|
Guillaume Apollinaire
|
Muse Inspiring the Poet.
Portrait of Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin,
by Henri Rousseau, 1909
|
|
Guillaume Apollinaire
French poet
pseudonym of Guillelmus (or Wilhelm) Apollinaris de Kostrowitzki
born August 26, 1880, Rome?, Italy
died November 9, 1918, Paris, France
Main
poet who in his short life took part in all the avant-garde movements
that flourished in French literary and artistic circles at the beginning
of the 20th century and who helped to direct poetry into unexplored
channels.
The son of a Polish émigrée and an Italian officer, he kept his
origins secret. Left more or less to himself, he went at the age of 20
to Paris, where he led a bohemian life. Several months spent in Germany
in 1901 had a profound effect on him and helped to awaken him to his
poetic vocation. He fell under the spell of the Rhineland and later
recaptured the beauty of its forests and its legends in his poetry. He
fell in love with a young Englishwoman, whom he pursued, unsuccessfully,
as far as London; his romantic disappointment inspired him to write his
famous Chanson du mal-aimé (“Song of the Poorly Loved”).
After his return to Paris, Apollinaire became well known as a writer
and a fixture of the cafés patronized by literary men. He also made
friends with some young painters who were to become famous—Maurice de
Vlaminck, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, and Pablo Picasso. He introduced his
contemporaries to Henri Rousseau’s paintings and to African sculpture;
and with Picasso, he applied himself to the task of defining the
principles of a Cubist aesthetic in literature as well as painting. His
Peintures cubistes appeared in 1913 (Cubist Painters, 1944).
|
|
His first volume, L’Enchanteur pourrissant (1909; “The Rotting
Magician”), is a strange dialogue in poetic prose between the magician
Merlin and the nymph Viviane. In the following year a collection of
vivid stories, some whimsical and some wildly fantastic, appeared under
the title L’Hérésiarque et Cie (1910; “The Heresiarch and Co.”). Then
came Le Bestiaire (1911), in mannered quatrains. But his poetic
masterpiece was Alcools (1913; Eng. trans., 1964). In these poems he
relived all his experiences and expressed them sometimes in alexandrines
and regular stanzas, sometimes in short unrhymed lines, and always
without punctuation.
In 1914 Apollinaire enlisted, became a second lieutenant in the
infantry, and received a head wound in 1916. Discharged, he returned to
Paris and published a symbolic story, Le Poète assassiné (1916; The Poet
Assassinated, 1923), and more significantly, a new collection of poems,
Calligrammes (1918), dominated by images of war and his obsession with a
new love affair. Weakened by war wounds, he died of Spanish influenza.
His play Les Mamelles de Tirésias was staged the year before he died
(1917). He called it surrealist, believed to be the first use of the
term. Francis Poulenc turned the play into a light opera (first produced
in 1947).
In his poetry Apollinaire made daring, even outrageous, technical
experiments. His calligrammes, thanks to an ingenious typographical
arrangement, are images as well as poems. More generally, Apollinaire
set out to create an effect of surprise or even astonishment by means of
unusual verbal associations, and, because of this, he can be considered
a forebear of Surrealism.
|
Calligramme de Guillaume Apollinaire
|
|
|
|
|
|
Guillaume Apollinaire
|
THE CONTRIBUTION OF GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a frequent
contributor to the influential La rente blanche from 1902
onwards. lie had originally confined his critical interest in
painting to the works of
Seurat,
Cezanne, and the
Fauves,
but later became closely involved with the activities of avant-garde
artists, acting as their interpreter and theoretician, lie wrote a
treatise entitled The Cubist Painters— Aesthetic Meditations
(published in 1913), as well as reviews and prefaces for the one-man
shows of
Picasso and
Braque and for
exhibitions by the so-called Orphists. An enthusiastic
apologist for any new artistic development, he wrote the manifesto "L'Antitradition
futuriste" for Marinetti in 1913. In 1917, he coined the term
"surrealism" when describing his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias,
and also contributed to
391,
Picabia's
Dadaist review. When Apollinaire died,
Picasso designed
a wire sculpture based on one of Apollinaire's poems, "signifying
nothing, like poetry and fame".
|
|
|
Marc Chagall
Homage to Apollinaire
1911-13
|
Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume
Apollinaire
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Guillaume Apollinaire (August 26, 1880 – November 9, 1918) was a French
poet, writer, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother.
Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with
coining the word surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described
as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917, later used as the
basis for an opera in 1947). Two years after being wounded in World War I,
he died at 38 of the Spanish flu during the pandemic.
Born Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky and raised speaking
French, among other languages, he emigrated to France and adopted the name
Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother, born Angelica Kostrowicka, was a Polish
noblewoman born near Navahrudak (now in Belarus). His father is unknown but
may have been Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, a Swiss Italian aristocrat who
disappeared early from Apollinaire's life. He was partly educated in Monaco.
Apollinaire was one of the most popular members of the artistic community of
Montparnasse in Paris. His friends and collaborators during that period
included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Marie
Laurencin, André Breton, André Derain, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre
Reverdy, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall and Marcel
Duchamp. In 1911, he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the cubist
movement. On September 7, 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion
of stealing the Mona Lisa, but released him a week later. Apollonaire then
implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning
in the art theft, but he was also exonerated. He fought in World War I and,
in 1916, received a serious shrapnel wound to the temple. He wrote Les
Mamelles de Tirésias while recovering from this wound. During this period he
coined the word surrealism in the program notes for Jean Cocteau and Erik
Satie's ballet Parade, first performed on 18 May 1917. He also published an
artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes. Apollinaire's status as
a literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the
Marquis de Sade, whose works were for a long time obscure, yet arising in
popularity as an influence upon the Dada and Surrealist art movements going
on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century as, "The freest
spirit that ever existed."
The war-weakened Apollinaire died of
influenza during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. He was interred in the Le
Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant
(1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced
in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, combining
traditional poetic forms with modern imagery. In 1913, Apollinaire published
the essay Les Peintres cubistes on the cubist painters, a movement which he
helped to define. He also coined the term orphism to describe a tendency
towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others.
In 1907, Apollinaire wrote the well-known erotic novel, The Eleven Thousand
Rods (Les Onze Mille Verges). Officially banned in France until 1970,
various printings of it circulated widely for many years. Apollinaire never
publicly acknowledged authorship of the novel. Another erotic novel
attributed to him was The Exploits of a Young Don Juan (Les exploits d'un
jeune Don Juan), in which the 15-year-old hero fathers three children with
various members of his entourage, including his aunt. The book was made into
a movie in 1987. Shortly after his death, Calligrammes, a collection of his
concrete poetry (poetry in which typography and layout adds to the overall
effect), was published. In his youth Apollinaire lived for a short while in
Belgium, but mastered the Walloon language sufficiently to write poetry
through that medium, some of which has survived.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
