As a child, Jarry filled notebooks with humorous sketches, poems, and short plays. The writings he produced by the age of thirteen already include themes of his adult works— scatology, the macabre, a zest for puns, and the scavenging of classical literature—as well as prototypes of later characters and plays. Illustrations figure in many of these early works.

As an adult, he personalized books as gestures of what he called “artistic sympathy.” Jarry drew directly on this plain binding he commissioned and inscribed to Catulle Mendès. In 1893, both Mendès and the writer Marcel Schwob had awarded Jarry a prize for his puppet play titled Guignol. This short work introduced a new character to the literary landscape named Père Ubu, who describes himself as a “great pataphysician.” Mendès’s thoughtful analysis of Ubu roi three years later helped to solidify Jarry’s reputation.

Pen and ink drawing and inscription to Catulle Mendès (1841–1909), ca. 1896. On Les minutes de sable mémorial (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894). Collection of Jean Bonna.

Jarry’s exposure to the writings of Marcel Schwob, Stéphane Mallarmé, and the visionary Comte de Lautréamont is evident in his early writing. An assertion Schwob made that “art stands in opposition to general ideas, describes only the individual, desires only the unique. It does not classify; it declassifies” inflected Jarry’s aesthetic in every medium. Other ideas associated with the Symbolist movement figure in the introduction to his first book: he aimed to “suggest” rather than to “define” and to “create in the highway of sentences an intersection of all the words.” Other prefatory remarks were defiantly prophetic: “Every meaning that the reader will find has been foreseen, and he will not find them all.” Scholars have yet to agree on the identity of the spiral-bodied figure in this woodcut.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Les minutes de sable mémorial (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197017.

Even before he created the iconic portrait of his character Père Ubu shown here, Jarry was associated with that name. He often signed letters and articles with the moniker and assumed the Ubu persona in public, speaking in a staccato voice devoid of affect. At literary salons, he made a spectacle of himself with spontaneous remarks and recitations related to the Ubu dramas, which dated back to high school marionette plays. Another idiosyncrasy was Jarry’s use of the first-person plural to refer to himself, which he also did when speaking as Ubu; other times, he referred to himself in the third-person singular as Le Père Ubu.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Ubu roi (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197019.

Jarry often wrote about himself as Père Ubu in letters to the author Rachilde. Born Marguerite Eymery, Rachilde assumed her androgynous pseudonym in the 1880s, regretting, she later wrote, that she had not been born male. Dressing at times in masculine attire, she disparaged female authors and resented being associated with them—her early cartes de visite identify her as an homme de lettres. Rachilde achieved renown for her sexually transgressive novels while Jarry was still in high school. At their first meeting, Jarry told her he was disappointed to discover that the author of Monsieur Vénus was a woman. She would become one of Jarry’s closest friends. Nonconformists in different ways, they shared two essential beliefs— that art is the only ethos, and that the individual is all.

Rachilde (1860–1953), Monsieur Vénus (Paris: Librairie française, L. Genonceaux & cie, 1902). The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Purchased on The Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2019. PML 198187.

Jarry’s ideas about book illustration coalesced in 1894—the year he visited the painters’ colony in Pont-Aven, Brittany, then dominated by Paul Gauguin. In a wide-eyed account of this formative experience in a letter to his sister Charlotte, he described how the beautiful landscapes and local “peasant” culture had enabled him to finally understand Impressionist painting. According to Jarry, Gauguin and the artists advised him to stop drinking water and instead drink rum all the time. He found it difficult to keep pace with their carousing given the rough Breton roads and his long rides back to the inn on a bicycle.

Gauguin and the painters Armand Seguin, Charles Filiger, and Roderic O’Conor were also engaged with printmaking. They helped shape the aesthetics of Jarry’s book design by encouraging him, above all, to make his own art, loaning him crude tools to create his first woodcuts.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Sainte Gertrude, woodcut, in L’Ymagier, no. 5 (October 1895). The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197080.

Jarry derided the use of language to describe visual art, even as an art critic. The exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings in Paris in 1893, however, inspired Jarry to write poems about three of the works. Profuse revisions to this draft capture his early attempts to transpose personal impressions of the artist’s exotic, fantastic worlds into subjective visions. Jarry presumably finished the poems in 1894 while spending time with Gauguin in Pont-Aven. They were recorded in a blank book the painter had conceived as “neutral ground” where his friends’ literary and visual art could meet. It was a model Jarry would apply to his own magazine projects, which he initiated later that year.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Autograph manuscript of three poems “after and for” Paul Gauguin, ca. 1893–94. The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased for the Dannie and Hettie Heineman Collection as the gift of the Heineman Foundation, 2019. MA 22740.

Jarry’s lifelong interest in the macabre figures in one of his few surviving paintings. A melee of grisly creatures and skeletons emerges from the walls and floor of a magician’s study. The appropriation and isolation of existing imagery that would inform Jarry’s book practice is also at play in the painting. It was inspired by a Gustave Doré wood engraving in an old magazine. Jarry’s garishly hued recreation of Doré (known as the “master of black and white”) subverted the defining aesthetic and function of wood engraving, which sought to translate drawings and paintings into grayscale relief.

The crocodile suspended from the top of the necromancer’s study was a popular element in the eighteenth-century cabinets of curiosity that were assembled by wealthy connoisseurs. In 1903, Jarry famously disparaged works of art of his era by comparing them to stuffed crocodiles nailed to the wall—a dead signifier of wealth and banal taste.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Le crocodile aux phantasmes, oil on board, ca. 1894. Collection of Robert Dean. © Jeff McLane Studio, Inc

Books figure as hallucinatory or apocalyptic metaphors in Jarry’s writings. He rarely reflected on the subject in essays other than to mock the uniformity of French book covers. Jarry’s first cover designs were chiefly black, with no title or author, just a small heraldic symbol printed in gold. For the special editions, he used medieval imagery from the Ars memorandi (The Art of Memory).

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Les minutes de sable mémorial (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197017.

Now, I had in my hands—since when?—a book—certainly written by me; how and when? no memory— where all that I was to see, all that I was to think afterwards, was foretold. . . . And the letters were pictures.
—Alfred Jarry, “Opium” (1893)

Jarry privileged painting over writing. Images, he argued, can be perceived all at once, whereas writing is sequential and thus constrained by duration. This title-page design defies the linearity of reading, however, presenting itself as both image and information. Some letters operate in multiple words; others are unstable (a J can be an I or a Y). Jarry’s use of medieval tildes (as in Frãce for France) requires the reader to complete the words.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), César-antechrist (Paris: Mercure de France, 1895). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197018.

The woodcut illustrations Jarry began to create in 1894 around the artists at Pont-Aven combined a crude modern aesthetic with primitive imagery he came across in old religious prints. Unlike his contemporaries, he made no attempt to unify the disparate designs within his early books. Claustrophobic arrangements of ornaments, obscure forms, occult symbols and other designs that verge on abstraction were melded into one visual vocabulary.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Les minutes de sable mémorial (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197017.

In his early books, Jarry interspersed his own woodcuts (or line drawings he passed off as woodcuts) with found imagery. This illustration for his second book is a composite design of two Renaissance woodcuts. He appropriated most of these kinds of woodcuts from an old catalogue documenting four centuries of popular imagery. Their unacknowledged presence in tandem with Jarry’s modern literature and design seemed to resituate the past in the contemporary or, conversely, suggested that Jarry’s work is itself anachronous. His engagement with both the Middle Ages and the modern shares traits with Baudelaire’s definition of beauty and ideas suggested by Nietzsche’s Meditations on the Untimely; but Jarry fractured this unity in the realm of the book arts. Such disharmony was at odds with figures such as William Morris who were attempting to unify book design in ways that reflected Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), César-antechrist (Paris: Mercure de France, 1895). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197018.

Jarry’s first magazine, L’Ymagier (1894-96), which he coedited with Remy de Gourmont, reversed the traditional separation of disparate forms, genres, and artistic periods. As a kind of radical museum in print, the magazine not only proposed equivalence across modern history and high and low culture but also questioned the distinction between original and copy. Gourmont and Jarry each contributed a few prints of their own usually under pseudonyms. Most of their contributions, however, were essays and commentaries on visual iconography over time. The chimerical, time-bending aesthetic of the magazine conformed to Jarry’s inverted definition of beauty in the second issue, which defined the monstrous as “all original, inexhaustible beauty.”

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) and Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915), eds., L’Ymagier no. 2 (1895). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197080.

Of H. Rousseau: there is above all “War (terrifying, she passes . . . ).” With legs outstretched the horror- struck steed stretches its neck with its dancer’s head, black leaves inhabit the mauve clouds, and bits of debris fall like pine cones among the translucent corpses of axolotls attacked by bright-beaked crows.
—Alfred Jarry, “Minutes d’art,” 1894

In his singular, independent approach to life and art, Henri Rousseau, much like Jarry, was viewed as sui generis. The painter was also a native of Jarry’s hometown, Laval. They were nearly thirty years apart in age and did not meet until 1894 in Paris. Few artifacts survive attesting to their friendship, although they lived together briefly.

Rousseau’s painting La guerre was the subject of ridicule when it was exhibited in 1894 at the Salon des Indépendants, but it made a significant impact on the twenty-year-old Jarry and inaugurated their friendship. Jarry wrote about the work in two separate articles and also commissioned Rousseau to create a lithograph based on the painting. Jarry’s immediate recognition of Rousseau’s talent and their compatibility became the stuff of legend: Guillaume Apollinaire and others spread apocryphal stories that Jarry “discovered” Rousseau and assigned him the nickname “Le Douanier” (the customs officer).

Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), La guerre, ca. 1894, oil on canvas. Paris, musée d’Orsay. © RMN-Grand Palais / Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, N.Y.

This page contains an extract from Édouard Dujardin’s influential essay from 1888, titled “Cloisonnism.” Jarry chose the passage in which Dujardin argued that the source of an artist’s imagery, be it a Japanese or Épinal print, is insignificant in comparison to the purpose the image serves for an artist’s project. Jarry set the text in the Renaissance-style type he had acquired and named for Perhinderion. The antiquated letterforms and punctuation include the long s, which resembles f, and ligatures; Jarry replaced Dujardin’s semicolons with colons, as if to connect, rather than separate, ideas. In addition, the critic’s key words and neologisms, which he had emphasized in italics, were rendered by Jarry in roman and thus brought into equivalence with the rest of the text. Jarry misattributed the excerpt to his friend, Félix Fénéon, and imposed a new title, “D’Art.” By transforming Dujardin’s words and ideas for his own purposes, Jarry had applied the critic’s theory of art to art criticism.

Excerpt from Edouard Dujardin’s “Le Cloisonisme,” 1888, misattributed to Félix Fénéon, in Perhinderion, no. 2 (1896). The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197087.

Jarry was in the midst of work on Perhinderion in early 1896 when he proposed a production 
of Ubu roi to Aurélien Lugné-Poe, the director of the cutting-edge Théâtre de l’Œuvre. As incentive, Jarry volunteered to handle the Œuvre’s publicity and race around Paris on his bicycle to drum up subscriptions. He also helped to adapt the translation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Diminutive in size, Jarry played the part of a troll.

Lugné-Poe had first taken an interest in Jarry based on his experimental books and magazines. A postcard and an inscribed special copy of Les minutes in the Morgan’s collection suggest that, even as plans for Ubu roi were underway, the author continued to use his publications to gain the director’s confidence. Jarry’s determination to bring an equal degree of innovation to the stage, however, began to test Lugné-Poe. He was wary of Jarry’s reputation as an eccentric and was baffled by the play. He was on the verge of canceling the project until Rachilde assured him that, no matter what, Ubu roi would be a sensation. On 9 and 10 December, 1896, Rachilde’s prediction came true. It was a succès de scandale.

Program for Ubu roi at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre (Paris: La Critique), 1896. The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased on the Gordon N. Ray fund, 2019. PML 198466.

Profanity was a common occurrence on cabaret stages in the 1890s. Jehan Rictus and Aristide Bruant were well-known for using what was then euphemistically called the “mot de Cambronne.” That a serious actor uttered a word that sounded like “shit” on the stage of a formal theater was something else altogether. The crowd booed and whistled for around fifteen minutes when Firmin Gémier delivered his first line; another lengthy interruption occurred later in the play when an actor’s hand served as a doorknob. The shouting doubled in volume after Gémier said Jarry’s name at the curtain.

Jarry had published an essay on the theater a few weeks before the premiere to prepare critics for Ubu roi. His radical ideas were summed up in the title: “The Futility of the Theatrical in the Theater.” For Jarry, actors and naturalist sets were the most “hideous and incomprehensible objects” cluttering the stage. He advocated for minimal props, to be moved around by handlers in plain sight. The use of cardboard masks and unnatural voices could transform performers into symbols, almost like letterforms, to express the writer’s ideas. By dispensing with the illusion of reality, a figure on stage could be a “walking abstraction” in service to the creator’s vision.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Ubu roi (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197019.

Jarry’s revolt against norms onstage was equally apparent in his design for Ubu roi’s publication. The book was typeset in his Renaissance-style font, Perhinderion. The play’s lengthy subtitle, which referred to its origins as a high-school marionette play, was another echo of Renaissance printing practices. Jarry’s presentation of the seminal text of modern theater—with its radical mise-en-scène and shocking neologisms—was arcane, resembling early editions of canonic prose more than cutting-edge drama. It appeared six months before the play’s premiere.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Ubu roi (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197019.

When Jarry reprinted the crude woodcut in the first edition, he also added this second portrait—a more cartoonish image of Ubu. That the images looked nothing alike introduced the pataphysical concept of the equivalence of opposites into the realm of contemporary illustration.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Ubu roi (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197019.

Jarry capitalized on Ubu roi’s notoriety by issuing a facsimile of the manuscript the following year. For the edition, he rendered in pen and ink the text, title, and every ornament as well as his two portraits of Ubu. He also incorporated Claude Terrasse’s incidental music and shared credit with the composer on the cover. Jarry used the opportunity to describe his ambitious plans for an orchestra—which, in performance, had amounted to little more than a piano and some timpani.

Of his cycle of full-length plays—Ubu roi, Ubu enchaîné, and Ubu cocu—only the first was performed during Jarry’s lifetime. Ubu enchaîné was published in 1900, however, as an addendum to the second edition of Ubu roi. This version bore no traces of Jarry’s idiosyncratic illustrations or inventive book design. By that point, Jarry had switched publishers and had ceded the role of Ubu’s iconographer to Terrasse’s brother-in-law, the painter Pierre Bonnard.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) and Claude Terrasse (1867–1923), Ubu roi, texte et musique, facsimile autographique (Paris: Mercure de France, 1897). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197020.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the practice of publishing facsimiles of manuscripts became a trend for Symbolist writers. The movement’s chief poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, had issued his manuscript of Poésies in a photo-lithographed edition of 40 copies in 1887. Jarry’s friends Rachilde, Marcel Schwob, and Remy de Gourmont followed suit. When Jarry could not find a publisher for L’Amour absolu, he paid to produce his novel in this fashion in an edition of fifty copies.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), L'amour absolu: roman ([Paris: Mercure de France, 1899]). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197024.

Jarry adapted Ubu roi for an avant-garde marionette theater he cofounded in 1897 with the painter Pierre Bonnard, the composer Claude Terrasse, and the writers Franc-Nohain and A.-F. Herold. The Théâtre des Pantins mounted their shows in the atelier behind Terrasse’s house. Edouard Vuillard and Bonnard painted the walls and Jarry and Franc-Nohain acted as chief puppeteers. Bonnard also built the marionettes with the exception of Ubu, which Jarry created himself.

Censorship had not been an issue at the Œuvre because it was a subscribers’ theater. The Pantins was open to the public, however, so the company had to submit the script to a bureaucrat for review (predictably, his scatological neologism “merdre” was cut). This shorter version of Ubu roi for marionettes was never published. There were three performances.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), program for Ubu roi at the Théâtre des Pantins, 1898, lithograph. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Museum Purchase, David A. and Mildred H. Morse Art Acquisition Fund. Photography by Peter Jacobs

Claude Terrasse’s incidental music for the Théâtre des Pantins’ puppet shows outlasted the short-lived endeavor. Individual songs were issued as sheet music with striking lithographed covers designed by Jarry and Bonnard.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) and Claude Terrasse (1867–1923), Répertoire des Pantins: Ouverture d’Ubu roi (Paris: Mercure de France, 1898). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197089.

After the Théâtre des Pantins folded, Jarry adapted the play yet again for low-brow hand puppets at the rowdy Cabaret des Quat’z’arts in Montmartre. Ubu sur la butte, as he later titled it, ran for sixty-four performances in 1901. For the scenario, Jarry cannibalized Ubu roi to reduce the play to two acts. The substantial changes he made reflected his anticipation of censorship and respect for the cabaret milieu. Like most puppet shows, the new version breached the fourth wall with a dialogue between the director and the archetypal puppet Guignol, who also referenced the cabaret and its spectators.

Five years later, Jarry published Ubu sur la butte as part of his booklet series he called Théâtre mirlitonesque—a term comparable to “ridiculous theater.” For the title page and cover designs, he copied the architectural frame on the 1535 title page of François Rabelais’s Gargantua—published in Lyon, the birthplace of the hand-puppet tradition—but used mirlitons, which are a kind of kazoo, in place of Rabelais’s classic columns.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Ubu sur la butte, Théâtre mirlitonesque (Paris: Sansot et Cie, 1906). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197031.

Over a decade, Jarry composed librettos for at least ten operettas. Most remained unfinished or were printed posthumously. Par la taille would be the second and last title to appear in Jarry’s whimsical Théâtre mirlitonesque book series in 1906. In 1907, his friends helped organize a deluxe publication of his comic opera Le moutardier du pape—a farcical retelling of the legend of Pope Joan, who disguised herself as a man. The book’s design united a pensive (much younger) portrait of Jarry with eleven-year-old images of Ubu, who has no role in the operetta.

Similar to Jarry’s ahistorical approach to book design, his comic operas contain anachronistic figures and technologies. Photography and the Salvation Army are invoked within the ninth-century setting of Le moutardier, which also features a telephone. The title character tells Joan he is going to make a call “without a line,” adding, “for the time being, pending its invention.”

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Le moutardier du pape: Opérette bouffe en trois actes (Paris: s.n., 1907). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197034.

Characters in Jarry’s comic operas are empty vessels, similar to marionettes. As one scholar phrased it, the subject of these librettos is arguably language itself. Jarry’s paragon in the linguistic arts was François Rabelais. For eight years, Jarry labored to turn Rabelais’s Pantagruel into an operetta. By 1904, however, his health had declined, exacerbated by alcoholism and poverty. Pantagruel’s composer, Claude Terrasse, persistently pressed Jarry to make progress on the libretto. He lured the writer to his country house to help him dry out and finish the text, but neither plan was successful (a friend completed the libretto after Jarry’s death). The fanciful baroque sets and costumes used in its 1911 premiere proved to be the antithesis of the anti-naturalist mise-en-scène that defined Jarry’s career.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) and Eugène Demolder (1862–1919), Pantagruel: Opéra-bouffe en cinq actes et six tableaux, musique de Claude Terrasse (Paris: Société d’éditions musicales, 1911). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197036.

Ubu returned to print for Jarry’s reinvention of a centuries-old genre: the common almanac. Both the author and the illustrator, Pierre Bonnard, were uncredited. Jarry applied his own approach to illustration when composing the texts by assembling original material with passages appropriated from old books. There were new playlets as well as sixteenth-century recipes for dyeing one’s hair green (supposedly something Jarry himself did on one occasion). The religious calendars—a requisite of early almanacs—listed the feast dates celebrating genuine saints as well as Saint Merdre. Another requisite of the genre, astronomical forecasts, predicted a partial “eclipse of Père Ubu.”

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Almanach du Père Ubu illustré. Illustrations by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) (Paris: s.n., [1898]). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197025.

Jarry’s most overt political commentary surfaces in the Ubu almanacs. The play Île du Diable (Devil’s Island), included in the first almanac, dramatizes events related to the Dreyfus affair. Ubu is cast as an effigy of the corrupt French military. The character would stand in as a proxy for France itself in the second almanac’s Ubu colonial, which comprises an account of Ubu’s visit to Africa. Jarry’s satire of the attitudes informing colonial practices was always indiscriminate, ridiculing both the perpetrators and victims of colonialism—an ambivalence affirmed by Bonnard’s offensive caricatures.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Almanach du Père Ubu illustré. Illustrations by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) (Paris: s.n., [1898]). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197025.

Jarry showcased his rhetorical virtuosity and irreverence later in life by publishing a book’s worth of speculative essays in magazines. Among many of the subjects Jarry addressed were cannibalism, a machine to beat women, and “killer pedestrians”; his review of a new postage stamp described it as a depiction of a blind prostitute (it was in fact the female personification of the French Republic). In one of his most famous vignettes, “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race,” Jesus gets a flat tire after riding over a bed of thorns and has to carry his wooden cross-frame bike up a hill over his shoulder.

Soon after H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine was translated into French, an article on how to build a time machine appeared under the byline of Jarry’s fictional character, Doctor Faustroll. Jarry borrowed passages from writings by the physicist Lord Kelvin to conceive of a real machine that was a gyroscopic device, initially described as analogous to a bicycle. Most of the essay was devoted to the phenomenon of time itself. Jarry proposed an “imaginary present” and defined time travel in pataphysical terms: isolated in a machine within the luminiferous ether, past and present could be explored simultaneously. Jarry emphasized his definition of duration typographically: “Duration is the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words: THE BECOMING OF A MEMORY.”

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), “Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps,” in Mercure de France, no. 110 (February 1899). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197152.

Faustroll, Jarry’s most imaginative and absurd novel, is a textual collage comprising the art, science, and people who shaped his aesthetic life. Treatises on pataphysics, legal documents, equations measuring the surface of God, and letters from another dimension are folded into a travel narrative about Faustroll, a bailiff, and a monkey whose sole utterance is “Ha Ha.” They set sail from Paris to Paris by sea on Faustroll’s copper mesh bed. Other beings on their voyage are three-dimensional elements conjured from an inventory of books Jarry calls the livres pairs (coequal or equivalent books). Twenty-fourth on that list is an anonymous play titled Ubu roi. Across “foliated space,” Faustroll draws from it “the 5th letter of the first word in the first act”—in other words, the second r in Jarry’s linguistic distortion merdre—synthesizing in one letterform (one piece of type) his radical transformation of artistic practice.

Henri Rousseau also makes an appearance in the novel: he defaces banal art with a painting machine, which eventually projects its own works on the walls of a “Palace of Machines.” Rejected by publishers, Jarry added a note to the Faustroll manuscript predicting that it would not appear in print “until the author has acquired enough experience to savor all its beauties.” The book was published four years after his death at age thirty-four.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien: Roman néo-scientifique, suivi de Spéculations (Paris: Eugène Fasquelle, 1911). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197152.

Faustroll’s many departures from the conventions of nineteenth-century novels include Jarry’s persistent invocation of living writers and artists. Among the works Jarry draws attention to are Emile Verhaeren’s Les campagnes hallucinées, Bonnard’s poster for La revue blanche, and La croisade des enfants by the author who championed his early career, Marcel Schwob. Real scientists of the day—those prone to bizarre theories, at least— are also invoked and interwoven with explanations of pataphysics, Jarry’s “science of imaginary solutions.” In addition to the specter of Lord Kelvin, the physicist C. V. Boys looms large. Jarry used ideas from Boys’s 1890 book on soap bubbles to explain why Faustroll’s copper mesh bed was seaworthy.

Marcel Schwob (1867–1905), La croisade des enfants. Cover illustration by Maurice Delcourt (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896). The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2019. PML 198234.

At a time when bicycling was transitioning from a pastime to an athletic activity, Jarry used his Clément Luxe for commutes to and from the country and for intracity transportation. He exalted bicycles as a “new organ” for man and an extension of the skeleton. Kinetic man-machines, when ridden at top speed, had the potential, Jarry suggested, to transform the artist’s consciousness. Guns, fencing foils, and even fishing rods seemed to function the same way in Jarry’s pursuit of extreme recreation. All were inextricable from his artistic identity in his final years, blurring the lines between creative expression and life.

“Catalogue illustré des célèbres cycles Clément,” Société des vélocipèdes Clément, no. 4 (1895). Collection of Pryor Dodge.

Encounters between man and technology in Le surmâle take on perverse and morbid characteristics. In the novel, a “love-inspiring-machine” electrocutes the hero after he demonstrates his supermale status by engaging in sex eighty-two consecutive times. The novel also features a ten-thousand-mile race between a locomotive and a five-man tandem bike. The riders are fueled with “perpetual motion food”—a compound chiefly comprised of strychnine and alcohol. Midway through the race, one of the cyclists dies; the corpse, whose feet are strapped to the pedals, continues on, however, and the “human mechanisms” outlast the train.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Le surmâle: Roman moderne. Cover illustration by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) (Paris: Fasquelle éditeurs, 1970). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197614. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Used in the extreme, “recreational” drugs—absinthe, wine, and ether—were devices Jarry used to supplement his imagination like a form of artificial intelligence. They also sapped his health and finances. After the magazines he depended upon for income folded, Jarry’s reputation as a delinquent in pecuniary matters became more pronounced. This envelope, addressed to Jarry by his wine merchant, contained one of the many outraged, threatening demands for payment overshadowing his final year. Jarry may have been intoxicated when he scrawled an indignant untruth on the back of the same envelope: “I always pay my debts.”

Envelope addressed by Gaston Jobard to Alfred Jarry, stamped 3 October 1907. On verso: Letter from Jarry to Jobard, October 1907. Collection of Christophe Champion, Librairie Faustroll.

In 1906, Jarry believed he was on the verge of death and wrote a letter to Rachilde that is now referred to as “The Testament of Père Ubu.” Jarry asks her to undertake a “posthumous collaboration” by finishing his novel after he dies. Writing about himself as Ubu in the third person, he concedes the irony that the author of The Supermale is now spent. Ubu’s furnace “is not going to explode, but rather just switch itself off . . . quite calmly, like an exhausted motor.” Jarry compares Ubu’s brain to a “perpetual machine” that will persist and dream without him. “He left such beautiful things on earth,” adds Jarry,“but he is disappearing in such an apotheosis! . . . He has armed himself before Eternity and is not afraid.”

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), letter to Rachilde, 28 May 1906 (“The Testament of Père Ubu”). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. MA 9074.

Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons drew attention to Jarry’s works in England during his lifetime; and the Scandinavian poet Sophus Claussen made an aborted attempt to translate Ubu roi into Danish. It was in Prague, however, where the first full translation of Jarry’s work appeared. His novel Messaline (1903) was serialized in 1904 in Arnošt Procházka’s seminal journal of the Czech avant-garde, Moderní revue, and was issued by the magazine’s imprint in book form in 1908. Jarry’s works would continue to hold sway in Central and Eastern European countries throughout the twentieth century as a touchstone for artists’ responses to totalitarian regimes.

For the subsequent generation of artists and writers, Jarry’s iconoclasm came to define the ethos of the modern avant-garde. His influence owes much to his encounter with the Italian Futurist poet, F.T. Marinetti (1876–1944), and close friendship with Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), the poet who would coin the terms cubism and surrealism. Marinetti called Jarry “the unquestionable literary genius of the underworld.” It was Apollinaire’s accounts of Jarry after his death, however—the gun-waving antics and eccentric lifestyle and dress—that left an indelible mark on the latter’s legacy.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Messalina ([Prague]: Moderní bibliotéka, 1908). The Morgan Library & Museum, anonymous gift for the Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman Pataphysics Collection, 2017. PML 197675. Anonymous gift, 2017.

Ambroise Vollard—gallerist, publisher, and friend to Jarry—wrote comedic texts featuring Ubu during and after World War I. A symbol of collective tyranny and of the mindless mob, Vollard’s Ubu appears in colonial settings, hospitals, and battlefields. To illustrate his series of publications, Vollard called upon artist friends with radically different aesthetics: Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Jean Puy (1876–1960), and Georges Rouault (1871–1958).

Ambroise Vollard (1867–1939), Le Père Ubu à l’aviation. Cover illustration by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), (Paris: Éditions Georges Crès et cie, 1918). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197109. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Legends surfaced, proliferated by Apollinaire and Max Jacob (1876–1944), among others, about encounters between Pablo Picasso and Jarry. Some were undoubtedly apocryphal; they were made further credible, however, by the number of sketches of Ubu and Jarry that Picasso left behind. The painter used Ubu as a symbol for injustice and oppression during the political upheavals of the 1930s, especially those wrought by the Spanish general, Francisco Franco. As Picasso became more proficient in French, he learned passages of Jarry’s plays by heart and collected his manuscripts and other artifacts, even claiming that his pet owls were ancestors of Jarry’s birds.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), illustration, in Ubu enchaîné (Paris: s.n., 1937). The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased for the Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman Pataphysics Collection on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2018. PML 198110. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.​

Maar is known for her beautiful and surreal black-and-white photomontages, which often combine street photography with erotic fragments of the female body. This image of an armadillo fetus is exceptional in her oeuvre for its repellent qualities. Maar’s original title for the work was Portrait d’Ubu. At the first exhibition of Surrealist objects in Paris in 1936, the curators grouped the photograph with “interpretations of found objects.” Throughout her life, Maar neglected to explain the subject or title of the work. Its creation coincided with her participation in Parisian radical anti-fascist movements spearheaded by the writers Georges Bataille and André Breton.

Dora Maar (1907–1997) Père Ubu, 1936, gelatin silver print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gilman Collection, Purchase, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, by Exchange, 2005; 2005.100.443. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

After breaking with the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac formed Le Théâtre Alfred Jarry, taking inspiration from Jarry’s antinaturalist theatrical philosophy and the burlesque brutality of performance inherent in Ubu roi. This booklet, which served as a manifesto as well as a complete history of the company, appeared just after hostile reactions in the press and among their peers had caused the group to disband. The section documenting critics’ blurbs used quotations from both real and fictional reviews (a few opinions were attributed to Père Ubu).

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and Roger Vitrac (1899–1952), Le Théâtre Alfred Jarry et l’hostilité publique, cover illustration by G.-L. Roux (1904–1988) [Paris: s.n., 1930]. The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased for the Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman Pataphysics Collection on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2017. PML 197100.

After the Second World War, Jarry’s identification as a provocateur and an icon of free expression made him a touchstone for burgeoning countercultural movements. Underground magazines such as Free Unions, Evergreen Review, and Gnaoua featured translations of his work as a bridge spanning late Surrealism, the Theatre of the Absurd, and experimental literature of the 1950s and 1960s. The Living Theatre, founded in New York by Judith Malina and Julien Beck, used one of Jarry’s drawings of Ubu on a program when staging his drama in tandem with a play by the avant-garde poet, John Ashbery.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Ubu the King [and] John Ashbery (1927–2017), The Heroes (New York: [The Living Theatre], [1952]). The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased for the Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman Pataphysics Collection on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2018. PML 197920.

Two women shaped the reception of Jarry’s writings in the English-speaking world. For a 1951 edition of Ubu roi, artist and small-press publisher Franciszka Themerson (1907–1988) illustrated virtually every page and rendered Barbara Wright’s translation in calligraphic handwriting. Their version of the play became the most widely disseminated text by Jarry in English. Themerson’s engagement with Jarry persisted for several decades. She went on to design sets, masks, and costumes for the landmark production of the play in 1964 at the Marionetteatern in Stockholm.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Ubu roi: A Drama in 5 Acts, translated by Barbara Wright (1915–2009), illustrations by Franciszka Themerson (1907–1988) (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1951). The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased for the Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman Pataphysics Collection on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2019. PML 198260.  © Themerson Estate.

After there was no one left in the world, the painting machine, animated inside by a system of weightless springs, revolved . . . like a spinning top, . . . dashed itself against pillars, swayed and veered in infinitely varied directions, and followed its own whim in ejaculating onto the walls’ canvas the succession of primary colors . . . this modern deluge.
—Alfred Jarry, Docteur Faustroll

The autonomous creativity of Faustroll’s painting machine reverberates in some of the machine-based art since the Second World War. It has also been a factor in experimental literature. The expatriate writer Bob Brown (1886–1959) proposed that humans should learn to see words “machine-wise.” He invented a reading machine to transform words into optic images. A single line of microscopic text would pass under a lens and then be projected directly into a person’s mind by means of light—ideally, according to Brown, at great velocity. To suit the project, Brown devised a new genre of writing he called readies—a neologism combining the words read, ready, and talkies. Soliciting contributions from Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, among others, Brown added arrows and dashes to encourage the mutual acceleration of machine and human perception.

Bob Brown (1886–1959), Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931). The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2018. PML 197919.

Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, we have become victims of our own knowledge—principally of our scientific and technological knowledge. In ’Pataphysics resides our only defense against ourselves. . . . Outwardly one may conform meticulously to the . . . conventions of civilized life, but inwardly one watches this conformity with the care and enjoyment of a painter choosing his colors. . . . ’Pataphysics, then, is an inner attitude, a discipline, a science, and an art, which allows each man to live his life as an exception, proving no law but his own.
—Simon Watson Taylor, “Superliminal Note,” 1960

In 1960, English-speaking members of the Collège de ’Pataphysique presented pataphysics to a broad audience for the first time in Evergreen Review. The editors pointed to the subject’s timeliness: the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, publicized the previous year, had posited that every outcome of an event is realized in divergent parallel universes. Readers have continued to sift through Jarry’s enigmatic writings in order to define pataphysics; in recent decades, however, figures in the arts and sciences have devoted more energy to creating works based on their individual interpretations. Several central ideas persist: universal equivalence, supplementary realities, and a science that is governed by particularities and exceptions—to which some have added the axiom that to understand pataphysics is to fail to understand pataphysics. The London Institute of Pataphysics continues to elaborate upon Jarry and his constellation as a pataphysical artist and thinker of the past, present, and future.

Roger Shattuck (1923–2005) and Simon Watson Taylor (1923–2005), eds. “What is ’Pataphysics? [’Pataphysics Is the Only Science].” Cover after a design by Juan Esteban Fassio (1924–1980). Special issue, Evergreen Review 4, no. 13 (1960). The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman, 2017. PML 197062. © 1960 by Evergreen Review. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Chimes’s lifelong interest in Jarry and, in particular, ideas associated with his novel Docteur Faustroll informed a series of panel portraits followed by white paintings and what he called the Hermes Cycle. Figures in the white paintings materialize and dissipate in a void of translucence—suggestive of the author’s own neologism, ethernity, where time converges with light and the dimensions of the universe. Both the white paintings and the panel portraits were based on the few surviving photographs of Jarry. The convergence of contemporary painting and photographic documentation of the present (now perceived from the future as the past) enabled Chimes’s exploration of Jarry’s pataphysical notions of Time.

Thomas Chimes (1921–2009), Alfred Jarry (Departure from the Present), 1973, oil on panel. The Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman Pataphysics Collection. Courtesy of Locks Gallery.