Picasso, Braque and Miro gathered around Prévert at the Montmartre museum

By associating words and pasting images, Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) was able to invent poetic worlds like an alchemist concocting a secret assemblage. Alice S. Legé and Eugénie Bachelot-Prévert, Prévert’s granddaughter, have brought together numerous documents recounting the life of the poet, his installation seventy years ago at 6bis, cited Véron near Montmartre, and his friendships with the artists with whom he collaborated for the creation of illustrated Books.

With his brother Pierre, Jacques Prévert, then aged 24, was hosted by the translator Jacques Duhamel at 54, rue du Château, in the Montparnasse district. There he met the surrealists and discovered the inventiveness of exquisite corpses, these collective drawings involving a large part of chance and the unconscious of the participants. Yves Tanguy decorates the door of Prévert’s room with this panel (right), wishing him lots of fun and pleasure.

From 1932, Jacques Prévert worked for the cinema, adapting texts or writing dialogues. Among his finest collaborations: The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1935) by Jean Renoir, Funny Drama (1937), Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) and Les Enfants du paradis (1945) by Marcel Carné. For his scenarios, Prévert illuminates his text with small drawings to define the characters or decorative elements. Here we recognize the devil and “the woman as a man”, which Jules Berry and Arletty will play on screen.

A good part of the tour emphasizes Jacques Prévert’s links with artists. First Calder, Miro, Braque and Chagall, with whom he designed five books in which he comments on their work (“Fêtes”, “Joan Miro”, “Contes de Boccaccio” and “De vive joie”) or sees his works accompanied drawings of others (“Adonides”). Picasso makes his portrait and Prévert integrates the Andalusian into a collage. With Max Ernst, finally, he created a true four-handed work for “Les Chiens ont soif” in 1964.

“Jacques Prévert designs his collages as he weaves the structure of his writings: the quotation, the anagram and the free association of ideas”, summarize the curators of the exhibition to explain this particular part of the poet’s creation. Prévert hunts for books and engravings from second-hand booksellers and merchants on Rue Dauphine, then he cuts out the subjects, brings them together to modify their meaning, and frames them with colored borders. Dreams and surprises guaranteed!

In the mid-1950s, architect Jacques Couëlle refurbished Jacques Prévert’s apartment at 6bis, Cité Véron, above the Moulin-Rouge, in the 18th arrondissement. As with André Breton, there is room here for the telescoping of meanings of objects with each other. Books, photographs, braid of garlic, starfish, religious statuettes, jars made by Jean-Pierre Maury… A heterogeneous accumulation justifying the expression “a Prévert inventory”.

“Jacques Prévert, dreamer of images”, Jacques Prévert, dreamer of images Montmartre Museum, from October 18, 2024 to February 16, 2025