Spencer Museum of Art The University of Kansas

Ubu's Almanac: Alfred Jarry and the Graphic Arts

Almanach du Père Ubu illustré, Paris, 1901

Lithographs by Pierre Bonnard
Virginia and Ira Jackson Collection, Houston
113 x 99 mm

Unlike Jarry's earlier unflinchingly sincere evocations of popular belief, the Almanac for 1901 is much less pious. It includes a calendar with the feast days of saints Asparagus, Profit, Anal, Snail, Slug, Tobacco, and Pshit (Merdre, the first word uttered in Ubu Roi). Among the feast days are Disembraining, Repopulation, Copulation, Putrefaction, and, on the fourteenth of July, the "Fête du Père Ubu." Ubu, personification of human greed and evil, also makes a fresh appearance in the 1901 almanac as a Colonial who laments the end of slavery. He also appears, through a series of lithographs by Bonnard, in a pictorial alphabet of mostly prurient vowels. Bonnard's contributions to the 1901 almanac were extensive: seventy-nine lithographs in two colors. These include illustrations to Jarry's poem, Tatane.