Guillaume Apollinaire

The poet, playwright, writer, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire was a pivotal figure of the avant-garde in France, connecting artistic and literary circles in Paris especially during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He coined the term “cubism” in his preface to the catalogue for the 8th salon of the cercle d’art “Les Indépendants” in Brussels in 1911, and was one of the first critics to define the principles of Cubism in his essay Les peintres cubistes (The Cubist Painters, 1913). He collected the works of Georges Braque, André Derain, Marie Laurencin and Pablo Picasso—the artists that figured most prominently within his “aesthetic meditations” on the “new spirit” of the age—and introduced readers to Cubist works reproduced in his review, Les soirées de Paris (1912–14).

Born in Rome to a Polish mother and an Italian father, Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki moved to Paris at the age of twenty. Between 1902, when he began to write for La Revue Blanche, and 1918, the year of his untimely death from the Spanish flu, Apollinaire was the foremost critic of his age, reviewing art, literature, theater, and ballet as a contributor to leading journals and newspapers Le Matin, Paris Journal, and Intransigeant. In addition to publishing erotic novels, fiction, and poetry, he edited several avant-garde literary journals, in which he championed the work of artists and writers within his inner circle, including Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Laurencin (with whom he had a five-year affair), Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. In 1912 Apollinaire co-founded the review Les soirées de Paris with writers André Billy, René Dalize, and André Salmon funded in part by the aristocratic patron Comte Étienne de Beaumont. In 1913 he published Les peintres cubistes, comprising a selection of his criticism published between 1905 and 1912, and Alcools, his first major collection of poetry, with Picasso’s Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire (1913) reproduced as a frontispiece. Apollinaire also advised the young gallerist Paul Guillaume, who, upon opening his first gallery in 1914, would promote many of the artists in Apollinaire’s orbit.

Apollinaire suffered a shrapnel wound to the head while serving in the French army during the First World War. Discharged from military service, he returned to Paris in 1916. Despite his injury, the final two years of his life were among his most prolific. As he continued to edit avant-garde literary journals, he wrote the play Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) in 1917 and directed its first production at a theater in Montmartre. He delivered a lecture “The New Spirit and Poets” in the fall of 1917. His collection of visual poems called calligrammes, published in 1918, had a formative impact upon the generation of young poets he had begun to mentor during the war, which included Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault.

Apollinaire’s apartment at 202 boulevard Saint-Germain, where he lived from 1913 to 1918, contained his remarkable collection of ethnographic artifacts and modern paintings, including works by Braque, Paul Cézanne, de Chirico, Derain, Laurencin, Henri Matisse, Picasso, and Henri Rousseau, among others. Apollinaire acquired works directly from artists, and sold them as needed in order to fund publications and travel. In October 1913, for example, he sold a watercolor by Henri Rousseau and twenty-two works on paper by Picasso to the Berlin dealer Otto Feldmann.

Apollinaire’s collection included several portraits painted by artist friends, including Mikhail Larionov, Louis Marcoussis, Jean Metzinger, Amedeo Modigliani, and Picasso. Metzinger’s Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire (1910; Centre Pompidou, Paris) was the first Cubist portrait to be publicly exhibited when it was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910. Apollinaire also owned Laurencin’s Portrait of Max Jacob (1908; Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, France) and The Poet and his Friends (1909; Centre Pompidou, Paris), depicting Apollinaire, Fernande Olivier, Picasso, and Laurencin herself in a pastoral scene.

As one of the first critics to promote the young Picasso in Paris, Apollinaire received dozens of works as gifts from Picasso. These oil paintings, caricatures, prints, and preparatory works on paper chart the development of the artist’s oeuvre and testify to the poet and the artist’s enduring friendship. Picasso’s portraits of Apollinaire ranged from lighthearted depictions of the poet as an academic, a coffeepot, and sailor (1902−10) to later depictions of the poet as a soldier: Guillaume de Kostrowitzky, Artilleur (1914; private collection, Paris) which depicted the poet on the battlefield with a cannon; Portrait d’Apollinaire en uniforme (1916; private collection, Paris); and Apollinaire blessé (Portrait de Guillaume Apollinaire) (1916; Musée Picasso, Paris), depicting the wounded poet with a bandage wrapped around his head. Apollinaire owned a set of Picasso’s engravings of saltimbanques (1904–05) as well as works on paper: Trois femmes dans un intérieur (Three Women; 1902−03; Musée Picasso, Paris); Jester Holding a Child (1905; Lionel Prejger Collection, Paris); and L’étreinte (The Embrace, 1905; private collection, Paris) signed “To my dear friend Guillaume Apollinaire Picasso 1905.” Apollinaire’s collection also contained several notable early paintings including the Blue Period Head of a Woman (1903; University of Montana, Missoula); Tête de femme (Head of a Woman, 1909; Berardo Collection, Lisbon); and Man with a Guitar (1918; Kunsthalle, Hamburg), which the artist gave to the poet as a wedding present in 1918. Following the poet’s death, Apollinaire’s wife, Jacqueline, preserved their apartment as it was, leading Picasso’s lover Françoise Gilot to describe it as a “small provincial museum.” The collection was dispersed at auction in 1967.