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.