Guillaume Apollinaire

"Guillaume Apollinaire's only book on art, The Cubist Painters, was first published in 1913. This essential text in twentieth-century art presents the poet and critic's aesthetic meditations on nine painters: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. As Picasso's closest friend and Marie Laurencin's lover, Apollinaire witnessed the development of Cubism firsthand. This collection of essays and reviews, written between 1905 and 1912, is a milestone in the history of art criticism, valued today as both a work of reference and a classic example of modernist creative writing."--Jacket.

An early and influential champion of cubism, the friend of Braque, Picasso, Dufy, Rousseau and Marie Laurencin (who became his mistress), Apollinaire was a seminal figure in the revolutionary art style known as "Surrealism," a term that he coined some seven years before Breton formally founded the movement. In this charming book, published in 1910 and embellished with the graphically sophisticated and totally appropriate woodcuts of Dufy, we find the poet at his most accessible. His quatrains, printed in Dante italic and felicitously translated by Pepe Karmel, present a voice that ranges from the colloquial to the impassioned, a brisk combination of lyric imagery and bawdy humor (not surprising for a poet who, after a pious adolescence, supported himself by writing pornography). This is a small bijou of a livre de peintre, a lovely and lively ensemble of accessible poetry and striking woodcut art.

« Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine »... Parmi les vers que les amoureux de poésie murmurent de temps à autre, bon nombre, sans aucun doute, proviennent des pages vivifiantes d'Alcools. Ce recueil révèle la fascination d'Apollinaire pour l'esprit nouveau des premières années du XXe siècle. Il nous fait don de mots en liberté qui chantent la mélancolie des souvenirs d'amours défuntes, la magie des légendes rhénanes, la beauté mouvementée de la vie urbaine moderne. Un véritable kaléidoscope. [payot.ch]

It's an erotic novel written under the name G.A., there is no record of Apollinaire saying he wrote it, but his close friends, like Picasso, say that it was him, and classify this novel as one of the most humouristic novels by the author. It may be portraiyed as a pornographic novel, but it is in fact more of a comedy, with hints of erotism.