Guillaume Apollinaire, 1880-1918
27 May - 21 Dec 2015
Poet of modernity and champion of the avant-gardes
Curator : Mnam/Cci / Brigitte Léal, Ariane Coulondre
Poet of modernity and champion of the avant-gardes, Guillaume Apollinaire was a great communicator of ideas whose verve and intelligence lit up early-20th-century Paris. Looking for novelty in artistic expression, he experimented with the calligram, a visual poem whose typographic composition forms an image. Friends with many artists, among them Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Le Douanier Rousseau and Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire shared in the artistic ferment that characterised the Paris scene. A prolific art critic in L’Intransigeant and founder of the magazine Les Soirées de Paris, he reported on current developments in art, the emergence of Fauvism, Futurism and Cubism, writing too on the art of Africa and Oceania that interested him as much as it did the artists of the time. Faced with a generally hostile public, Apollinaire rose to the defence of the young painters. Close to Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, he promoted Cubism, publishing his pioneering Les Peintres cubistes as early as 1913. It was he who coined the word Orphism for the Delaunays’ coloristic Cubism, and the “Surrealism” that Breton took from him. Polish by birth, in 1915 Apollinaire enlisted in the French army and died in 1918, at the age of 38, two days before the end of hostilities.
Brigitte Léal et Ariane Coulondre
Thanks to Christian Briend, Christelle Courregelongue et Marc Archambault
Curator : Mnam/Cci / Brigitte Léal, Ariane Coulondre
Poet of modernity and champion of the avant-gardes, Guillaume Apollinaire was a great communicator of ideas whose verve and intelligence lit up early-20th-century Paris. Looking for novelty in artistic expression, he experimented with the calligram, a visual poem whose typographic composition forms an image. Friends with many artists, among them Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Le Douanier Rousseau and Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire shared in the artistic ferment that characterised the Paris scene. A prolific art critic in L’Intransigeant and founder of the magazine Les Soirées de Paris, he reported on current developments in art, the emergence of Fauvism, Futurism and Cubism, writing too on the art of Africa and Oceania that interested him as much as it did the artists of the time. Faced with a generally hostile public, Apollinaire rose to the defence of the young painters. Close to Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, he promoted Cubism, publishing his pioneering Les Peintres cubistes as early as 1913. It was he who coined the word Orphism for the Delaunays’ coloristic Cubism, and the “Surrealism” that Breton took from him. Polish by birth, in 1915 Apollinaire enlisted in the French army and died in 1918, at the age of 38, two days before the end of hostilities.
Brigitte Léal et Ariane Coulondre
Thanks to Christian Briend, Christelle Courregelongue et Marc Archambault