The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations

in 1914 Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic, served as a decisive interface between artists and poets of the early 20th century, joining the visual arts and literary circles. '', oil on canvas, 129.7 x 96.68 cm, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Exhibited at the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, Paris. Metzinger painted several portraits of Apollinaire, 1909–10, 1911 and this work which, according to Apollinaire, is "said to be a portrait of myself". :"Apollinaire, like Baudelaire", writes Pamela A. Genova, "was a self-taught art critic, and he began his art theory naïve to the technical terminology and to the conventional precepts of the field. His work was spontaneous, impetuous, and ahead of its time, and like many avant-garde pioneers, he was often misunderstood, underestimated, or disregarded. Yet for one who began as a novice in the appreciation, analysis, and promotion of painting, the accuracy of Apollinaire's taste is uncanny, for his favorite painters [for example the artists he includes in Les Peintres Cubistes] are now considered among the most influential artists of the century". and Surrealism (concerning the ballet Parade in 1917), and was the first to adopt the term "Cubism" on behalf of his fellow artists (at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, Brussels). He wrote about these and related movements such as Fauvism, Futurism, and Simultanism. But his most compellingly original stance can be found in Les Peintres Cubistes, in his analysis of the new art movement: "The new artists demand an ideal beauty, which will be, not merely the proud expression of the species, but the expression of the universe, to the degree that it has been humanized by light." (Les Peintres Cubistes, p. 18) ==Volume==

Guillaume Apollinaire's only book on art, The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations is an unsystematic collection of reflections and commentaries. It was written between 1905 and 1912, and ultimately published in 1913. Composed of two parts, the volume demonstrates the poetic vision of Apollinaire. The first part, "On Painting" (Sur la peinture), is a manifesto for the new art form, consisting of seven chapters (22 pages), of which much of the text was written in 1912 and published in Les Soirées de Paris the same year. The second and larger section of the book (53 pages), under the heading "New Painters" (Peintres nouveaux), analyzes the work of ten artists most representative of the movement in the following order: Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Laurencin, Gris, Léger, Picabia, Duchamp, and in the Appendix, Duchamp-Villon. In the section on Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire included a text a Henri Rousseau, first published in a review of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants (L'Intransigéant, 10 April 1911). This was the third attempt to define the new pictorial trend burgeoning during the years before the First World War, following Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, 1912, It came to rely heavily on Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's book Der Weg zum Kubismus (published in 1920), which centered exclusively on the developments of Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris. Cooper's restrictive use of these terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris and Léger (to a lesser extent) implied an intentional value judgement, according to Christopher Green. Describing Metzinger, Apollinaire claims this 'great painter's work had not yet been fully appreciated, despite the design, composition, the contrasted lights and an overall style'. His works were "set apart" above and beyond many of the works of his contemporaries. "It was then that Jean Metzinger, joining Picasso and Braque, founded the Cubist City." writes Apollinaire. The work of Gleizes, he continues, has "a degree of plasticity such that all the elements which constitute the individual characters are represented with the same dramatic majesty". Apollinaire compares the work of Gris with the "scientific cubism" of Picasso, "his only master", a type of drawing that was geometrical individualized, "a profoundly intellectual art, according to color a merely symbolic significance". His works had "purity, scientifically conceived", and "from this purity parallels are sure to spring". File:Juan Gris, 1912, La Guitare (Guitar and Glasses), oil on canvas, 30 x 58 cm, private collection.jpg|Juan Gris, 1912, La Guitare (Guitar and Glasses), oil on canvas, 30 x 58 cm, private collection File:Juan Gris, 1912, Les Cigares (The Packet of Cigars), oil on canvas, 22 x 28 cm, private collection.jpg|Juan Gris, 1912, Les Cigares (The Packet of Cigars), oil on canvas, 22 x 28 cm, private collection File:Juan Gris, 1912, Portrait (Etude pour le Portrait de Germaine Raynal), pencil and charcoal on paper, 36 x 26.5 cm, private collection.jpg|Juan Gris, 1912, Portrait (Etude pour le Portrait de Germaine Raynal), pencil and charcoal on paper, 36 x 26.5 cm, private collection File:Juan Gris - Man in a Café.jpg|Juan Gris, 1912, Man in a Café, oil on canvas, 127.6 x 88.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Only the upper half of this painting was reproduced in Les Peintres Cubistes Fernand Léger Léger is described as a talented artist. "I love his art because it is not scornful, because it knows no servility, and because it does not reason. I love your light colors [couleurs légers], O Fernand Léger! Fantasy does not lift you to fairylands, but it grants you all your joys." File:Fernand Léger, 1910, Nudes in the forest (Nus dans la forêt), oil on canvas, 120 x 170 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum.jpg|Fernand Léger, 1910, Nudes in the forest (Nus dans la forêt), oil on canvas, 120 x 170 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum File:Fernand Léger, 1911, Étude pour trois portraits (Study for Three Portraits), oil on canvas, 194.9 × 116.5 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum.jpg|Fernand Léger, 1911, Étude pour trois portraits (Study for Three Portraits), oil on canvas, 194.9 × 116.5 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum File:Fernand Léger, 1912, Les Fumées, reproduced in Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913.jpg|Fernand Léger, 1912, Les Fumées File:Fernand Léger, Woman in Blue, Femme en Bleu, 1912, oil on canvas, 193 x 129.9 cm.jpg|Fernand Léger, La Femme en Bleu (Woman in Blue), 1912, oil on canvas, 193 x 129.9 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel Francis Picabia Just as the Impressionists and the Fauves, Picabia "translated light into color", arriving at "an entirely new art". His color was not just a "luminous transposition" without "symbolic significance". It was a "form and light of whatever is represented". As in the works of Robert Delaunay, color was for Picabia "the ideal dimension", one that incorporated all other dimensions. Form was symbolic, while the color remained formal. It was "a perfectly legitimate art, and surely a very subtle one". Color was saturated with energy and prolonged in space. The title for Picabia was intellectually inseparable from the work to which it referred, playing a role as actual objects. Analogous to Picabia's titles, real objects, "are the pictorial arabesques in the backgrounds of Laurencin's pictures. With Albert Gleizes this function is taken by the right angles which retain light, with Fernand Léger by bubbles, with Metzinger by vertical lines, parallel to the sides of the frame cut by infrequent echelons." Apollinaire found equivalence in the works of all the great painters. "It gives pictorial intensity to a painting, and this is enough to justify its legitimacy." It was not a question of abstraction, but of "direct pleasure". Surprise played an important role. "Can the taste of a peach be called abstract?" mused the author. Each picture of Picabia "has a definite existence, the limits of which are set by the title". Picabia's paintings were so far from a priori abstractions that "the painter can tell you the history of each one of them. Dance at the Spring is simply the expression of a plastic emotion experienced spontaneously near Naples". File:Francis Picabia, Paysage (Landscape), reproduced in Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913.jpg|Francis Picabia, Paysage (Landscape) File:Francis Picabia, 1911-12 - Paysage à Cassis.jpg|Francis Picabia, 1911–12, Paysage à Cassis (Landscape at Cassis), oil on canvas, 50.3 × 61.5 cm, private collection File:Francis Picabia, 1911, Paysage (Landscape), reproduced in Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913.jpg|Francis Picabia, c.1912, ''L'Arbre rouge (Paysage'') File:Francis Picabia, 1912, Tarentelle, oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.1 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.jpg|Francis Picabia, 1912, Tarentelle, oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.1 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York Marcel Duchamp To date, Duchamp's production had been too spars and differed considerably from one painting to the next. Apollinaire hesitated to make any broad generalizations, noting rather Duchamp's apparent talent and his abandoning of "the cult of appearances". To free his art from all perceptions, Duchamp wrote the titles on the paintings themselves. "This literature, which so few painters have been able to avoid, disappears from his art, but not poetry. He uses forms and colors, not to render appearances, but to penetrate the essential nature of forms and formal colors... Perhaps it will be the task of an artist as detached from aesthetic preoccupations, and as intent on the energetic as Marcel Duchamp, to reconcile art and the people." File:Marcel Duchamp, 1910, Joueur d'échecs (The Chess Game), oil on canvas, 114 x 146.5 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art.jpg|Marcel Duchamp, 1910, ''Joueur d'échecs (The Chess Game''), oil on canvas, 114 x 146.5 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art File:Marcel Duchamp, 1911-12, Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (Nu -esquisse-, jeune homme triste dans un train), Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.jpg|Marcel Duchamp, 1911–12, Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (Nu, esquisse, jeune homme triste dans un train), oil on cardboard mounted on Masonite, 100 x 73 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice File:Marcel Duchamp, 1912, Le Roi et la Reine entourés de Nus vites (The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes), oil on canvas, 114.6 x 128.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art.jpg|Marcel Duchamp, 1912, Le Roi et la Reine entourés de Nus vites (The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes), oil on canvas, 114.6 x 128.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art File:Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase.jpg|Marcel Duchamp, 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, oil on canvas, 147 cm × 89.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art Appendix Duchamp-Villon The departure of sculpture from nature tends toward architecture, writes Apollinaire: "The utilitarian end aimed at by most contemporary architects is responsible for the great backwardness of architecture as compared with the other arts. The architect, the engineer should have sublime aims: to build the highest tower, to prepare for time and ivy the most beautiful of ruins, to throw across a harbor or a river an arch more audacious than the rainbow, and finally to compose to a lasting harmony, the most powerful ever imagined by man. Duchamp-Villon had this titanic conception of architecture. A sculptor and an architect, light is the only thing that count for him; but in all the arts, also, it is only light, the incorruptible light, that counts." File:Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1911, Baudelaire, reproduced in Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913.jpg|Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1911, Baudelaire File:Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1911, Vasque décorative (detail), reproduced in Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913.jpg|Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1911, Vasque décorative (detail) File:Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1912, Croquis pour le Soleil, reproduced in Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913.jpg|Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1912, Croquis pour le Soleil File:Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1912, Projet d'hôtel, Maquette de la façade de la Maison Cubiste, published in Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913.jpg|Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1912, Study for ''La Maison Cubiste, Projet d'Hotel (Cubist House)'' Note Besides the artists of whom Apollinaire writes in preceding chapters, there were other artists and writers alike attached, "whether willingly or not", to the Cubist movement. Scientific Cubism was defended by Ricciotto Canudo, Jacques Nayral, André Salmon, Joseph Granié, Maurice Raynal, Marc Brésil, Alexandre Mercereau, Pierre Reverdy, André Tudesq, André Warnod, Georges Deniker, Jacques Villon, and Louis Marcoussis. Physical Cubism was supported in the press by the writers listed above, in addition to , Olivier Hourcade, Jean Marchand, Auguste Herbin, and Véra. Orphic Cubism was defended by Max Goth, Pierre Dumont and Henry Valensi. Certain artists associated with Instinctive Cubism were supported by Louis Vauxcelles, René Blum (ballet), Adilphe Basler, Gustave Kahn, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Michel Puy. According to Apollinaire this trend included Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Auguste Chabaud, Jean Puy, Kees van Dongen, Gino Severini, and Umberto Boccioni. In addition to Duchamp-Villon, other Cubist sculptors included Auguste Agéro, Alexander Archipenko, and Constantin Brâncuși. ==See also==