Jodorowsky Retrospecitve

According to a review in the November 2015 issue of Art News, a museum in Bordeaux, France has just wrapped up a 50-year retrospective of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s career. In the photo shown here, peeking out from under the screen, you can see the bottoms of the Tarot de Marseille that Jodorowsky designed with Philippe Camoin. But Jodorowsky is about a lot more than tarot.

Here are some of his accomplishments that were on display in Bordeaux:

• Drawings, paintings and cartoons.
• His work in the 1950s with the post-surrealist performance-art collective Panic Movement.
• Screenings of his films El Topo and The Holy Mountain. In the 1970s these films played for months in New York City arthouses.
• Graphic novels created with the French illustrator Moebius.
• Sketches and storyboards from a film based on Frank Herbert’s Dune which never got off the ground.

Not to mention his role as Psychomagical Trickster and his books on shamanic psychotherapy. On Netflix you can find a disk with one of his films and a documentary showing Jodorowsky turning an informal discussion into an intense Family Constellations session.

The article said Jodorowsky is a Twitter star. I’m not on Twitter and never will be – but it sounds worth checking out.

Here’s the reviewer’s summary:

“Hailed as a visionary, dismissed as a charlatan, Jodorowsky’s work has never left critics indifferent. He belongs to the genealogy of such (in)famous mavericks as Dalí, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol; as with them, his greatest creation might be himself.”

See photos of Jodorowsky, his Tarot de Marseille deck, and the museum exhibit on the facebook page of the CAPC: Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux.

Here’s my review of Jodorowsky’s book on reading with tarot cards – The Way of Tarot.

Alejandro Jodorowsky: Musée D’art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Review by Javier Montes, Art News, November 2015.