Antoine Maria Joseph Paul Artaud (; French: [aʁto]; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), better known as Antonin Artaud (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃tɔnɛ̃ aʁto]), was a French artist who worked across a variety of media. He is best known for his writings, as well as his work in the theatre and cinema. Widely recognized as a major figure of the European avant-garde, he had a particularly strong 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 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. Euphrasie gave birth to nine children, but four were stillborn and two others died in childhood.
At age five, Artaud was diagnosed with meningitis, which had no cure at the time. Biographer David Shafer argues, however, that 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.
Artaud attended the Collège Sacré-Coeur in Marseille, a Catholic middle and high school, from 1907 to 1914. At fourteen years old he founded a small private literary magazine (une petite revue) with others where he published his first poems, inspired by Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe. Towards the end of his tenure at the Collège, Artaud noticeably withdrew 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.:163
In 1916, there was a pause in Artaud's treatment when he was conscripted into the French Army.:26 He was discharged early due to "an unspecified health reason" (Artaud later claimed it was "due to sleepwalking", while his mother ascribed it to his "nervous condition").:4
In May 1919, the director of the sanatorium prescribed laudanum for Artaud, precipitating a lifelong addiction to that and other opiates.:162 In March 1921, he moved to Paris where he was put under the psychiatric care of Dr Édouard Toulouse who took him in as a boarder.:29
In Paris, Artaud worked with a number of celebrated French "teacher-directors", including Jacques Copeau, André Antoine, Georges Pitoëff, Ludmilla Pitoëff, Charles Dullin, Firmin Gémier and Lugné-Poe. Lugné-Poe, who gave Artaud his first work in a professional theatre, later described him as "a painter lost in the midst of actors".
His core theatrical training was as part of Dullin's troupe, Théâtre de l'Atelier, which he joined in 1921.:345 As a member of Dullin's troupe, Artaud trained for 10 to 12 hours a day. He was originally a strong proponent of Dullin's teaching and they shared a strong interest in east Asian theatre, specifically performance traditions from Bali and Japan.:10 He stated, "Hearing Dullin teach I feel that I'm rediscovering ancient secrets and a whole forgotten mystique of production.":351 However, their disagreements increased over time, particularly in relation to the differing logics of Eastern and Western theatre traditions.:351-2 Their final disagreement was over his performance as the Emperor Charlemagne in Alexandre Arnoux's Huon de Bordeaux; he left the troupe in 1923 after eighteen months as a member.:22;:345
Shortly thereafter he joined the troupe of Georges and Ludmilla Pitoëff. He remained with them through the next year, when he shifted his focus to work in the cinema.:15-16
In 1923, Artaud submitted poems to La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), a prominent French literary journal. The poems were rejected, but Jacques Rivière, the journal's editor, found Artaud intriguing and invited him for a meeting. This initiated a written correspondence, which resulted in Artaud's first major publication, the epistolary work Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière.:45 Artaud continued to publish some of his most influential works in the NRF. Later, he would revise many of these texts for inclusion in The Theatre and Its Double, including the "First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty" (1932) and "Theatre and the plague" (1933).:105
Artaud had an active career in the cinema as a critic, actor, and writer. This included his performance as Jean-Paul Marat in Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) and the monk Massieu in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).:17
Artaud also wrote a number of film scenarios, ten of which have survived.:23 Only one of the scenarios was produced during his lifetime, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928). Directed by Germaine Dulac, many critics and scholars consider it to be the first surrealist film, though Artaud's relationship to the resulting film was conflicted.
Artaud was briefly associated with the surrealists, before André Breton expelled him from the movement in 1927.:21 This was in part due to the Surrealists increasing affiliation with the Communist Party in France.: 274 As Ros Murray notes, "Artaud was not into politics at all, writing things like: 'I shit on Marxism.'" Additionally, "Breton was becoming very anti-theatre because he saw theatre as being bourgeois and anti-revolutionary."
In "The Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre" (1926/27), written for the Theatre Alfred Jarry, Artaud makes a direct attack on the surrealists, whom he calls "bog-paper revolutionaries" that would "make us believe that to produce theatre today is a counter-revolutionary endeavour".:24 He declares they are "bowing down to Communism",:25 which is "a lazy man's revolution",:24 and calls for a more "essential metamorphosis" of society.:25
Théâtre Alfred Jarry (1926–1929)
In 1926, Artaud, Robert Aron and the expelled surrealist Roger Vitrac founded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry (TAJ). They staged four productions between June 1927 and January 1929. The Theatre was extremely short-lived, but was attended by an enormous range of European artists, including Arthur Adamov, André Gide, and Paul Valéry.:249
At the Paris Colonial Exposition (1931)
In 1931, Artaud saw Balinese dance performed at the Paris Colonial Exposition. Although he misunderstood much of what he saw, it influenced his ideas for theatre.:26 Adrian Curtin has noted the significance of the Balinese use of music and sound for Artaud, and particularlythe 'hypnotic' rhythms of the gamelan ensemble, its range of percussive effects, the variety of timbres that the musicians produced, and – most importantly, perhaps – the way in which the dancers' movements interacted dynamically with the musical elements instead of simply functioning as a type of background accompaniment.