, Paris, São Paulo, and beyond. Born Frédéric Louis Sauser, he wrote his first major poem in 1912 in New York, where he transformed into Blaise Cendrars, a name that evoked his aesthetic goals: to burn and to create art from the ashes of his life. He came to prominence among the Parisian avant-garde as the author of La prose du Transsibérien—a freewheeling travel poem self-published as a vertical arrangement of polychrome typography with imagery by Delaunay-Terk. Written in a colloquial style, with virtually no punctuation, the poem, narrated by a man named Blaise, is a breathless flow of thought, memory, and imagination set on a train trip from Russia to China. The accordion-bound artist’s book, which measures more than six feet long, presents Cendrars’s radical verse in more than two dozen colored typefaces parallel with Delaunay- Terk’s abstract designs, which were rendered in gouache using stencils. Advertised as the “first simultaneous book,” its publication furthered ideas about the expressive properties of color initiated by Delaunay-Terk and her husband Robert Delaunay—that the simultaneous perception of contrasting hues generates rhthym, motion, emotion, and depth.

Cendrars inscribed the copy of La prose on view to one of the Delaunays’ rivals—the American abstract painter and cofounder of Synchromism, Morgan Russell (1886–1953). The copy came to the Morgan in 2021 in an extraordinary donation from the art historian Gail Levin, an early authority on Russell and Delaunay-Terk.

As the installation demonstrates, Cendrars’s innovations as a publisher and experimental book designer continued in the years following La prose due Transsibérien, exemplified in Le Panama, ou Les aventures de mes sept oncles (Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles), an imaginative book-length poem (arguably the first conceptual artist’s book) designed to resemble the Union Pacific timetables, with train maps and advertisements incorporated into the text.

The exhibition highlights Cendrars’s refusal to ally himself with one school of art or art form. Instead, he drew inspiration from the outlier artists associated with the La Ruche studios in Montparnasse, including Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Alexander Archipenko. In 1915, Cendrars lost his right forearm fighting for France during the Second Battle of Champagne—an experience that pervades the prose and poetry he created while recovering from his injuries and learning to write with his left hand.

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), J’ai tué (I Have Killed), illustrations by Fernand Léger (1881–1955). Paris: À la Belle édition, [1918]. The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2015; PML 196205. © Blaise Cendrars/Succession Cendrars, © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photography by Janny Chiu, 2023.

These works were issued in small editions, illustrated by the Mexican painter Ángel Zárraga and fellow veterans Moïse Kisling and Fernand Léger. Cendrars would go on to create his most significant collaborations with Léger, including a deluxe edition of Cendrars’s bizarre film scenario, La fin du monde, filmée par l’ange N.-D. (The End of the World, Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame). The two friends, along with Darius Milhaud, also collaborated on La création du monde (The Creation of the World), a production for the Swedish Ballet that lays bare how White modernists distorted and appropriated the creative expressions of Black people. The program and mise-en-scène for the ballet are on view in this exhibition, which also documents Cendrars’s collaborations with Jean Cocteau to promote avant-garde composers, including Igor
Stravinsky, Erik Satie, and Milhaud’s group of musicians—Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre—known as The Six.

Other highlights of Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry Is Everything include illustrations by the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral, whose career Cendrars championed in Paris. The exhibition also points to his involvement in film and advertising as potential poetic mediums, featuring his collaboration with the graphic designer A. M. Cassandre, Le spectacle est dans la rue (The Spectacle is in the Streets). Excerpts from Abel Gance’s 1923 silent film La roue (The Wheel), for which Cendrars served as Assistant Director, are also projected in the gallery.

Though long acknowledged by scholars as a catalyzing force in the explosive artistic innovations of the early twentieth century, Cendrars’s works remain largely unknown in the United States. His use of democratized language and attunement to the everyday experiences of modern life continue to reverberate in postwar American poetry, through his works’ direct influence on the Beat Generation, particularly Allen Ginsberg, and poets of the New York Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), La fin du monde, filmée par l’ange N.-D. (The End of the World, Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame). Illustrations by Fernand Léger (1881– 1955). Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1919. The Morgan Library & Museum, PML 198752. Photography by Janny Chiu, 2023. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. School. English translations of Cendrars’s poetry featured in the gallery, including the entirety of The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France, are by Ron Padgett.

Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum, said, “Gail Levin’s gift to the Morgan of the tour-de-force livre d’artiste, La prose du Transsibérien, strengthens the Morgan’s mission to illuminate the interplay of visual and textual creativity across time. The exhibition Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry Is Everything allows us to consider a figure at the center of a revolutionary moment in the arts much like our own, when artists were challenged to rethink creativity in a period shaped by technology, new media, and conflict.”

The exhibition is curated by Sheelagh Bevan, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator, Department of Printed Books & Bindings, at the Morgan Library & Museum.

The Morgan Library & Museum
Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry Is Everything
May 26th, 2023 – September 24th, 2023