Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright and art critic born in Italy on this day in 1890 to Angelica de Kostrowitzky who registered
the infant who would become France’s greatest war poet. as Guglielmo
Alberto Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinare
Angelica hailed from Lithuanian-Polish petty aristocracy. Her
grandfather had been wounded while fighting with the czar’s troops at
Sebastopol. Her father was a valet to the pope. Angelica was a demimondaine, kept by wealthy lovers.
Family legend claimed that Guillaume’s father was a
Roman aristocrat. But in the first decade of the 20th century, when
Apollinaire was a writer and art critic at the heart of the pre-war
cultural revolution in Paris, his friends believed him to be the
illegitimate son of a Roman prelate.
“He was registered as the son of an unknown father and remained so,”
says Laurence Campa, the author of the definitive biography of
Apollinaire, published by Gallimard in Paris.Officially, Apollinaire was a citizen of Russia
Angelica took Guillaume and his half- brother Albert to the Côte d’Azur,
where she haunted the gambling dens of Nice and Monaco.
In his youth Apollinaire assumed the
identity of a Russian prince. He received a French education at the
Collège Saint-Charles in Monaco, and afterwards in schools in Cannes and
Nice.
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”).
In to Paris 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 Alfred Jarry,
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2011/06/alfed-jarry-891877-11107-life-as-riot.html 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, as an art critic
Apollinaire was the first to champion Cubist painting;he wrote
the preface to their catalogue, producing his own “
Peinture cubist”
(Cubist Painters) in 1913,which explored the theory
of cubism and analysed psychologically the chief cubists and their works.
According to Apollinaire, art is not a mirror held up to nature, so cubism
is basically conceptual rather than perceptual. By means of the mind,
one can know the essential transcendental reality that subsists 'beyond the
scope of nature.
The term Orphism (1912) is also his and described 'the art of painting new structures out of elements
that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere but have been created
entirely by the artist himself, and have been endowed by him with the
fullness of reality.' Among Orphicist artist were Robert Delaunay, Fernand
Léger, Francis Picabia, and Frantisek Kupka.. Apollinaire also wrote one of the earliest Surrealist literary works, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), which became the basis for the 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias.
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,” The prose-poem depicted the entombment of
Merlin the Enchanter by his love. From his sufferings Merlin creates a
new world of poetry. Alcools combined classical verse forms
with modern imagery, involving transcriptions of street conversations
overheard by change and the absence of punctuation. It opened with the
poem Zone, in which the tormented poet wanders through streets after
the loss of his mistress. Among its other famous poems are 'Le pont
Mirabeau' and 'La chanson du mal-aime.'
“Alcools” is pronounced “al-coal,” meaning “spirits,” although it is
also an obvious pun on “alcohol.” Indeed, the original title was
“Brandy.”
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.In 1911.
Apollinaire had a rebellious spirit and seemed an unlikely solider,
but in December 1914 he voluntarily joined the French army, much to the
surprise of many of his friends, and was posted to the front in April
1915.While in military training, Apollinaire met Louise de Châtillon-Coligny, for whom he wrote many of his best war poems:
If I died over there on the army front
You would cry for a day oh Lou my beloved
And then my memory would fade as dies
A shell bursting on the army front
A beautiful shell like flowering mimosa
Apollinaire loved military life. He loved his training in arms and
horseback riding, and learning to use and care for the famous French 75
cannon. He loved the camaraderie of barracks life, and the infinite
number of new sights and sounds and experiences that the war brought.
“Soldiering is my true profession,” he wrote his Parisian friends. To
another he wrote, from training camp, “I love art so much, I have joined
the artillery.”
But as his biographer Campa points out, Apollinaire had not yet seen any
shells exploding. He would continue to use childlike imagery, and to
preserve an inner world of beauty, even in the trenches. But
Apollinaire’s experience of war also changed his poetry. In Bleuet (the equivalent of the poppy in Britain), Apollinaire described the psychological ravages of battle:
Young man
of the age of twenty
who has seen such terrible things . . .
.looked death in the face more
than a hundred times and you don’t
know what life is...
Apollinaire realised quickly that his “beloved Lou” was playing with
him. He continued to write to her, but also began a correspondence with
Madeleine Pagès, a literature teacher whom he met on a train in January
1915.
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.”
Apollinaire arranged
words on the page to form patterns resembling objects: a drunken man, a
watch, the Eiffel Tower. At the time this eccentric use of typography
was thought to have stretched poetry to its limit.
His other works include the novella "The Poet
Assassinated" (1916) and the play "The Breasts of Tiresias" (1917). The
latter was made into an opera (1947) by composer Francis Poulenc, who
also set many of Apollinaire's poems to music.
Letters to Madeleine
combine the three strains of Apollinaire’s poetry: sex, love and war.
His eroticism is often humorous and ironic, as when he writes of
midwives fantasising about priapic cannons. Some of it is so explicit
that one is amazed it passed the military censors: “My tense flesh,
hardened by desire will penetrate your flesh,” he wrote to Madeleine on
October 22nd, 1915.
Apollinaire’s letters are equally explicit about the war. In July 1915
he wrote of “the horrible horror of millions of big, blue flies,” of
“holes so filthy you want to vomit.” Four months later, it was “mud,
what mud, you cannot imagine the mud you have to have seen it here,
sometimes the consistency of putty, sometimes liked whipped cream or
even wax and extraordinarily slippery.”
In December, Apollinaire told Madeleine that “the heart jumps with
every thunder” of the Germans’ 105mm.
While in hospital, Apollinaire gave an interview to a
cultural magazine in which, with his usual prescience, he predicted
that cinema would soon become the most popular form of art.
In November 1915, Apollinaire was transferred at his request to the
96th Infantry Regiment and was promoted to 2nd lieutenant. It was a
matter of “virile pride,” writes Campa. Living conditions were better
for officers, and “something in him wanted to go to the limit of his
commitment. He believed that being a poet meant taking risks.”
He suffered a serious head injury in March 1916,
which required him being trepanned. He never really recovered from the wound.
Picasso portrayed the convalescent soldier with his head in bandages
and the medal of the Legion of Honour pinned to his chest.
Apollinaire;s epistolary engagement to Madeleine had faded
after he visited her on Christmas leave in 1915.
In his last letter to Madeleine , in September 1916, he wrote: “Almost all my
friends from the war are dead. I don’t dare write to the colonel to ask
him the details. I heard he himself was wounded.”
Apollinaire remained in Paris, still in uniform, as a military censor.
He was afraid of being sent back to the front, and the job allowed him
to frequent publishing circles. Campa, who studied his work in French
archives, says he was a lenient censor.
In May 1918, Apollinaire married Jacqueline Kolb, “the pretty redhead” for whom he wrote the last poem in Calligrammes.
Kolb’s lover had been killed on the same battlefield where Apollinaire
was wounded. Picasso and the art dealer Ambroise Vollard were witnesses
to the marriage.
Six months later, on November 9th, Apollinaire was killed by the
Spanish flu epidemic that claimed more lives than the entire war itself.
He was 38 years old, and the French language was deprived of untold
riches.
Apollinaire died on the day Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated. Legend has it
that from his top floor apartment at 202 Boulevard St Germain he heard
people shouting “À bas Guillaume!” In his delirium, the poet believed
they referred to him.artillery. “It jumps not from fear
or emotion – those things no longer exist after 15 months of war – but
it jumps because the change in air pressure shakes everything.”
In November 1915, Apollinaire was transferred at his request to the
96th Infantry Regiment and was promoted to 2nd lieutenant. It was a
matter of “virile pride,” writes Campa. Living conditions were better
for officers, and “something in him wanted to go to the limit of his
commitment. He believed that being a poet meant taking risks.”
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 “ Cemetary,” created by Picasso, Erik Satie, Sergie Diaghilev
and Jean Cocteau.
Weakened by his war wound,
Apollianaire succumbed to Spanish Flu on Nov. 9, 1918, at the age of 38 and the French language was deprived of untold
riches He is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetarym in Paris. By the time of his death, his reputation was secure as one of the great
French poets and art critics.
Apollinaire's stature has continued to grow
since his death, as the precursor of surrealism and as a modernist 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. There has rarely, if ever, been
a single man who has been the central of so many artistic spokes.
“Through his innovation and inventiveness, Apollinaire initiated
20th-century poetry,” says Campa. “By embracing cubism and abstraction,
he also opened the artistic century . . . Now he’s become a symbol of
the more than 500 French writers who perished in the first World War,
whose names are engraved on the walls of the Pantheon. He also
symbolises the many foreigners who sacrificed their lives for France.”
The following poem “The Stunned Dove and the Water Jet.” is a translation, rearranged conventionally, by Charles Bernstein. Its 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.
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.
