“The Morgan Library & Museum is pleased to present Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry Is Everything, the first American exhibition to explore Cendrars’s achievements as a radical poet, publisher, and instigator at the heart of European modernism. Opening May 26 and on view through September 24, 2023, the exhibition is anchored in La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913), Cendrars’s monumental collaboration with the Ukrainian-born painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1885–1979). The focused installation traces Cendrars’s subsequent collaborations with figures in the visual arts, music, ballet, film, and graphic design, in his attempts to articulate what was at stake for poetry in the context of new media and the profound transformations of modern life in the years surrounding the First World War.” — The Morgan Library & Museum

Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum, said, “Gail Levin’s gift to the Morgan of the tour-de-force livre d’artiste, La prose du Transsibérien, strengthens the Morgan’s mission to illuminate the interplay of visual and textual creativity across time. The exhibition Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961): Poetry Is Everything allows us to consider a figure at the center of a revolutionary moment in the arts much like our own, when artists were challenged to rethink creativity in a period shaped by technology, new media, and conflict.”

The exhibition is curated by Sheelagh Bevan, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator, Department of Printed Books & Bindings, at the Morgan Library & Museum. 

Images courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum.