Jacques Rigaut

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Jacques Rigaut (born December 30, 1898 in Paris , † November 9, 1929 in Châtenay-Malabry , Hauts-de-Seine , France ) was a French poet and author of Dada and Surrealism . In his short life's work, he dealt almost exclusively with the idea of suicide , which he thematized and glorified in short stories and articles in his own newspaper Le Grabuge .

Life

Jacques Rigaut came from a wealthy family. As a student at the Lycée Montaigne , he showed his talent for writing and reciting, for which he received numerous awards. At the traditional high school Lycée Louis-le-Grand he met René Clair , with whom he became friends. In the course of time, the young Rigaut attracted increasing attention due to his eccentric and extravagant behavior and was finally de-registered.

Friends of Max Ernst in front of his exhibition in the Parisian gallery Au Sans Pareil, 1921. Philippe Soupault is standing on the ladder with his bicycle, Jacques Rigaut hanging upside down, André Breton on the far right .

The Parisian painter Jacques-Émile Blanche hired him as a secretary without further ado; there he worked until the mobilization in 1917. During the First World War he was placed under the military driving service in Paris . After the war, he began to write reviews and short articles for the elite literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française . Around 1919 he frequently visited the Café Le Certa , at that time a popular evening meeting place for the Dadaists at the Passage de l'Opéra , and soon joined the new anarchic artist group around Tristan Tzara , Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard . The Dadaists especially valued his predilection for nihilism . With the exclusion of André Breton and the split and dissolution of the Dadaists in Surrealism, he loosely joined the group around Tzara, Eluard and Benjamin Péret in 1922 .

Rigaut was an avowed protagonist of decadent dandyism , favored the aestheticism of an Oscar Wilde and cultivated his own excessive and sophisticated lifestyle. He philosophized about the boredom of life and celebrated the implied suicide: he carried a revolver with him all his life, which he used to keep under his pillow when he slept. In his text “It is good to have discovered the insignificance of an order” he sums up: “Boredom writes more to the edge of life than intoxication, just like sleep. This is a way of losing consciousness, at least temporarily losing consciousness of the personality you are in all other moments of your life. A person [...] who only ever regarded suicide as an absurdity, which kills itself after a quarter of an hour of boredom. "

His friend, the French writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, described Rigaut “as a robot with a perfectly tied tie, who demonstrates the presence of the spirit by its absence and who drinks and celebrates like Brummell .” His dissolute lifestyle and continuous drug use - Rigaut was meanwhile strong dependent on opium , cocaine and heroin  - soon made the dandy destitute and so he let his parents bear him up. Around 1923 he fell in love with a wealthy American, whom he followed to Patchogue , New York . However, the relationship was short-lived: bored of his drug excesses, the mistress left him. His best-known work Lord Patchogue , which appeared posthumously in August 1930 in the Nouvelle Revue Française , was probably created around that time.

In 1926 he had a brief film appearance in Man Ray's surreal experimental film Emak Bakia . Man Ray later recalled Rigaut in his autobiography: “…. Rigaut was the most beautiful of the group - an embodiment of the French dandy, elegant as I had imagined him - only around his lips he had a bitter streak. Over the years we became close friends; together we've done a lot of stupid things. One day I heard about his suicide. He left us without an explanation. " (Man Ray: Self-Portrait , 1963)

In November 1928 Jacques Rigaut returned to France, where he rented a house from the surrealist Paul Chadourne and resumed his rampant lifestyle; but after only a short, excessive period of time he had to undergo several rehab cures .

On November 6, 1929 Rigaut, bored with life, shot himself in the heart in a sanatorium in Châtenay-Malabry (Hauts-de-Seine); he died on November 9th. Jacques Rigaut is buried on the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris.

Works

published posthumously:

  • Lord Pachtogue , 1930
  • Papiers Posthumes , 1959
  • Agence Générale du Suicide , 1967
  • Écrits , 1970
  • Et puis merde! , 1998

literature

  • Jacques Rigaut: Suicide. Writings of a suicide by society, a forgotten person of the Parisian Dadaist movement . ISBN 978-3923118557
  • Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma , Jacques Vaché , Arthur Cravan , Roger Conover (Eds.), Terry J. Hale (Eds.), Paul Lenti (Eds.), Iain White (Eds.): 4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma & Jacques Vache (Anti-Classics of Dada). Atlas Press, 1995, ISBN 0-947757-74-0 (English)
  • Laurent Cirelli: Jacques Rigaut, portrait tiré . Le Dilettante, 1998, ISBN 2-84263-016-5 (French)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "It is good to have discovered the insignificance of an order" ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ noveporte.it ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Divergent sources archive link ( memento of September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) name November 7th
personal data
SURNAME Rigaut, Jacques
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French poet and author of Dada and Surrealism
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris , France
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 1929
Place of death Châtenay-Malabry , Hauts-de-Seine , France