Apollinaire, Guillaume (1880–1918)

Author(s):  
Tara S. Thomson

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was a poet, literary and art critic, playwright, novelist, editor, and journalist. Born in Rome to a Polish-Russian mother and an unknown father, Apollinaire’s birth name was Guglielmo Alberto Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinare de Kostrowitzky, though his family called him Wilhelm (the German form of the Italian Guglielmo). After spending his early years moving throughout Monaco, France, Belgium, and Germany, he finally settled in Paris in 1902, adopting the pen name Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire became a prominent cultural figure in Paris and was a key player in the literary and artistic avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, particularly Cubism and Surrealism. Apollinaire first gained literary recognition for his poetry collection Alcools (1913) but is best known for inventing calligrams, a form of visual poetry. While Apollinaire was primarily a poet, he earned his living as a journalist and art critic. In his articles and reviews he championed avant-garde art, and was friends with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Apollinaire fought for France in WWI and returned home in 1916 after receiving a head wound. He survived the war but died of Spanish Flu in 1918.

Author(s):  
Elena Fabietti

Giuseppe Ungaretti was a major Italian author of the first half of the twentieth century. In his poetry he achieves a massive reinvention of Italian poetic language, abolishing punctuation, dismembering syntax and fragmenting the verse into single verbal units. Words acquire a completely new relevance and density, which counterweigh the abundance of silence and blank space, in ways that resonate with the models of Symbolism and the avant-garde, without coinciding with these. Born in Alexandria in Egypt in 1888 as the son of an emigrant family, Ungaretti received a bilingual education in Italian and French. After moving to Paris in 1912, he became part of Parisian intellectual and poetic life, attended classes at the Sorbonne and came into contact with all major cultural personalities of the time, such as Henri Bergson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and the Italian futurists, among others.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-170
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore

Three letters from the Sheina Marshall archive at the former University Marine Biological Station Millport (UMBSM) reveal the pivotal significance of Sheina Marshall's father, Dr John Nairn Marshall, behind the scheme planned by Glasgow University's Regius Professor of Zoology, John Graham Kerr. He proposed to build an alternative marine station facility on Cumbrae's adjacent island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde in the early years of the twentieth century to cater predominantly for marine researchers.


Author(s):  
Lynn M. Somers

Born in Paris in 1859 to a bourgeois family, painter and draughtsman Georges-Pierre Seurat enjoyed a brief but mature career as the leading French Neo-Impressionist. His invention of Divisionism (or "chromo-luminarism"), a painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics, challenged the spontaneity and fluidity of Impressionism, which by the 1880s had been largely subsumed by a capitalist gallery system. In 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, Seurat debuted his monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte (1884–1886), a "patient tapestry" of line and color that led the art critic and activist Félix Fénéon to coin the term néo-impressionisme. Equally shaped by the Renaissance frescoes of Piero della Francesca and the Baudelairean praise of the ephemerality of modern life, La Grande-Jatte symbolically closed a chapter in French painting. Seurat’s systematic aesthetic produced an indelible impact on fin de siècle artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, and later Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and André Breton’s Surrealism, firmly establishing him as integral to the 20th-century avant-garde. Seurat’s oeuvre includes approximately 500 drawings and 6 major figure paintings, an astonishing output for a career that lasted only 11 years.


2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Double

Punk rock performance consciously draws on popular theatre forms such as music hall and stand-up comedy – as was exemplified on the occasion when Max Wall appeared with Ian Dury at the Hammersmith Odeon. Oliver Double traces the historical and stylistic connections between punk, music hall and stand-up, and argues that punk shows can be considered a form of popular theatre in their own right. He examines a wide range of punk bands and performers – including The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Devo, Spizz, The Ramones, The Clash, and Dead Kennedys – to consider how they use costume, staging, personae, characterization, and audience–performer relationships, arguing that these are as important and carefully considered as the music they play. Art movements such as Dada and Futurism were important influences on the early punk scene, and Double shows how, as with early twentieth-century cabaret, punk performance manages to include avant-garde elements within popular theatre forms. Oliver Double started his career performing a comedy act alongside anarchist punk bands in Exeter, going on to spend ten years on the alternative comedy circuit. Currently, he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent, and he is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005).


2018 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Yetta Howard

The introductory chapter of Ugly Differences provides a theoretical overview of the book and its central interventions on the concepts of ugliness and the underground. It turns to early-twentieth-century examples by Gertrude Stein and Claude McKay to frame genealogical connections between ugliness and queer female difference. This literary history highlights the roles that avant-garde, experimental, primitivist, and vernacular approaches to cultural production play in reflecting nondominant subjects whose differences are routed through de-privileged sites of the aesthetic.


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