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Guillaume Apollinaire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Guillaume Apollinaire (August 26, 1880 – November 9, 1918) was a poet, writer, and art critic. The foremost French poet 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). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died at 38 of the Spanish flu during a pandemic.
Born Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky / Wąż-Kostrowicki in Rome, Italy, and raised speaking French, among other languages, he immigrated to France and adopted the name Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother, born Angelica Kostrowicka, (Waz Coat of Arms) was a Pole of the Szlachta nobility born near Nowogródek (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 one of the most popular members of the artistic community of Montparnasse in Paris. His friends and collaborators during that period were Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Marie Laurencin, André Breton, André Derain, 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 of the same year, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa, but released him a week later.
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.
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