Alfred Jarry Exhibition

Ubu's Almanac: Alfred Jarry and the Graphic Arts is an exhibition on view at the Spencer Museum of Art, Univeristy of Kansas, from April 11 - May 31, 1998. The exhibition includes prints and books by or edited by the French playwright, Alfred Jarry. Today Jarry is remembered almost exclusively as an author, especially of his notorious play, Ubu Roi. However, as this exhibition seeks to demonstrate, Jarry was also very involved in the world of printed images. He made woodcuts and drawings to ornament his own books, and he was involved with two periodicals (L'Ymagier and Perhinderion) that sought to assemble a broad spectrum of printed art, much of it of anonymous or popular production and generally of a devotional nature. These periodicals also included, however, images by the important German Renaissance artist, Albrecht Dürer, and many of Jarry's contemporaries, such as Henri Rousseau and Pierre Bonnard.

This site was conceived as an integral part of the exhibition: Ubu's Almanac: Alfred Jarry and the Graphic Arts. The other key component the exhibition is the exhibition catalogue.

The exhibition can only display one page from a given book and we were not able to provide a catalogue with color plates. Therefore, this site provides an alternate means of seeing many pages from each of the exhibited books in color. Many of the larger images include details, and translations of some of the texts are given. Most of the brief explanatory texts included in this site are excerpted from the exhibition catalogue.

In order to maximize resolution we have cropped many of the pages, but we have tried not to crop the images themselves.

Our photographs were made by Robert Hickerson, staff photographer at the Spencer Museum of Art (excepting those provided by J. Bocoyran for Perhinderion II). The photographs were made in raking light to convey something of the surface of the paper.

Some Other Jarry Sites:

• A useful site at Hampshire college
• Professor Alfred Tautz's Jarry Page

The catalogue (64 pages) includes 23 black & white illustrations, a checklist, and two essays:

How to order: send $9.00 (U.S. Dollars)
Kansas Residents add $.62 State Tax
Shipping within the continental U.S. $2.00 (book rate) or $3.00 (first class)
Shipping outside of the continental U.S. $3.00 (surface)

Send check to:
Bernadette Traiger
Bookstore Manager
Spencer Museum of Art
Lawrence, Kansas 66045
U.S.A.

To make a Credit Card Order (Visa or Mastercard) call 785 864 4710 and ask for the bookstore, or fax us at 785 864 3112