Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire was the poet who explained the prewar avant-garde to itself. A member of Pablo Picasso's circle from 1905, he defended Cubism in print when the press treated it as a hoax, published Alcools, one of the landmark poetry collections of the century, in 1913, and in 1917 coined the word that became Surrealism.

He did not live to see what the word became. Wounded in the head by shrapnel in 1916, he died of Spanish influenza on 9 November 1918, two days before the Armistice, at thirty-eight.

From Rome to Paris

Apollinaire was born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in Rome on 26 August 1880. His mother, Angelica Kostrowicka, was a Polish noblewoman; his father never acknowledged him, and is generally identified as Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, a Swiss-Italian aristocrat. The boy was schooled in Monaco, Cannes, and Nice, and by 1900 was living with his mother in Paris, getting by on clerical work.

In 1901 he went to the Rhineland as a tutor and fell in love with Annie Playden, an English governess who did not return the feeling. The affair fed several of the long poems later collected in Alcools. Back in Paris, he helped found a small review, Le Festin d'Ésope, in 1903, in a circle that included the writers André Salmon, Alfred Jarry, and Max Jacob.

Picasso, Laurencin, and the Bateau-Lavoir

Apollinaire met Pablo Picasso in 1905 and became a fixture of the circle around the Bateau-Lavoir, the ramshackle Montmartre studio building where Picasso then lived and worked. In 1907 Picasso introduced him to the painter Marie Laurencin, and the two were a couple until 1912. Laurencin painted him during those years; her Portrait de Guillaume Apollinaire now hangs in the Musée de l'Orangerie. The end of the affair fed "Le Pont Mirabeau," the poem in Alcools that sets lost love against the Seine flowing under the bridge.

In 1908 he presided over the banquet the Bateau-Lavoir crowd threw for the painter Henri Rousseau, a night Gertrude Stein later recounted in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Rousseau answered the tribute in paint: The Muse Inspiring the Poet, which he made in two versions in 1909, shows Apollinaire with Laurencin as his muse. Apollinaire was also a regular at Stein's salon at 27 rue de Fleurus.

From 1911 he also shaped the market for the art he championed. He took up a young enthusiast of African sculpture named Paul Guillaume, introduced him to the avant-garde, and guided his choices when Guillaume opened his first gallery in 1914.

The Mona Lisa arrest

When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in August 1911, the police arrested Apollinaire. His former secretary, Géry Pieret, had earlier stolen ancient Iberian stone heads from the museum and sold them to Apollinaire and to Picasso, and when Pieret's thefts surfaced during the investigation, suspicion fell on the poet. He was arrested on 7 September 1911 and held for five days in the Santé prison. Picasso was questioned by the examining magistrate. Both men were cleared.

The painting had been taken by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter who had worked at the Louvre. He was caught in 1913 when he tried to sell it in Florence.

Alcools and The Cubist Painters

1913 was his great year. Alcools collected fifteen years of his poetry, printed without punctuation — Apollinaire removed it at the proof stage — and opened with "Zone," a poem that walks modern Paris in long unrhymed lines. The same year The Cubist Painters made the case for the new painting in book form, claiming for it an art "entirely new." Among the artists it discussed was Marcel Duchamp, of whom Apollinaire predicted that he might reconcile art and the public.

He ran his side of the argument from a café table. From 1913 he effectively edited his magazine Les Soirées de Paris from the ground floor of the Café de Flore on the boulevard Saint-Germain.

The war, the wound, and a new word

When the war came, Apollinaire — still not a French citizen — volunteered. He enlisted in late 1914, reached the front as an artilleryman in March 1915, and later took an infantry commission. France granted him citizenship in March 1916. Days later, on 17 March 1916, a shell fragment pierced his helmet at the right temple while he sat in a trench reading a magazine. He was trepanned that May and returned to Paris weakened, his head bandaged.

The last two years were the most consequential of his life. For the premiere of Parade on 18 May 1917 — the ballet by Jean Cocteau, with music by Erik Satie and sets and costumes by Picasso — Apollinaire wrote a program note describing the work as a kind of "sur-réalisme." He had been trying the word out in letters that spring. On 24 June 1917 his own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias premiered carrying the subtitle "drame surréaliste." André Breton, who admired him, took up the word when he organized the Surrealist movement in 1924.

In 1918 he published Calligrammes, poems of peace and war in which the words are arranged on the page as pictures, and on 2 May married Jacqueline Kolb, who had cared for him since his injury.

That autumn the Spanish influenza pandemic reached Paris, and Apollinaire, weakened by the head wound and its surgery, could not fight it off. He died at home on 9 November 1918, two days before the Armistice ended the war he had fought in. He was thirty-eight. He was buried on 13 November at Père Lachaise, where a rough granite menhir now stands over a base carved with one of his calligrammes.