Exhibition Details
This installation focuses on Cendrars’s career as a radical poet, publisher, and instigator in the 1910s and early 1920s. He would soon abandon poetry to write novels and dubious memoirs of his truly adventurous life, fulfilling his credo: “All of life is only a poem... I am only a word, a verb, depth, in the wildest sense, the most mystical, the most alive.”
Artist Details
Blaise Cendrars, born Frédéric Louis Sauser, was a catalyst in some of the explosive artistic innovations of the early twentieth century. An intrepid spirit, he left his Swiss homeland at age seventeen. In Saint Petersburg and New York, he wrote his first poems and transformed into Blaise Cendrars—a name symbolizing his aesthetic goals: to burn and to create poetry from the ashes of his life.
Location
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Image: Detail from Morgan Russell (1886–1953), Color Form Synchromy (Eidos), 1922–23, oil / courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum