Arthur Cravan. Maintenant ?

A few elements have contributed to build the legend of Arthur Cravan. His life as a journalist, writer as well as painter and boxer make him into a character of a novel to begin with. Add to that the fact that he was the cousin of Oscar Wilde, which the media lapped up. And then put a dab of mystery by questioning his death somewhere on the Rio Grande, on the border between Mexico and the USA. Cravan’s real name was Fabian Avenarius Lloyd. The catalogue, and the exhibition at the Picasso museum in Barcelona until 28 January 2018, do not aim to be a new biography, but rather to shed new lights on a specific period, the time he spent in Barcelona in 1915-1916. This adventurer alternated between boxing matches, among which a famous defeat against the world’s first Black champion, Jack Johnson, and literary evenings with Picabia and other Cubist artists based in Catalonia during the war. The book also presents a series of paintings supposed to be by him, signed by another pseudonym (Edouard Archinard) and exhibited at the galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1914.

• Arthur Cravan. Maintenant ?, directed by Emmanuel Guigon, Silvana Editoriale, 288 p., €32.