Apollinaire, Guillaume

Apollinaire, Guillaume (b Rome, 26 Aug. 1880; d Paris, 9 Nov. 1918). French poet and art critic. The illegitimate son of a high-class Polish-Russian courtesan, he was originally called Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, but he adopted his pseudonym in 1902, about two years after he settled in Paris; his father was probably an Italian nobleman, although Apollinaire liked to hint he was the offspring of a high-ranking clergyman. In addition to being a major poet, he was ‘the most influential art critic writing in France during the decade before the outbreak of war in 1914…a cardinal figure in creating the artistic climate of Paris early in this century—a climate in which anything and everything was thought possible’ ( John Golding, Visions of the Modern, 1994). He earned his living mainly with journalism and was one of the prototypes of the modern critic, his writing containing much that is superficial and gossipy. His importance stems not so much from the quality of his writing as from his brilliance as a propagandist on behalf of those artists he most admired. In particular he championed Picasso (his first substantial articles, in 1905, were on him) and later the Cubists in general (including the Orphists, whose name he coined). Among the other artists whose reputations he either established or consolidated were Chagall, de Chirico, Derain, Matisse, and Henri Rousseau. He was also influential on Dada (his friend Marcel Duchamp's interest in visual punning was partly inspired by Apollinaire's love of jest and linguistic acrobatics) and on Surrealism (he coined the term in 1917 and his suggestion that artists should explore ‘interior universes’ stimulated André Breton, who dedicated the first Surrealist manifesto to his memory). In an entirely different artistic context, he became briefly notorious in 1911 when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre and he spent several days in police custody on false suspicion of being involved in the crime. Apollinaire was wounded in the head serving in the French army in 1916; weakened by this, he died of influenza two years later.