Max Jacob

MAX JACOB (Quimper, Brittany, 1876 - Drancy concentration camp, 1944).
View of Colliure, 1943.
Sepia ink and watercolor.
Signed in the middle right area. Dated and located in the lower right area.
Measurements: 20 x 26 cm; 39'5 x 45'5 cm (frame).
Max Jacob was a multidisciplinary artist, poet, playwright and painter. He was a friend of Pablo Picasso, and the influence of this one motivated him to abandon his studies of Law to dedicate himself to the art. Apollinaire, Modigliani and Juan Gris would be some of the other artists he met in the popular Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre and who would influence his work, both literary and pictorial. Of Jewish origin, he was a man with an intense spiritual life. Born into a non-practicing family, he would end up converting to Christianity and living, since 1936, in the town of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, a practically monastic life, in the abbey of Fleury. Despite this, a few months before the liberation of Paris, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Drancy concentration camp, where he died five days later, a few hours before his final deportation to Auschwitz. This intense spiritual life is reflected in his poetic and plastic work. The latter would evolve towards an increasingly intense synthetism, which owes much to cubist painting, but which in his case has little of analytical and includes, instead, a strong mystical charge.