The Blue Hour in Guillaume Apollinaire

(25.5.2022) The First World War has left its traces in the history of colors: a bleu horizon, horizon blue, referring to the uniform of French soldiers, is still known today. And this story, taken from the history of colors, as one might say, can also be detected in French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, whose favourite color was, as we are informed due to letters, blue.

(Picture: Paul Castelnau)

Who would Picasso have been without Guillaume Apollinaire? Such rhetoric question, of course, cannot be answered. But we can ask: what has the Blue Period Picasso to do with his friend Guillaume? And we would have to discuss, for example, the poem Crépuscule by Apollinaire, with its harlequine, inspecting her body, its harlequin and its charlatan crépusculaire. Who is influencing whom, is often hard to tell, but as far as the relation Apollinaire/Picasso is concerned, it seems that Apollinaire acted as one of the many personalities around Picasso, who offered a sort of conceptual guidance to the artist, who was less concept-oriented but rather an instinctive craftsman. Who yet was able to adapt all kind of conceptual guidances offered to him – instinctively/intelligently. This particular capacity, as one might say, actually made the genius of Picasso. Or much of it.
Crépuscule is from the 1913 collection Alcools, which is assembling the earlier, pre-World-War-I production by the poet. As Apollinaire himself went to war as a soldier – without loosing his particular sense of humour, as his poems reflecting his experience of going to war are showing us, we can detect horizon blue in his later collection of poems: Calligrammes (published in 1918, posthumously).
Dusk and dawn itself, in Apollinaire, does not seem to be blue as such. But dusk and dawn, in Apollinaire, are populated. By the charlatan crépusculaire, in his earlier period; by a ›blue angel‹, an officer, ›galloping by‹ in the ›grey rain‹, in the poem 2e Cannonier Conducteur. If we look at works by Picasso from the, let’s say, 1913-1915 period, it seems that blue horizon has also entered certain cubistic works, which may be seen as equivalents to the eclectic-style modern poetry by Apollinaire, in that such works are structures, incorporating fragments of reality such as the horizon blue color of the French soldiers’ uniform, as well as many other fragments. Horizon blue is a greyish blue. Its mere presence has to do with the French military, and with the First World War. In the work of Picasso it may have to do with military, war, and particularly with Apollinaire, his friend, going to war. Again we may ask: who would Picasso have been without his friend, poet Guillaume Apollinaire?

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