Max
Jacob
Born
in Quimper (Brittany), France, (1876 - 1944)
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Poet,
writer, art critic, and painter, Max Jacob passed through a religious crisis,
and converted to Catholicism in 1915. At his baptism, Picasso served as
his godfather. In 1917, he published a collection of poems, and in 1921
retired to the Benedictine Abbey at St. Benoit sur L'Oise. In the following
years, and particularly from 1926 and well into the 1930s, Jacob's creative
output in the visual arts was at its peak. He exhibited regularly at the
Percier and the Georges Petit Galleries.
Despite
his conversion and entry into a monastery, Jacob was arrested and interned
in Drancy, where he died on March 5, 1944. In her Ph.D. thesis, Picasso
and His Art during the German Occupation, M.M. Goggin states that the
candles and skulls that Picasso painted at that time were a memento
mori to his friends, Chaim Soutine and Max Jacob.*
* Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction
and Interpretation, (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993) p. 3.
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