As France celebrates its national holiday on Bastille Day, I am beginning a new series celebrating the French contribution to contemporary sacred art, beginning this week with the first of four portraits of French artists with a significant body of religious work who are joining my on-line Collection. Max Jacob is best known as the poet who revolutionized modern French verse with alliterative prose poems capturing the cadences of human speech. A close friend of Pablo Picasso, he was present at the birth of Modern Art in the artist's Montmarte studio, earning an income from his own paintings. Jacob was a homosexual Jew and, later, Roman Catholic convert, ill at ease in his identities. He was arrested by Gestapo agents in February 1944 and died in a Parisian internment camp, awaiting transport to Auschwitz. The gallery of the new Jacob profile page features images from a 1928 album reproducing forty drawings Jacob made of the Passion of Christ. The free-style ink sketches recall the work of Picasso with a pathos absent in the drawings of Jacob's idol. (John Kohan)