Alfred Jarry
French, 1873-1907

A startlingly modern book for its time, Alfred Jarry’s Les Minutes de sable mémorial anticipates the irrational theater and poetry of Dada and the Surrealists—two early-20th-century movements that claimed Jarry as a predecessor. The book, a collection of poems and plays, illustrates Jarry’s belief that “real genius works like the stomach of an ostrich, which can swallow anything, digest anything and transform anything.”  The images in the book attest to this sentiment, reflecting Jarry’s interest in primitivism, Gothic and Old Master prints, as well as Japanese woodcuts.  The text and the woodcut illustrated here include one of the earliest appearances of Jarry’s famous icon of greed and immorality, King Ubu (Ubu Roi or Père Ubu).

Text by Alfred Jarry
Book with 10 woodcuts, 1894
Mrs. George W. Stevens Fund, 2001.5