Guillaume Apollinaire: The Poet Who Named Modern Art
On 7 September 1911 the Paris police arrested a thirty-one-year-old poet on suspicion of stealing the *Mona Lisa*. He spent a week in custody, panicked, and implicated his friend Pablo Picasso; both were questioned and both were exonerated, the actual thief being an Italian house painter named Vincenzo Peruggia who was not caught for two more years. It was an absurd episode in a life full of them. It was also the low point of a decade in which the same man gave the twentieth century three of the words it would use to describe itself: Cubism, Orphism, and Surrealism.
A Roman Birth and a Missing Father
He was christened Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Aleksander Apolinary Kostrowicki, born in Rome on 26 August 1880. His mother, Angelika Kostrowicka, was a Polish-Lithuanian noblewoman born near Navahrudak in the Grodno Governorate, in what is now Belarus, and the daughter of a man who had taken part in the 1863 uprising against Russian rule. His father is unknown; the likeliest candidate is Francesco Costantino Camillo Flugi d'Aspermont, a Graubünden aristocrat born in 1835, who vanished from the boy's life early. Apollinaire grew up speaking French, Italian and Polish, a triple inheritance that may explain why he never treated the French language as sacred property. In his late teens he emigrated to France, and in 1900 he moved from Rome to Paris and took the name under which the world knows him.
Montmartre and the Business of Modernity
Paris in 1900 was the only place his particular talent could have been put to use. Apollinaire made himself indispensable to the artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse — not as a patron, since he had no money, but as an explainer. He worked as a journalist and art critic for *Le Matin*, *L'Intransigeant*, *Mercure de France* and *Paris Journal*, and in 1912 he co-founded the magazine *Les Soirées de Paris*. His circle was, in retrospect, an implausible roll call of the century: Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, André Salmon, André Derain, Blaise Cendrars, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, and the young André Breton. He dabbled in anarchism and spoke publicly as a Dreyfusard. The painter Marie Laurencin became his lover and is often identified as his muse.
He also became a subject as well as an observer. Jean Metzinger painted the first Cubist portrait of him, shown at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, and Apollinaire wrote with visible pride in his *Vie anecdotique* on 16 October 1911: "I am honoured to be the first model of a Cubist painter, Jean Metzinger, for a portrait exhibited in 1910."
The Man Who Supplied the Vocabulary
Apollinaire is credited with coining the term Cubism in 1911, and he delivered the opening address at the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or, the most important pre-war Cubist exhibition. At the same salon he coined Orphism to describe the work of Robert Delaunay and František Kupka, defining it as the art of painting new totalities with elements that the artist does not take from visual reality but creates entirely by himself. His book *Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques*, published in 1913, defined the movement for a public that had not yet decided whether to laugh.
The third word came in wartime. In March 1917 he wrote to Paul Dermée: "All things considered, I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism." He applied it formally to *Parade*, the Cocteau and Satie ballet that premiered on 18 May 1917. Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, who would form the nucleus of the Surrealist group, took the word and built a movement on it after his death.
Alcools, and the Removal of the Full Stop
Apollinaire's own poetry did what his criticism argued for. His first collection, *L'enchanteur pourrissant*, appeared in 1909, followed by *Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée* in 1911. *Alcools*, published in 1913, made his reputation: poems that juxtapose the old and the new, marrying traditional prosody to the imagery of aeroplanes, factories and city streets. Famously, he stripped the punctuation out entirely. The Poetry Foundation singles out "Zone" and "Song of the Ill-Beloved" as his most successful poems, and identifies the abolition of punctuation, together with the visual arrangement of text in *Calligrammes*, as what many regard as his most significant contribution to modern poetry.
He wrote a great deal else, some of it deliberately scandalous. *Les Onze Mille Verges*, an erotic novel of 1907, remained officially banned in France until 1970; Picasso treasured the original 1907 manuscript of the related *Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan*.
The Wound
Apollinaire served as an infantry officer in the First World War. In 1916 he received a serious shrapnel wound to the temple from which he never fully recovered. Convalescing, he wrote *Les Mamelles de Tirésias*, staged in 1917 and now regarded as one of the earliest Surrealist literary works; Francis Poulenc turned it into an opera in 1947. In 1918 he published the manifesto *L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes*, calling, in the Poetry Foundation's summary, for pure invention and a total surrender to inspiration, and *Calligrammes*, in which typography and layout are part of the meaning and poems take the shape of rain, a horse, the Eiffel Tower.
He died on 9 November 1918, aged thirty-eight, of influenza in the Spanish flu pandemic, two days before the Armistice and two years after the wound that had weakened him. He was recognized as *Mort pour la France* and buried in Père Lachaise.
Why Guillaume Is Called a Genius
The quality at issue is not depth of thought but speed of recognition. Apollinaire's gift was to see a new thing while it was still incoherent, understand what it was for, and hand it a name that stuck — three times, in three separate domains, within six years. That is a rare cognitive act: pattern recognition operating faster than consensus. The Poetry Foundation calls him one of the most important literary figures of the early twentieth century and names his defining qualities as vitality and a constant readiness to take both personal and artistic risks. His influence ran into Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism at once, and Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and Louis Aragon all claimed his legacy.
The counter-case is real. Apollinaire built no system and left no sustained theory; *Les Peintres Cubistes* is advocacy, not analysis, and his enthusiasms were sometimes indiscriminate. His output is uneven, padded with pornographic potboilers written for money. He was capable of moral failure under pressure, as the Louvre affair showed when he named Picasso to the police. Much of what is credited to him — particularly Surrealism — was developed into something substantial by other people after he was dead. What is not in dispute is the originality of the formal moves themselves: removing punctuation from *Alcools* and turning the printed page into a picture in *Calligrammes* were not slogans but genuine inventions, and poets have been working with them ever since.
Legacy
A career of eighteen years, ended by a virus at thirty-eight, produced two collections that remain fixtures of the modern canon and a critical vocabulary that outlived every movement it described. Apollinaire never belonged to a single school, which is precisely why he could speak for all of them; he is the connective tissue between Picasso's studio and Breton's manifesto, the writer who stood at the exact hinge where the nineteenth century stopped and the twentieth began, and told everyone what to call it.
Achievements
- Notable work: Alcools
- Worked as poet, writer and playwright
