Guillaume Apollinaire: 140 Years Since the Birth of Modernity's Enfant Terrible

Guillaume Apollinaire, born in Rome in 1880 to a Polish noblewoman and a Bourbon officer of Swiss descent, was a poet, writer, and art critic who championed Cubism, Futurism, and the avant-garde. He recognized and encouraged talents like Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck, and Marinetti. After founding the review Les soirées de Paris, he published Alcools in 1913, dissolving temporal sequence. In 1914 he volunteered for WWI, serving as an artillery sub-lieutenant; wounded in 1916, he underwent cranial surgery. His war poetry echoed Ungaretti's pity. In his final year, he eliminated punctuation and adopted free verse in Calligrammes, merging word and image and anticipating kinetic art. He died in Paris in 1918 from the Spanish flu. A posthumous 2010 publication of his sketchbook revealed proto-Surrealist drawings.