"His unique contributions acted as a bridge between the literary and visual arts"

Guillaume Apollinaire

A Sensational Surrealist, A Cubist, A Caligrammist, A Bohemian, and more!

#onhisbirthdaytoday

Credited with coining the terms Cubism, Orphism, Surrealism, and other key Modernist Terms

26th August

Guillaume Apollinaire is a pioneer of the early 20th century avant-garde artistic movements in Europe.

He gained notoriety in 1917 with the staging of his play The Breasts of Tiresias. He coined a new word for the play’s subtitle: ‘‘A Surrealist Drama.’’

By ‘‘surrealist,’’ Apollinaire meant a representation that surpassed traditionally simplistic or sentimental realism. He felt that theatre should suggest the infinite possibilities of the modern world, in which science was turning fantasy into reality. The results might shock or outrage traditional audiences, but would appeal to the modern mindset that understands life as an unpredictable blend of tragedy, comedy, and surprise.

His unique contributions acted as a bridge between the literary and visual arts. He became a legend for his artistic daring and his flamboyant, bohemian personality.

Unlike the symbolists, however, whose work intentionally ignored everyday reality, Apollinaire’s strategy was to confront and transform worldly experience. Many themes in Alcools and Calligrammes - images of technology, for example, and the alienation of modern existence - had never been treated before in serious poetry!

A Calligram [concrete poetry or picture poetry or shape poetry,
which combines poetic writing and drawing]

He revelled in the irreverent attitudes of Dadaism, the fragmented perspectives in cubist painting, and the flexible structures of jazz. He deliberately juxtaposed the modern with the traditional, and the serious with the ludicrous, in his effort to grapple with the complicated, contradictory realities of the twentieth century.

His friendship with the young Pablo Picasso marked a turning point in Apollinaire’s career. He became a defender of experimentation and innovation in the arts. His essays on cubism, starting in 1904 and culminating with a book on The Cubist Painters (1913), remain pertinent for art critics. His writings helped bring artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Rousseau to a wider audience.

The Calligrammes, are his most distinctive creation. He coined this term for his visual poems where the typography and arrangement of words form a picture that relates to the poem’s subject. For example, a poem about rain might have its lines cascade down the page. This fusion of text and image was a radical departure from traditional poetic form, blurring the line between poetry and visual art.

Moreover, by abandoning all kinds of punctuation, he also pioneered a Modernist Poetics in his influential poetry collection Alcools (1913). He abandoned all punctuation, since he believed that, the flow and rhythm of the language should guide the reader. This mirrored the stream-of-consciousness techniques that would become central to modernist literature. He also blended modern themes, like technology and urban life, with classical and lyrical subjects.

Literature Source: Gale’s Encyclopedia | Image: Google