Antonin Artaud

Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (ɑ̃tɔnɛ̃ aʁto; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the European avant-garde. In particular, he had a profound influence on twentieth-century theatre through his conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty. Known for his raw, surreal and transgressive work, his texts explored themes from the cosmologies of ancient cultures, philosophy, the occult, mysticism and indigenous Mexican and Balinese practices. Antonin Artaud was born in Marseille, to Euphrasie Nalpas and Antoine-Roi Artaud. His parents were first cousins—his grandmothers were sisters from Smyrna (modern day İzmir, Turkey). His paternal grandmother, Catherine Chilé, was raised in Marseille, where she married Marius Artaud, a Frenchman. His maternal grandmother, Mariette Chilé, grew up in Smyrna, where she married Louis Nalpas, a local ship chandler. He was, throughout his life, greatly affected by his Greek ancestry. Euphrasie gave birth to nine children, but four were stillborn and two others died in childhood. Artaud was diagnosed with meningitis at age five, a disease which had no cure at the time. Biographer David Shafer points out, "given the frequency of such misdiagnoses, coupled with the absence of a treatment (and consequent near-minimal survival rate) and the symptoms he had, it's unlikely that Artaud actually contracted it." From 1907 to 1914, Artaud attended the Collége Sacré-Coeur. Here he began reading works by Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Edgar Allan Poe and founded a private literary magazine in collaboration with his friends. At the end of college he started to noticeably withdraw from social life and "destroyed most of his written work and gave away his books".:3 Distressed, his parents arranged for him to see a psychiatrist.:25 Over the next five years Artaud was admitted to a series of sanatoria.