Antonin Artaud
The Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud's conceptual framework, stands as his most cited contribution to twentieth-century theatre. Developed through his work as a playwright, director, and actor, the concept shaped his engagement with both theatre and cinema. Artaud also received the Prix Sainte-Beuve, and his output across poetry, dramatic writing, and other forms reflected his activity as a French artist who worked across a variety of media.
Born Antoine Maria Joseph Paul Artaud on 4 September 1896 in Marseille, he went on to work in France as a writer, poet, playwright, director, and actor. He used the French language throughout his career and was active across theatre and cinema, roles that placed him simultaneously in the position of performer and director. His full range of occupations — writing, directing, acting, and poetry — established him as a figure whose practice crossed multiple disciplines.
Artaud's conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty influenced twentieth-century theatre, as the facts of his career attest. He died on 4 March 1948 in Ivry-sur-Seine, at the age of fifty-one. The Prix Sainte-Beuve, which he received during his lifetime, remains a concrete marker of the recognition accorded to him as a French-language writer and artist.
Quotes by Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud's insights on:
To confront the metaphysics I have created for myself, in accordance with the void I carry within me.
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea shining in his head frightened people and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
The extreme point of mysticism, I hold it now in the real and in my body, like a toilet broom.
All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
And when we tell ourselves we have reached the paroxysm of horror, blood and flouted laws of poetry that consecrates revolt, we obliged to advance still further into an endless vertigo.
And war is wonderful, isn’t it? For it’s war, isn’t it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.
It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.