4 September 1896 4 March 1948 Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud was born on 4 September (Antonin) of 1896 in Marseilles from a middle-class family: his mother, Euphrasie performance as he Turkish origin (Smyrna), while his father Antoine is sea captain. The childhood of small Antonin is disturbed, when she was four, by disease: the child suffers from a pretty serious form of meningitis, believed to be the cause of neurological problems that will arise later (stuttering, neuralgia and episodes of severe depression). In teens Artaud is subjected to various shelters in sanitarium, although between June and July 1916 still manages to enlist in the army: is however rejected because of self-induced episodes of sleepwalking. During the hospitalizations, passes the time reading: among his favorite authors there are Poe, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. In May 1919, in spite of himself, begins to become dependent on opiates, because of prescription of laudanum accomplished by the Director of the sanatorium. About a year later, he moved to Paris, where, being interested in theater, approaches the Surrealists. He met, among other things, the Director of the Theatre de L'Oeuvre Lugné-Poe, who has staged works by authors such as Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Jarry and Maurice Maeterlinck, as opposed to a theater considered sclerotized on the Repertoire of ancient tragedies and comedies bourgeois of the second empire. Antonin Artaud is hired by Lugné-Poe, and immediately turns out to be an eclectic artist and a talented actor: create, among other things, the costumes and scenes for "life is a dream" by Calderón de la Barca. Shortly after has the chance to work on the advice of Max Jacob, with Charles Dullin, founder of the Theatre de l'Atelier. In this way he met actress Gene Athanasiou, who would become his lover, interpreter of Antigone in the tragedy of the same name, whose set design, in the staging of that era, is drawn even by Picasso. Antonin Artaud in 1923 left Dullin passes in the company of Georges and Ludmilla Pitoeff: in that year, however, the Director of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise "Jacques Rivière rejects his first collection of writings. Between the two, in each case, begins a correspondence in which the Marseillaise expresses its conception of writing understood as a fight between introspection and incompleteness. Correspondence is motivated primarily by the need to Artaud to feel appreciated from the literary point of view: the correspondence is published in the journal. Antonin, meanwhile, remains increasingly disappointed by the theatre, which offers only unimportant roles, and therefore turns its attention to the movies, eager to see recognized their abilities. Benefits, therefore, the fact that his cousin Louis a career as both the artistic director of the Société des Cinéromans: it is to him that appeals for help. Performance as allows him to get a part in the film by Luitz-Morat "Surcouf, le roi des corsaire" and a short film by Claude Autant-Lara "Fait divers", whose shooting take place in March of 1924. Artaud became later Director of Surrealist research, and deals with the creation of prose poems and screenplays. Some of his texts are published in the official journal of the surrealist group called "La Révolution surréaliste". In the last months of 1926 Antonin opposes the idea, born in the group, to join the French Communist Party: it is, therefore, excluded from the movement, which in any case had never shown favorable to the conception of revolutionary theater that he proposed. Through a career as, Artaud still managed to find new creative outlets, coming into contact with Abel Gance, who offers to interpret Marat in the movie "Napoléon". After trying to get the role of Roderick Usher in the film by Jean Epstein "La chute de la maison Usher" (attempt proved unsuccessful, however), in 1930 was forced to close the Theatre Alfred Jarry, who had founded a few years earlier with Robert Aron and Roger Vitrac: experience fails due to lack of financial resources, despite the staging of several operas including one written by Artaud. In 1931 he came into contact with the balinese Theatre, remaining strongly impressed: try to repeat the experience, with the necessary changes, in the drama "the cenci", staged at the Theatre des Folies-Wagram, where he tries to put into practice many of the theories exposed on "theatre of cruelty". In 1936 sets sail from Belgium intends to land in Mexico, interested in discovering the precortesiana indigenous culture. Once arrived on the American continent, Antonin Artaud experimented with peyote, and holds three conferences in Mexico City, entitled "Surrealism and revolution", "man versus his fate" and "the theater and the gods". Published by Jean Paulhan "the theatre and its double," and, upon returning from Mexico (after passing from Ireland), he was arrested and jailed in a straitjacket before being interned in several clinics. Over the next nine years undergoes electroshock very frequently, to the point of falling into a coma over fifty times. In 1943 is brought into the clinic, where he began to draw and write on small notebooks; in the spring of 1946, however, is moved to a clinic in Ivry, where he was given the opportunity to move. In this way, it can travel to Paris, to meet his old friends, among them Pierre Loeb, who advised him to write something about Van Gogh. Artaud, therefore, writes "Van Gogh the suicide of society", in which diseased society consciousness complaint because of the lack of hindsight. In January 1948 to Artaud was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Dies within a short time, on 4 March of that year, alone, in a psychiatric clinic, probably after swallowing a fatal dose of hydrochloric acid.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.