The catalogue of the exhibition Apollinaire Le regard du poète, for which Professor Peter Read was a member of the Advisory Committee, has recently been awarded the 2016 Prix CatalPa, an annual prize awarded to the year’s best Paris exhibition catalogue.

The exhibition ran at the musée de l’Orangerie, in the Tuileries, from 6^th April to 18^th July 2016. It explored the role played by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) as critic, promoter and impresario of innovative artists including Chagall, De Chirico, Delaunay, Derain, Duchamp, Léger, Matisse and Picasso, and also of African and Oceanian art. The exhibition presented paintings and sculptures from international museums and private collections as well as posters, films, set designs, photographs, manuscripts and other documents. It attracted 186,000 visitors.

Peter Read gave two public lectures during the exhibition, at the Orangerie and at the Picasso Museum, presented the exhibition on French national radio and was a consultant for the catalogue, to which he contributed three chapters. The 2016 Prix CatalPa was chosen this year from a field of sixty publications. The President of the jury was the Haitian francophone novelist Dany Laferrière, member of the Académie Française. The runners-up were the catalogues for Icônes de l’art moderne La collection Chtchoukine (Fondation Vuitton) and Beat Generation (Centre Pompidou).

Laurence des Cars, Peter Read et al., Apollinaire Le regard du poète, Paris, Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie / Gallimard, 2016. 320 pp. 45 Euros. ISBN : 978-2-07017-915-2.