In addition to this other talents, Jacques Prévert produced several art collages during the late 1950s and early 1960s. “They were surreal, comic and beautiful, scathingly anti-church, anti-corporation, anti-hypocrisy,” reported the New Republic. [1]
Jacques Prévert was a poet and screenwriter, and one of the most popular French poets of the 20th century. He was born on 4 February 1900 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, to a family of artists. His father, André Prévert, was a painter, and his mother was Suzanne Catusse.
The second of three sons, Prévert grew up in Paris and enjoyed a sheltered middle-class childhood although he was bored by school. He often went to the theatre with his father, a drama critic, and his mother taught him to love reading. He left school early and went to work in a department store in Paris. He had a deep empathy for those less fortunate than himself and frequently visited poorer areas of Paris.
By the mid-1930s, Prévert began developing into a screenwriter and dialogue writer. He also started writing poetry but did not see his first volume of poetry, Paroles, published until 1946. The book was a best-seller, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Prévert had mastered the art of the small poetic sketch that could catch a reader off guard. His best-regarded films formed part of the poetic realist movement, and include Les Enfants du Paradis (1945).
Prévert’s poems are frequently studied in French schools but have also been translated into many other languages and are popular world-wide. Many have been set to music.
Jacques Prévert married twice and died aged 77 on 11 April 1977, at his home in Normandy, France after a long illness.
I’ve made a video about Prévert’s poem, Déjeuner du Matin. It’s one of my favourites. Watch it here on my YouTube Channel.