Guillaume Apollinaire

Poet, critic, supporter who helped shape, define birth of modern art movements

The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic claimed the lives of as many as 100 million people of all ages. Among the prominent victims was the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, the unsung driver of the pre-WWI art scene.

As a poet, he was also a visual artist, pioneering the calligram, a process where words are laid out in such a way to form pictures.

Apollinaire was friend of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and a champion of both in a time when the two men had yet to dominate the art world. He also introduced Picasso to Georges Braque, thereby effectively fathering Cubism.

Apollinaire was born Guillelmus (or Wilhelm) Apollinaris de Kostrowitzki in Rome on Aug. 26, 1880. He was the son of a Polish emigree and an Italian officer but kept his upbringing a mystery. At the age of 20 he traveled to Paris before traveling to Germany where he fell in love with the countryside and wrote several poems. He also fell in love with an English girl, whom he followed to London only to be rebuffed, which caused him to write his poem, “Chanson du mal-aimé” (“Song of the Poorly Loved”).

Apollinaire returned to Paris where he earned a reputation as a writer and befriended many of the city’s struggling artists, many of whom went on to some acclaim, including Andre Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck. He championed the work of the folk artist Henri Rousseau. Apollinaire introduced the artists to African art, which was beginning to become popular in France. His influence on the young artists of the time is immeasurable. Through him the artists became Cubists — he wrote the preface to their catalogue, producing his own “Peinture cubist” (Cubist Painters) in 1913.

Apollinaire’s writing on art was more than simple review. He captured the spirit of the movements. Of Picasso, he wrote in the March issue of Montjoie!, “He is a new man and the world is as he represents it. He has enumerated its elements, its details, with a brutality that knows, on occasion, how to be gracious.” Apollinaire, in 1918, wrote of Matisse, “With the years, his art has perceptibly stripped itself of everything that was non-essential; yet its ever-increasing simplicity has not prevented it from becoming more and more sumptuous.”

While producing a large quantity of art criticism, he also found time to publish a book of poetry, “The Rotting Magician” in 1909, a collection of stories, “L’Hérésiarque et Cie” (“The Heresiarch and Co.”), in 1910, a collection of quatrains called “Le Bestiaire” in 1911, and what is considered his masterpiece, “Alcools,” which contains poems scanning the years 1898 to 1913. The poems in the collection do not follow any consistent theme.

“Alcools” is pronounced “al-coal,” meaning “spirits,” although it is also an obvious pun on “alcohol.” Indeed, the original title was “Brandy.”

Laurence Campa, assistant professor of the University of Paris East, writes, “The result of a long gestation, the work traces, in singular detours, the personal and poetic itinerary of Apollinaire since 1898, from symbolist-inspired youth poems … to the most modern pieces, … and removed any punctuation since in his eyes, the rhythm and the cut alone are important.”

The poems in “Alcools” are not arranged chronologically and, as a result, the dates of each are not always clear.

Donald Lyons, in his journal article “Modernist Spirits: Apollinaire’s ‘Alcools,’” writes, “In Apollinaire’s best verse there is no aimlessness or total surrender but an electric tension between innovative impudence and the formal French poetry he knew and loved.”

The opening poem, “Zone,” which was one of the last written, opens with the classic rallying call, “Let us go then you and I ….”

Apollinaire was caught up, along with Picasso, in the theft of the “Mona Lisa” from the Louvre in 1911, an incident that would indirectly lead to his death. His reputation as a radical and as a foreigner, led to his being arrested in August 1911, on suspicion of stealing the painting and a number of Egyptian antiquities, although he was released five days later for lack of evidence. The Egyptian sculptures had been taken by Apollinaire’s former secretary Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret. In order to protect himself, as he was also considered a suspicious foreigner, Picasso publicly denied that he and Apollinaire were friends, causing a rift in the friendship.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Apollinaire, desperate to prove his allegiance to his adopted country, volunteered for the army, where he was a first lieutenant. He suffered a serious head injury in March 1916, which required him being trepanned. He never really recovered from the wound, although he continued to write and promote the avant-garde on his return to Paris, coining the term “Surrealism” in the program notes for the ballet “Parade,” created by Picasso, Erik Satie, Sergie Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau.

In 1918, Apollinaire published “Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War 1913-1916,” a collection that was both visual and verbal. Calligrams are poems where the arrangement of the words on the page adds meaning to the text. In a letter to André Billy, Apollinaire writes, “The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.” The poet was still on the forefront of new cultural conventions.

Take, for example, “The Stunned Dove and the Water Jet.” The image features a bleeding dove with spread wings, followed by a fountain with the water coming out of a vase that is reminiscent of the dove’s wings.

The following is a translation, rearranged conventionally, by Charles Bernstein.

Sweet stabbed faces dear floral lips

Mya Mareye

Yette and Lorie

Annie and you Marie

Where are you, oh young girls

But near a crying jet of water and praying

This dove is ecstatic

All the memories of yesteryear

O my friends gone to war

Well up to the firmament

And your eyes in the sleeping water

Die melancholy

Where are they Braque and Max Jacob

Derain with gray eyes like dawn

Where are Raynal Billy Dalize

Whose names are melancholisent

Like steps in a church

Where is Cremnitz who engaged

Maybe they are already dead

From memories my soul is full

The stream of water cries over my pain.

Those who went to the war

in the North are now fighting

The evening falls O bloody sea

Gardens where bleed abundantly

laurel rose flower warrior.

Weakened by his war wound, Apollianaire succumbed to Spanish Flu on Nov. 9, 1918, at the age of 38. By the time of his death, his reputation was secure as one of the great French poets and art critics.

A century later, Apollinaire has been forgotten by many, yet his influence on modern art is incredible. He inspired, cajoled, encouraged and supported many of the early 20th century’s most influential artists through his writings, as well as being a poet that captured the zeitgeist of the period.

It is time that Apollinaire is restored to the pantheon of the giants of pre-WWI arts and letters. There has rarely, if ever, been a single man who has been the central hub of so many artistic spokes.

Story by Andy Coughlan, ISSUE editor