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Apollinaire
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The most important aspect of Apollinaire's first years in Paris was his encounter with writers and artists. Jovial and full of enthusiasm, he became the welcome companion of the young modernists in the Bohemia of the day. He helped found little reviews and wrote articles defending what later was dubbed cubism. He wrote fiction, too, and poems that appeared in magazines, ultimately published in 1913 in a volume entitled Alcools (Alcohols). The originality of these poems lies more in the subtle handling of image and rhythm to express emotion than in technical innovation. Yet in correcting the proofs, Apollinaire rubbed out all punctuation and placed at the head of the collection a quite recent poem called "Zone," which is a sort of manifesto of modernism and, in form, less orthodox than the others.
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Apollinaire's first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but Alcools (1913) established his reputation. The poems, influenced in part by the Symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, combining traditional poetic forms with modern imagery. In 1913, Apollinaire published the essay Les Peintres cubistes on the cubist painters, a movement which he helped to define. He ... coined the term orphism to describe a tendency towards absolute abstraction in the paintings of Robert Delaunay and others.
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In 1914 Apollinaire had a short-lived affair with Louise de Coligny, then with a schoolteacher called Madeleine Pagès, to whom he became engaged. Then he met Jacqueline Kolb, whom he married in 1918. Disenchanted with his reputation as a dangerous foreigner and thief - in 1911 he had been detained for a week on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa - he took out French nationality and enlisted in the infantry. He fought on the front in Champagne until 1916, when he received a head wound. Some of his poems Apollinaire wrote in the trench under fire: "The sky is starry with Boche shells / The marvelous forest where I live is giving a ball." During and after his convalescence in Paris he continued to arrange new exhibitions and staged his one play The Breasts of Tiresias in 1917, about a housewife, Therèse, who changes sex and lets her breasts floating upwards as toy balloons. Apollinaire called the play "Drame surréaliste", making the term known.
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In November and December 1912, some time after his imprisonment on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Musée du Louvre and his subsequent release, Apollinaire stayed at the Delaunays’ flat. During this period Robert Delaunay produced his first Fenêtres, for example Window on the City (1912; New York, Guggenheim), which Apollinaire included under the stylistic heading of Orphism. Apollinaire’s friendship with Robert Delaunay led to close collaboration. Apollinaire wrote and published a series of texts about Delaunay’s art, in which he further promoted the concept of Orphism. In March 1913 Orphism was displayed to the public for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants; describing the Salon in L’Intransigeant (25 March 1913), Apollinaire wrote that ‘it combines painters of totally different characters, all of whom have nonetheless achieved a more internalized, more popular and more poetic vision of the universe and of life’. In his review of this exhibition in the Orphic magazine Montjoie!
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When cubism had become a powerful force, Apollinaire published The Cubist Painters, which explored the theory of cubism and analyzed psychologically the chief cubists and their works. According to Apollinaire, art is not a mirror held up to nature, so cubism is basically conceptual rather than perceptual. By means of the mind, one can know the essential transcendental reality that subsists "beyond the scope of nature." Ten days after the appearance of the book, Apollinaire deserted cubism for Orphism. The concept was ... invented by him and described "the art of painting new structures out of elements that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere but have been created entirely by the artist himself, and have been endowed by him with the fullness of reality." Among Orphicist artist were Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, and Frantisek Kupka. The Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico made in 1914 two paintings in tribute to Apollinaire. In Portrait of Apollinaire as a Premonition the poet uses sunglasses - he is blind.
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When war broke out in 1914, Apollinaire enlisted and found in combat new themes of poetic inspiration. Wounded in 1916, he was sent back to Paris, where the generation of future Dadaists and surrealists greeted him as a chief. In the following year the presentation of The Breasts of Tiresias, a burlesque play very much in the modern mood, and a lecture on the "new spirit" gave him considerable notoriety.
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Apollinaire