Oumu, the condemned king

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), author of *Ubu* and *L’Homme sur-masculin*, was a key influence on countless artists, from Apollinaire, Duchamp and Artaud to Joyce, Queneau and Ionesco. According to André Breton, “literature, starting with Jarry, is shifting dangerously onto slippery ground… And again, starting with him, the distinction between art and life was called into question until it was completely obliterated”.

The son of a wealthy family from Laval in France, Jarry sketched out the character of Monsieur Hupy at the age of eighteen, after which he moved to Paris and joined the literary circles comprising Guillaume Apollinaire, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gertrude Stein and others. One of the most important figures of the Parisian avant-garde, Alfred Jarry, died in 1907, aged thirty-seven, already famous for his radical writing and his anarchic lifestyle and politics.