The third man, Max Jacob
At the beginning of the 20th century, there a fertile exchange of ideas between artists was unfolding. Paris was the place where most creative activity was emerging, not without a few battles, and often with stunning advances.
"And these two men who had come from abroad, driven by a pressing need to upend the real in their effort to bring about a new reality, hungry for the future, both living in the same destitution but rich with the same promises that fame eventually confirmed , came together in the extraordinary hotbed of creativity and avant-garde ventures that Paris had become at the turn of the century, emerging as the indisputable capital of modern art."[1] From 1905 to 1918, they wrote to each other often. The archives at the Musée Picasso-Paris covering their correspondence enable us to appreciate the power of the intense, irregular but loyal friendship that unfolded over the course of a difficult decade marked by the war.
The third man to share this close connection was Max Jacob, who described the poet affectionately as follows: "He turned around, roamed, looked, laughed again, became frightened."[2] Max Jacob had been close with Picasso since 1901. Later, beginning in 1905, after Picasso had struck up a friendship with Apollinaire, he evolved in the shadow of these two iconic figures. Jacob described the first time they met: "One morning, when I arrived as usual from Boulevard Barbès, Picasso, who I hadn't seen the night before, told me he had spent the evening at a bar on Rue d’Amsterdam with an extraordinary man, Guillaume Apollinaire, and that he would introduce him to me that very evening. So I saw Guillaume Apollinaire, who was quite impressive […] We shook hands and that very minute a three-way friendship began which lasted up until the day of Apollinaire's death."[3] Their mutual friendship led Max Jacob to publish several poems, one of which was dedicated to Picasso ("Le Cheval"), in the second issue of the magazine that Apollinaire launched in 1905, Les Lettres modernes.
[1] Picasso/Apollinaire, correspondance. Pierre Caizergues and Hélène Seckel, eds. Coedition, Gallimard (Art et artistes)/RMN, 1992, p. 5.
[2] Philippe Sollers, "Le meilleur ami de Picasso", Le Monde des livres, 29 December 1995.
[3] Max Jacob, 1927, quoted in the catalogue for the exhibition Max Jacob et Picasso, RMN, 1994. The show was held at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Quimper from June to September 1994 and at the Musée Picasso Paris from October to December 1994.
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Summary