More than a decade after Pablo Picasso, a poet was still looking to modern art and Montmartre, the artist corner of Paris, to change everything. More than century later, Blaise Cendrars still will not let go. Together with my earlier report on “Young Picasso in Paris,” it is also the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.
So are we there yet? After so many years, critics are still questioning Modernism’s promise, but the questions were there from the start. As early as 1913, Cendrars sounds like a child with a long trip ahead. Sommes-nous bien loin de Montmartre (“Are we really far from Montmartre”) comes as a refrain in a poem that became a work of modern art itself. 
It unfolds as an accordion book, with watercolor by Sonia Delaunay, as “La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France.” And now it hangs at the center of “Poetry Is Everything,” at the Morgan Library through September 24.
In truth, Cendrars was not noted for patience. He sought to burn everything to the ground and to start again. Born Fréderic Louis Sauser in 1887, he chose a name with the sounds of blaze and cendres, French for ashes. “The guillotine,” he declared, “is the master of plastic art,” and he imagined living on la Rue de la Violence. How could his poem be prose? Easy, when art and the guillotine supply the “visual poetry.”
How, too, can the Trans-Siberian Railroad, from Russia to China, end in Montmartre? For Cendrars, all roads lead to Paris. He collaborated with seemingly everyone on the road to abstraction, only starting with Delaunay (here called Delaunay-Terk). He brought his poetry to rhythmic circles of color from František Kupka, Morgan Russell, and Robert Delauney, then Sonia’s husband. He had an affinity as well with the mask-like faces of Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, the robotic bodies of Alexander Archipenko. He sought out Marc Chagall floating over the rooftops and Fernand Léger, whose Eiffel Tower no longer has its feet on the ground.
They all make an appearance at the Morgan. It is a modest show nonetheless, in the small gallery off the atrium. Not all of them illustrated Cendrars and his verses, and his name may not come to mind with the progenitors of modern poetry and art. Readers now are more likely to turn to another poet and his friend, Guillaume Apollinaire. En ce temps-là, his epic journey begins, j’étais en mon adolescence (“In those days, I was in my adolescence”), and one might hesitate at his immaturity, as did he, but modern art was in its adolescence, too, and it was an exciting time. He knew all the same les inquiétudes, les cendres, 
and la pluie qui tombe—the cares, the ashes, and the falling rain.
He took an interest in early cinema, too, once again to keep things moving toward a clean break. For him, the camera “sets itself in motion.” His collaboration with Delauney itself soars far out of reach. Most accordion books unfold horizontally, like that of Rick Barton a year before at the Morgan, so that they become part of the viewer’s experience in time. This one hangs vertically, starting well overhead. You can hardly read much of it, not even if you know French.
The Morgan does not ask you to try. A video lets the poem play out in translation. Facing the work itself, you may be left only with that insistent refrain—and the art. Delauney’s clashing, compelling circles and triangles run parallel to the text at left, while blocks of watercolor fit between and alongside the words, like the marks of a censor in living color. They never quite obscure the text, in what the artist and poet called “the first simultaneous book,” but then what more was there to refuse to say? Cendrars lived until 1961, but when you have burned everything to the ground, what is left?
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.