Max Jacob (1876-1944)
Series of approx. 16 autograph letters signed to Pierre Lagarde, 14 June 1936 - 8 March 1943, with 39 autograph manuscripts (many signed) for 'Méditations', and a poem, 'Ballade des deux vaisseaux', December 1939 - May 1940 and n.d.
The meditations usually on separate leaves, but one series of ten meditations in two gatherings ('cahiers d'école'), a few of the letters containing further meditations. Together approximately 120 pages, various sizes; many envelopes (usually attached to their respective letters or meditations by pins); [with] portrait photograph signed ('Max Jacob') and inscribed 'au très grand poète et romancier Pierre Lagarde’, St-Benoît-sur-Loire, August 1936, 296 x 235mm, stamp of 'Photo Photomaton' on verso; a drawing of Jacob by 'Serge'; and manuscript working notes of Pierre Lagarde. Provenance: Sotheby's London, 29 November 1985, lot 328.

'La méditation est l’art de retrouver Dieu en nous'. The artist and writer Max Jacob, a close friend of Picasso from the latter's earliest days in Paris, converted to Catholicism in 1909. The present meditations are part of a long series dating chiefly to the years of the Second World War, which he spent in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire until his arrest by the Gestapo on 24 February 1944: he died at Drancy internment camp on 5 March whilst awaiting transfer to Auschwitz.

La méditation est l’art de retrouver Dieu en nous … la méditation n’admet pas les développements elle est une descente d’une seule idée nue plus bas dans le ventre aux convictions ; elle est un creusement de mine, un village, un forage de puits pour trouver l’eau de la grâce

Pierre Lagarde published Max Jacob – mystique et martyre in 1944, containing 32 of these meditations.