Biography
Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020
In Max Jacob, the poet’s life plays out against the vivid backdrop of bohemian Paris from the turn of the twentieth century through the divisions of World War II. Acclaimed poet Rosanna Warren transports us to Picasso’s ramshackle studio in Montmartre, where Cubism was born; introduces the artists gathered at a seedy bar on the left bank, where Max would often hold court; and offers a front-row seat to the artistic squabbles that shaped the Modernist movement.
More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.
Featured with five recommended related books on Shepherd.org: https://shepherd.com/best-books/france-modern-art-culture-and-political-conflict
Praise
“This radiant book will make you love Max Jacob, as his best friend and protégé Picasso undoubtedly did and as Rosanna Warren clearly does. Warren is completely at home in all three of Jacob’s fascinating worlds: first, and most importantly, on the page in brilliant verse and prose; second, in Paris, from the heady rise of Modernism to France’s ignominious capitulation to Hitler; and third, in the mystical world, to which Jacob was deeply committed. Scrupulously researched and deftly written, Max Jacob is a joy to read.”
“Max Jacob, one of the great French avant-garde poets of the early twentieth century, remains surprisingly little known in the English-speaking world. Poet Rosanna Warren’s dazzling biography, based on decades of research and superb critical insight, has now made up for this neglect. Max Jacob reads like an absorbing novel but is also superb reportage and literary history. Anyone interested in the brilliant but contradictory period when Paris was the capital of world art will want to read Rosanna Warren’s biography.”
“Only a poet, artist, translator, and classicist could have written this totally engaging account of the many-sided Max Jacob. We meet a host of artists we have known about elsewhere, and here they come vividly to life, and some to death; poets we might have thought we knew well, we know again. Max Jacob deserves these 30 years of impassioned thinking and superbly delicate forceful writing. As poetry surely dwelt in him, poetry dwells no less in Rosanna Warren.”
“Rosanna Warren’s Max Jacob is both monumental and intimate, a long-awaited portrait of a highly influential artist who haunts any account of early modernism…Max Jacob led a raucous, poignant, and mysterious life movingly illuminated in this elegant and passionate biography.”
“Max Jacob led a life of allegory, as Keats would have called it. All the glory and barbarism of the twentieth century are summed up in his fortune and fate. Rosanna Warren has brought a poet’s eloquence and a historian’s doggedness to bear on this heartbreaking tale. Her book’s humanity is commensurate with her hero’s. She has given us a masterpiece of life-writing.”
“Rosanna Warren’s Max Jacob is both monumental and intimate, a long-awaited portrait of a highly influential artist who haunts any account of early modernism. . . Max Jacob led a raucous, poignant and mysterious life movingly illuminated in this elegant and passionate biography.”
“Rosanna Warren’s eloquent chronicle of the life and times of painter-poet Max Jacob brilliantly revives the lost ‘new world’ of modernism’s beginnings, and takes in the full landscape of her subject’s mercurial, magnanimous soul. Warren’s Jacob is a man of astonishingly reconciled contradictions—Jew and Catholic, provincial and cosmopolitan, lover and solitary, harlequin and bard—who boldly practiced and preached an ‘art of controlled discontinuity’ through two world wars and made an art of sacred ritual until his tragic last days.”
“Rosanna Warren’s biography of Max Jacob, one of the pioneers of French modernism, offers a penetrating and beautifully researched portrait of this complicated and troubled figure—a Jew turned devout Catholic, practitioner of a loopy version of the Kabbalah, and, with all this, a promiscuous homosexual prone to infatuation with often dubious young men. Jacob was an intimate of Picasso, Apollinaire, and other modernists in painting and literature, and the book conveys a vivid and detailed sense of the modernist movement in its heyday in the early
twentieth century. This is a major achievement.”
“This is a gripping biography of Max Jacob, the now largely forgotten French poet and painter whose prose poems once influenced poets all over the world. It brings to life Paris in the years when it was the capital of the avant-garde in literature and modern art and where its practitioners all knew each other. Both as a story of one remarkable man and a portrait of an epoch, it is brilliant and immensely entertaining.”
“There are run-of-the-mill biographies not very different from gossip columns and there are great biographies which we put on the shelf next to books by eminent historians. So is this volume—a fascinating history of French and European Modernism with Max Jacob, Jew and Catholic, poet, painter and friend of the most famous artists, as the central figure. We are confronted here with the noble hubris of Modernism as it collides with the despicable crimes of the last century. The tragic ending of Max Jacob’s life will stay with us for a long time, will make us wonder once again: how was it possible. Rosanna Warren tells us how many years, how many decades she needed to write this major book, so rich in detail, so intelligent. We, the grateful readers, can only say—it was worth it!”
“The friends of Max Jacob were, as he said, his ‘native land.’ What friends they were—main inventors not just of ‘bohemia,’ but of the twentieth century imagination! In Rosanna Warren, Jacob has another astonishing friend—his preternaturally meticulous, eloquent biographer. Warren honors Jacob with a fiercely truthful account, reckoning with his eccentric genius as well as with his fautes, his sins. Her empathetic tenderness, combined with tough-minded analysis, quickens Jacob’s art, his tragedy, and the convoluted depth of his faith. Warren elevates his stature, his greatness. Max Jacob is passionately alive in this book, and its reader, too, will inevitably discover him as a complex but treasured friend, a compatriot.”