Apollinaire, Guillaume

Apollinaire, Guillaume ( Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky) (1880–1918). French poet and art critic, a major figure in the avant-garde world of Paris in the early 20th century. He was born in Rome, the illegitimate son of a high-class Polish courtesan, Olga Kostrowitzky, whose surname he used until 1902, when he adopted his pseudonym; his father was probably an Italian nobleman, although Apollinaire liked to hint he was the offspring of a high-ranking clergyman. He was brought up in Monte Carlo and received his education in French. From about 1900 he lived in Paris, where he earned his living mainly with journalism, especially art criticism—he was, indeed, one of the prototypes of the modern journalistic 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: John Golding writes that ‘no other critic has ever helped and encouraged such an impressive number of gifted and, for the most part, unknown young painters.’ 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 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). The less impressive aspects of his career include his failure to understand Brancusi and his overrating of Marie Laurencin (his lover), whom he placed on the same level as Picasso.

Apollinaire enlisted in the French army in 1914 and was discharged in 1916 after receiving a head wound; weakened by this, he died of influenza two years later. The only book on art he published in his lifetime was Méditations esthétiques: Les peintres cubistes (1913), but a collected edition of his criticism appeared in 1960 under the title Guillaume Apollinaire: Chroniques d'Art 1902–18 (an English translation was published in 1972 as Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–18). John Golding sums up his position in the history of art as follows: ‘no other man reflected so completely every facet of the artistic temper of his age. He was a weather-vane which responded to the slightest intellectual vibration; he was a net which caught and gathered up every new aesthetic trend. Artists loved his company, and he made them aware of themselves and of each other. Above all he was a cardinal figure in creating the artistic climate of Paris early this century—a climate in which anything and everything was thought possible. It was this belief that made the early twentieth century one of the most exciting periods in the entire history of the visual arts, and Apollinaire, for all his failings, remains its spokesman and its most representative critic’ (‘ Guillaume Apollinaire: The Painters' Friend’ in Visions of the Modern, 1994).