Contemporains pittoresques

It was in the gazette Les Marges, published by his friend Eugène Montfort, that Apollinaire first turned his attention to his female contemporaries — Judith Gautier, Anna de Noailles, Renée Vivien and Colette among them — writing under the pseudonym Louise Lalanne.

Further chronicles followed, this time under his own name, again in Les Marges, in the early 1910s. These were collected ten years after the poet’s death by Éditions de la Belle Page, in the “collection des Contemporains pittoresques,” taking the original title of the articles as they had appeared in the review: pieces on Jarry, Moréas, Ernest La Jeunesse, Mendès and Ponchon, “reflecting his fascination with exceptional, singular beings, who by themselves constitute a kind of proof of the richness and infinite diversity of the human species.”

Only the copies on Japanese paper contain the portrait in several states. This caricature portrait of Picasso exists in several variants, the earliest dating from 1906, which the artist titled “Don Guillermo Apolliner.”