Blaise Cendrars and the avant-garde painters

Abstract

Blaise Cendrars was an active member of avant-garde circles. Among his friendships, we highlight Chagall, Modigliani, Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and the Brazilians Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral. With these colleagues, Cendrars created truly innovative works. In a strong relationship with avant-garde painting, the European poet’s work had a plastic inclination, with verses that aesthetically and visually dialogued with pictorial works. Thus, we will present the aesthetic relationships between the Franco-Swiss poet’s work and early 20th-century avant-garde painting. To achieve this objective, a comparative analysis was conducted between Cendrars’ poems and the works of these painters, based on theories of poetry, comparative literature and intertextuality, painting, and the aesthetics of the Avant-gardes.