Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire
by Maurice de Viaminck, (1903)
Guillaume Apollinaire
(August 26, 1880 – November 9, 1918)
was a French poet, writer and
art critic born to a Polish mother.
Among the foremost poets
of the early 20th century,
he is credited with coining the word
“surrealism.”
Apollinaire ran with Pablo Picasso,
Gertrude Stein, Blaise Cendrars,
Jean Cocteau, Marc Chagall
and Marcel Duchamp.
He was jailed for a week in 1911
on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa.
Two years after being
wounded in World War I,
he died at age 38,
a victim of the 1918
Spanish flu pandemic.