Pierre Albert-Birot

Pierre Albert-Birot (22 April 1876 – 25 July 1967) was a French avant-garde poet, dramatist, and theater manager. He was a steadfast avant-garde during World War I. He created and published the magazine Sic from 1916 to 1919. He was a defender of Futurism and Cubism. The Dadaists considered him one of their own, although he never took part in the movement. He declared himself the founder of the ″nunique" school (from the Greek adverb νῦν / nun, now), a literary school of which he was the only master, with no disciples.

After the war, he distanced himself from the Surrealists, to whom he had, with Guillaume Apollinaire, given their name, and he created a solipsistic body of work and tried his hand at everything, printing his own books and cultivating the childlike joy of artistic creation. He himself wrote: ″I find my joy in poetic creation and I find my joy in the creations of my hands. ... All of this is just like a game, I love to play, I keep the kid alive.″

Despite being mocked by the Surrealists for his pretensions to excel in many artistic mediums, and being criticized by Philippe Soupault as an extravagant man without real poetic talent, he earned the praises and friendships of Francis Picabia and Apollinaire, who dubbed him ("Pyrogen"), because of his "fiery" temperament as an innovator and disruptor. Later, Gaston Bachelard praised the depth of his philosophical views, thanking him for ″giving the body better consciousness than a philosopher″. He hs been credited as influencing various poets such as Jean Follain, Pascal Pia, and Valérie Rouzeau.

Childhood and adolescence

He was born Pierre Albert Birot on April 22, 1876, in Angoulême. His mother, Marguerite, ″embroidered, played the piano and sang.″ His father, Maurice Birot, ″was constantly starting up businesses, but not very solid ones. that he met the musician Germaine de Surville.

The same year, he abandoned his children. His daughters entered the Orphanage of the Arts in Courbevoie, and his sons entered the Fraternity of Artists. He married Germaine in 1913.

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From January 1916 to December 1919, Albert-Birot edited the avant-garde art magazine SIC: Sons Idées Couleurs, Formes, which featured writings by Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists. SIC was the second Parisian magazine, after Nord-Sud, to distribute the texts of the Zürich Dadaists, namely those of Tristan Tzara. SIC was a focus for many avant-garde initiatives, even those which Albert-Birot himself disliked, but he believed in independence and objectivity. At the end of its publication in 1919, SIC had published 53 issues.

New Birth

Pierre Albert Birot avoided the draft due to respiratory insufficiency during World War I," which is not without evoking, although in a much less radical form, Dada's rejection of all imitation and literary tradition and life. Earlier by one month, Albert-Birot is not far from synchronous with the vitalist affirmation of the Dadaists of no longer imitating life but creating life.

An illustration in the publication of the first issue shows the outstretched hand of an isolated artist to avant-garde circles of which he was both completely unknown and ignorant.

He mockingly calls Paul Claudel a ″beautiful poet of the day before yesterday″ and continues with ″I would really like to meet a poet of today″.

Meeting with avant-garde circles

The first to respond to this magazine was not a poet but the painter Gino Severini, whose impetus made SIC a true avant-garde magazine, as Albert-Birot humorously explains:

″Severini already had quite a few years of combat and research into ultra-modern art behind him, since he had been with Marinetti, the creator of Futurism, for a long time; naturally, for him, the first issue of my magazine was quite timid, but after talking to me he had the feeling that I was ready to become a true warrior for the good cause.″

The second issue, published in February, is devoted to the discovery of Futurism. It reports on Severini's First Exhibition of Plastic Art of the War and other previous works, held at the Boutet de Monvel gallery from January 15 to February 1, 1916. Albert-Birot writes: "The picture, until now a fraction of space, becomes with futurism a fraction of time." Severini offered SIC a reproduction of his Train Arriving in Paris.

In addition, Severini convinced Guillaume Apollinaire to meet Albert-Birot. The meeting takes place in July 1916, at an talian hospital, and immediately the two men became friends. Apollinaire introduced Albert-Birot to his many friends and brought his mentorship to the magazine. Apollinaire has his Tuesdays at the Café de Flore and SIC has its Saturdays, on rue de la Tombe-Issoire, where Apollinaire comes as soon as he is released from the hospital and brings his friends: André Salmon, Pierre Reverdy, Serge Férat, and Roch Grey.

Collaboration with Apollinaire

From their first meeting, organized by Severini in July 1916 while Apollinaire was convalescing at the Italian hospital in Paris, Albert-Birot asked him to write a play that he would direct, with the idea of non-realistic theater as the guiding principle. Apollinaire proposed to subtitle it ″supernaturalist drama″; but Albert-Birot wanted to avoid any association with the naturalist school or the evocation of the supernatural, so they agreed on the word ″surrealist.″ The play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, was created at the Maubel conservatory on June 24, 1917. The music was by Germaine Albert-Birot, the sets by the cubist painter Serge Férat, and the costumes by Irène Lagut. In the idea of abandoning referential realism, masks were used. Patrons are sold a program adorned with a drawing by Picasso and a woodcut by Matisse.

The creation of the work takes place under uncertain conditions due to the context of the war. The budget is reduced and the scenery is made of paper. Thérèse's flying breasts were supposed to be represented by helium-filled balloons, but since the gas is reserved for the army, they settle for pressed fabric balls. The director also narrowly avoids a last-minute actor dropout, and without any musicians, Germaine's music cannot be played. Finally, a single pianist, who also handles sound effects, performs the music. The play, which is a sell-out at its performance, has a taste of a Dada evening: already, due to the passionate reactions, the show is as much on stage as it is in the audience. "Journalists [...] shout scandal. [...] The play ends in an indescribable uproar."

The same year, Albert-Birot publishes his 31 Pocket Poems prefaced by Apollinaire. Unfortunately, Apollinaire dies the following year and the experience of Les Mamelles de Tirésias cannot be repeated.

In January of the following year, Albert-Birot dedicates a triple issue of SIC to the memory of Apollinaire, and brings together the funeral tributes of Roger Allard, Louis Aragon, André Billy, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée, Max Jacob, Irène Lagut, Pierre Reverdy, Jules Romains, André Salmon, Tristan Tzara, etc.

″The time of solitude″

″ [...] with the 30s and after the theater experiments, begins what Albert-Birot calls his time of solitude.″ – Jean Follain In 1965, thanks to Arlette's efforts, Gallimard published an augmented but incomplete Grabinoulor. A banner did not hesitate to present it as "a classic of Surrealism," to the surprise, and even anger, of Albert-Birot, who had never been part of the group, signed any manifesto, or participated in any of the demonstrations. In 1966, he declared that he was not "attracted to the arcana and the fantastic of Surrealism, to its Freudian visions." The play, to which the author put a final point in 1963—the only point in all of his work—is only published in its complete form of the Six Books of Grabinoulor in 1991 by Jean-Michel Place.

Pierre Albert-Birot died on July 27, 1967. On his death notice, Arlette included a verse from The Black Panther:

"Those who love you see you beautiful, vertical, all war and fire and colors, biting with full teeth, biting into the solar system."

Poetry

Albert-Birot wrote several books of poetry, including:

("Thirty-one Pocket Poems"), 1917
("Everyday Poems"), 1919
, 1920
("Poems to the Other Me"), 1927

, 1938
("The Black Panther"), 1938
("Natural Amusements"), 1945
("110 drops of poetry", 1952
, 1972

His poetry is inseparable from his early theatrical work: lyric, funny and eminently modern.

Prose

His novel Grabinoulor appeared in 1919. Bernard Jourdan theorised that the name of the hero of this stream of consciousness is a near-anagram of "We Albert-Birot";

The titular Grabinoulour, a modern man, has a host of adventures, some everyday, others fantastic, with nods to the heroes of Rabelais' and Lewis Caroll's works, but also to the supermen of modern mythology; from Fantômas to Tarzan, from Arsène Lupin to science fiction heroes traveling through space and time.

Pierre Albert-Birot was a fringe poet who wrote fanciful novels such as the 1934 ("employee"). He also wrote literary translations of Homer, Eschylus and Virgil, translations of medieval poets into Modern French, and studies of prosody.

Theater

In 1917, Albert-Birot directed the first performance of by Guillaume Apollinaire, a friend who had also been a contributor to SIC. He went on to write numerous plays of his own, including ("Bluebeard"); ("Flexible Women"); and ("The Dismembered Man").

In 1929 he founded his own theater, Le Plateau. Being unable to afford to produce others' works, he produced his own series of short performance pieces entitled ("Study pieces").