France
Marseille 1896 - Paris 1948.
Antonin Artaud, was a French poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, stage director and actor. Artaud is the author of a vast work that explores most literary genres, using them as paths to an absolute and "total" art. His first books of poems (he would later abandon poetic preciousness, disappointed) L'ombilic des limbes, of 1925, and Le Pèse-Nerfs already announce the explosive character of his later work.
He is best known as the creator of the theater of cruelty (The theater and its double, 1938; Manifesto of the theater of cruelty, 1948), a notion that has had a great influence on the history of world theater. He worked on 22 films, during the 1920s and 1930s, most notably Abel Gance's Napoléon and Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Because of the influence of his work and his dramatic ideas, he has been considered "the father of modern theater."
