Apollonaire

See also: [The Banquet Years] (Sir Monty Stattuck and his avant garde bandiliers!) [Impressionism [Louis Marcoussis] [Blaise Cendrars]

Apollonaire

Apollonaire (b.1880, Rome; d.1918, Paris) aka "Guillaume de Kostrowitsky" "Born of a Polish mother and a Swiss-Italian father, A. used to like to pass himself off as the son of an Italian prelate. An extraordinary character and an in-ordinate hoaxer, but at the same time a poet of captivating charm and sincerity, A. played a most important role in the history of modern art. One of his claims to distinciton -- and by no means the lest -- stems from his having perpetuated the tradtion started by 1800c French poets headed by Baudelaire of devoting some of their finest works to the exaltation of the plastic arts, particularly the new painting of their time." -- Maurice Raynal, in Dictionary of Art