max jacob

Max Jacob later wrote of his first encounter with Picasso's work at the artist's first Parisian exposition in 1901, that " I was so dazzled by his production that I, as a professional art critic, had left [him] an admiring note" (Kamber 14). Indeed that evening would prove fateful in the lives of both Picasso and Jacob. At the subsequent urging of Jacob, their mutual friend, Guillaume Apollinaire, introduced the two over drinks several weeks later (Seckel 32). The two would take to each other almost immediately, in part out of mutual interest, in part out of necessity. At the time, both Picasso and Jacob were living in near penury, The latter was struggling to pay the rent on an apartment on the Rue Voltaire with the wages he earned as a clerk and sweeper at the Entrepot Voltaire, while publishing art criticism, painting, and mingling with members of the young Parisian artistic community like Apollinarire. Picasso, still a fledgling Spanish artist, whose early correspondence with Jacob and Apollinaire reveal a slightly awkward, Spanish-colored French, was living with friends.

"Naturally then," Jacob writes, "Picasso came to live in my room, boulevard Voltaire, on the fifth floor. It was a vast room. Picasso painted all night. And when I was getting up to go to work at the department store, he was going to bed to get some rest" (Kamber 14). But, as Picasso's biographer, John Richardson writes, this was in fact a myth the two men would create to conceal the intimate, romantic relationship that developed between them over the course of their years together (Richardson 260).

Jacob would again mention the "vast room" they shared in a poem scrawled on the back of a 1906 sketch of himself done by Picasso, Etude d'homme, drawn just before Picasso moved out. It reads, “the house where my beloved lived” (Seckel 48). Clearly, their relationship was, at least for Jacob, profoundly intimate.

But who exactly was Max Jacob? And to what degree might his own tumultuous adolescence have influenced Picasso's 'adolescent' depictions of Jacob and the emotions the young poet represented?

Five years Picasso's senior, Jacob was born in Quimper, Brittany in July 1876. His parents were Alsatian Jews; his father was a tailor and part-time antiques dealer whose income did not afford the family leisure, but did make it possible for Jacob to receive an education. The young Jacob was understood to be exceptionally bright from a young age but also to be "inordinately sensitive" and sickly, frequently making him the subject of physcial and emotional abuse from schoolyard peers and from his mother whom he later wrote was chronically "nervous and impatient"(Kamber 11). One biographer writes of the melancholy air the young poet had developed by adulthood, "Max already had his sadness from birth. Often he was beaten. At the age of twenty-four he received his last slap from his mother for having made a spelling error" (Kamber 21).

Forced from his home by feelings of abuse and inadequacy, Jacob first attempted to join the army. He writes of the attempt:
The inefficiency of my efforts to collaborate in the exercises of the barracks exhausted the patience of those who were directing them and when the benevolent vigilance of the military authorities interrupted my tasks at the end of six weeks in order to spare me further trouble, I better dissimulated embarassment at having been relieved of my responsibilities than my chiefs their joy at having acquitted themselves of theirs (Seckel 18).

After his release from the military in 1897, Jacob moved to Paris where he earned a living by giving piano lessons and shared an apartment with another friend, "as poor as he," the poet Andre Breton, and took evening courses at the Academie Jullian. (Kamber 13). Jacob also shaved his head, which, with his pale complexion and effeminate manner, gave the artist the vaguely androgynous semblance we see in Picasso's sketches. He later took a (moonlighting) job at the literary journal, Gaulois as an art critic, providing his entre into Parisian artistic circles and eventually to Pablo Picasso. When he met Picasso in 1901, he had gone freelance, quitting the Gaulois in order to "perfect his style" and begin work as a poet himself.

In 1922, Jacob wrote of this period "then began that life of privation and suffering which today is mine" (Kamber 27). Does this remark reflect a sense of "privation and suffering" that lingered after Jacob's split with Picasso, when the two remained intimates only in their frequent letters? Or is it a reflection on the hopes, fears, and baggage of those years leading up to his relationship with Picasso? In any case, we must consider Jacob's 'quest' from Brittany to Paris, from an abusive world to an embracing but destitute one, in order to understand the figure in Picasso's 1905-1906 images.