Raoul Dufy, Pierre Alechinsky and Jim Dine: Depicting the Arts in Guillaume Apollinaire's ‘Le Poète Assassiné’

Abstract

This article focuses on Guillaume Apollinaire's loosely autobiographical novel, ‘Le Poète assassiné’ (1916), challenging accepted readings of it as a straightforward roman à clef. The ways in which the novel itself deals with art and the relationships between poetry, painting and popular culture are brought out through the examination of three overlooked sets of illustrations for it: by Raoul Dufy (1926), Pierre Alechinsky (1948) and Jim Dine (1968). Through them, the article scrutinizes the author and illustrators’ intentions in subverting the monumental, classical and traditional and considers the novel as a challenge to the deceptive ‘appearance’ of Art, represented by illusionistic academic conventions. By pushing art's ‘appearance’ to the margins and treating the text from individual standpoints, the three artists concerned suggest the process of illustration to be one of creation, overwriting and mapping. The ‘marriage’ between text and image, poetry and painting, can here be understood as a form of ‘visual cartography’.