The Morgan Library and Museum is pleased to announce the first major U.S. museum exhibition exploring the iconoclastic works and personality of the French writer Alfred Jarry (18731907). Opening Friday, Jan. 24, and running through May 10, Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being considers the authors seminal role in the radical upheaval in the arts more than a century ago. An inspiration for Dada and Surrealism and a touchstone for the Theatre of the Absurd, Jarry is best-known today for his revolutionary play Ubu roi (1896) and for his invention of pataphysics, a science of imaginary solutions. Jarry was also a puppeteer, a critic, a novelist, an artist, and a bicycle fanatic. His works suggested that technology, popular imagery, and the performance of everyday life could constitute works of art. Jarrys statement that living is the carnival of being embodies his anti-authoritarianism and subversive theatricality, expressed in a life of excess, wordplay, alter egos, and the unfettered imagination. Since his death in 1907, Jarrys eclectic works and ideas have continued to resonate for figures of the 20th- and 21st century avant-gardes. Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being celebrates the gift to the Morgan Library and Museum of the books and manuscripts in the Robert J. and Linda Klieger Stillman Pataphysics Collection. The exhibition considers some of Jarrys many innovations by exploring his engagement with printed matter and the graphic arts. One of the first writers to experiment with visual typography, Jarry forged new relationships between image and text in his experimental approaches to book and magazine design. His use ofassembling, anachronism, collage, and appropriation are bellwethers of modern and contemporary practices. Drawing primarily on the Stillmans collection, the installation is contextualized with other objects in the Morgans collections as well as loans from private and institutional lenders, comprising manuscripts, drawings, photographs, and ephemera. Paintings and prints by figures in Jarrys circle, such as Henri Rousseau, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, are also featured. The final portion of the exhibition points to ways in which Jarrys writings have inspired pataphysical organizations and visual artists at particular historical moments, featuring works by Marcel Duchamp, Mary Reynolds, Joan Mir, Dora Maar, Max Ernst, Thomas Chimes, and William Kentridge, among others. We are thrilled to be able to explore Alfred Jarrys seminal role in the development of modernism as a consequence of the Stillmans generous donation. One of the finest and most complete Jarry collections in private hands, the Stillmans were keenly attentive to specific attributes in books, bindings, special papers, corrected proofs, and provenance, qualities that are consonant with the values that have defined the Morgans holdings for more than a century, said Colin B. Bailey, director of the Morgan. Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being is organized by Sheelagh Bevan, the Morgan Library and Museums Andrew W. Mellon associate curator of Printed Books and Bindings. The Morgan Library and Museum is located at 225 Madison Ave. at 36th St., New York, N.Y. For further information, visit www.themorgan.org.