JACQUES PREVERT
Jacques Prévert Nautical Festival, undated, 31.9 Eugénie Bachelot Prévert Collection - © Adagp Paris 2024
Jacques Prévert Le Désert de Retz - Collection Bachelot Prévert
The year 2024 celebrates the centenary of Surrealism and it is also an op portunity to celebrate the installation of Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) in the 18th arrondissement, Cité Véron, at the bottom of a small cul-de-sac behind the Moulin Rouge. T he Montmartre Museum is devoting a vast exhibition to him from October “Jacques Prévert, dreamer of images” which will end at the end of February 2025.
The magic and humanity of this great, multifaceted artist, poet, screenwriter, lyricist to Barbara and Yves Montand, are presented alongside his many artistic achievements. Around 150 objects of different sizes, lithographs, collages, drawings, paintings, storyboards bear witness to his collaborations with the great artists of his time. His work, always imbued with fantasy, humor and non-conformism, embraces all forms of art. Pursuing formal freedom with his pen, his creations are linked to surrealism without wanting to belong to it, supporting neither limits nor labels. T he exhibition is structured in 4 parts: “An arborescent life”, “Jacques Prévert in the time of painters”, “Collages the merry-go-round of images” and “Chez Jacques Prévert”.
The exhibition thus opens on the childish and surrealist creative universe which invites Prévert to four-handed artistic collaborations with Picasso, Miro, Calder, Chagall... His numerous and magnificent collages express all his poetry mixed with a form of irony in complete freedom. Prévert liked to savor words like delicacies, he felt their shapes, hues, music, perfumes and flavors. He knew how to evoke its power to invoke that of dreams.
Jacques Prévert Self-portrait, collage, undated - Bachelot Prévert Collection
© Adagp Paris 2024
Jacques Prévert Portrait de Janine , vers 1943, collage - Collection Bachelot Prévert © Adagp Paris 2024
« Time and space “ takes the title of one of his poems to present a series of his ephemeris which punctuate his appointments on the white pages of the diary in the light of large colorful flowers.
To end this journey in the Prévert universe is the intimate workshop that reveals itself as a vast cabinet of curiosities.
Magician, anarchist at heart, eternal dreamer in images, genius of the word in colors, the exhibition highlights the intimacy of the artist in his studio which lets his imagination appear to the delicate sound of the irreverent music of his colorful language with all his delicious playful genius, engaged and yet forever free.
“Jacques Prévert: dreamer of images”
- Musée de Montmartre -
Paris
from October 18, 2024 to February 16, 2025
www.museedemontmartre.fr