Antonin Artaud
French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director (1896-1948) · France · Writers · Died at 51
Antonin Artaud is read about 919 times a day, in 59 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He wanted theatre to assault the audience - not with story, but with raw sensation that bypassed reason entirely. Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty never quite made it to the stage the way he imagined, but the idea rewired how the avant-garde thought about performance.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
In their own words 8
, It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves.
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
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About this person
Antonin Artaud worked across writing, theatre, and cinema, moving through the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century with a vision that set him apart. He conceptualized the Theatre of Cruelty, a framework that would shape how experimental theatre understood itself long after his death on 4 March 1948. His texts pulled from ancient cosmologies, philosophy, the occult, mysticism, and the ritual practices of indigenous Mexican and Balinese cultures. The work was surreal, transgressive, and raw - less interested in narrative than in tearing through the surface of things. He died at fifty-one, but the influence outlasted the man.
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