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Apollinaire book becomes French best-seller for University author

A large-format book on the drawings and paintings of poet Guillaume Apollinaire by Professor Peter Read, Chair of French at the University of Kent and Director of the University of Kent at Paris, has become a best-seller in France during the run-up to Christmas.

Les Dessins de Guillaume Apollinaire (The Drawings of Guillaume Apollinaire) by Peter Read and Claude Debon, Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris (New Sorbonne), was published by Buchet-Chastel in October this year. Since then, the book, which presents colour reproductions of hundreds of previously unpublished drawings and paintings by Apollinaire, has received extensive media coverage, including a full-page article in Paris Match and illustrated reviews in most of the French national newspapers, including Le Monde and La Croix.

Regional papers have also been recommending the book and the Italian national daily La Repubblica gave it a double-page spread. In Le Figaro of 11 December, novelist Patrick Granville referred to the book as 'a workshop of intoxication, a factory of dreams' and stated that the works illustrated 'go from fragments sketched in the corner of a cave to futurist masterpieces. This is the art of the shamans of Lascaux and these are the illuminated manuscripts of the electronic age'.

The book has now been adopted by French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel and from January 2009 images from its pages are to form the centrepiece of window displays in her main shops and boutiques in 20 capital cities around the world.

Professor Read attributes the success of the book to 'the sudden revelation of this unknown store of paintings and drawings by one of France's most poignant and popular writers, and the country's best-known poet of the Great War'. He added that 'the uninhibited vitality of the drawings and the dazzling colour of the paintings seem to have astonished critics and captured the public's imagination'.

The drawings and paintings in Les Dessins de Guillaume Apollinaire were located by Peter Read and Claude Debon in French archives and private collections. The earliest works show the poet as a young teenager already seeking to combine words and images in complex compositions that prefigure his later picture-poems or 'calligrammes'. Many drawings appear on the backs and margins of manuscripts, which are often decorated with chivalric, erotic, domestic, macabre and comical scenes. There are cubist collages pasted into printer's proofs while other drawings and paintings provide a graphic, first-hand record of front-line existence during the Great War. The last paintings, from 1916-1918, express dreams of an alternative reality, prefiguring the art of Surrealism.

The illustrations are accompanied by extensive introductory essays, notes and annotations by the authors.

Contact: mediaoffice@kent.ac.uk

Story published at 12:07pm 23 December 2008