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The Cubist Painters

by Guillaume Apollinaire; translated with commentary by Peter Read
University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 2004
248 pp., illus. 45 b/w. Trade, $65.00; paper, $29.95
ISBN: 0-520-24353-6; ISBN: 0-520-24354-4.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, USA

mosher@svsu.edu

My favorite television show these days is "C.S.I.". On it, the Las Vegas Police Department's Crime Scene Investigators dissect and reconstruct human remains, with intelligence, detachment, and subtle humor (the last trait lacking in its two spin-off imitators). In his book The Cubist Painters, Guillaume Apollinaire praises Pablo Picasso who "studies an object like a surgeon dissecting a corpse", for "the artist had to assassinate himself as scientifically and methodically as a great surgeon". The re-suturing of retinal, empirical, or conceptual reality is the strength, integrity and delight of Cubism.

Guillaume Apollinaire (1885-1918) was a Polish emigré living in Paris writing poems and journalism, who died in military service of his adopted land in World War I. He introduced Picasso to Georges Braque, whom he credits with introducing collage into painting. He writes of their collaboration, as well as of the artists Albert Gliezes, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Marie Laurencin and Jean Metzinger. Apollinaire frequently praises the artists' "purity" in opposition to the general decadence of painting at the time. He compares Marie Laurencin to the Douanier Rosseau. He posits four categories of Cubism, including Orphic and Instinctive. The latter category is expansive enough to include the Fauvist painters Roualt, Matisse, Derain and Dufy (those two the subjects of Apollinaire's first two books), and the Futurists Severini and Boccioni.

Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia were better known a few years later as Dadaists but are included and praised for their Cubist paintings. Duchamp had been asked to withdraw "Nude Descending a Staircase" as too Futurist from one Cubist exhibition. He is credited by Apollinaire as the only Cubist interested in the nude figure, whereas the Futurists wanted to ban nudes from art for at least a decade. Young Duchamp is judged as possessing much promise, and his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon is appreciated as an architect. The sculptors Archipenko and Brancusi are cited as bringing Cubism to sculpture in a single sentence at the end of the text, before the plates of Cubist paintings and photographs of some of the painters.

The Cubist Painters built upon Apollinaire's notes on painters and paintings from 1905 to1912. By 1913 there had already been several books on or mentioning Cubism, so Apollinaire's book was timely. A few weeks after its initial publication, Apollinaire published his poetry collection Alcools, and a few months later an eclectic Futurist manifesto. In this edition, translator Peter Read provides an additional 150 pages of historical material, detailing the progress of Apollinaire's drafts of the book. First translated into English in 1922, selections from the book replaced the previously-serialized Ulysses in The Little Review when Joyce's novel had been ruled pornographic.

Cubism has been praised by critic John Berger as innovative expression of a time of social optimism, a promising moment of organized labor agitation, spreading technology, and advanced theoretical science. Apollinaire compares the late medieval painter to Cimabue and the early aviator Bleriot in their unprecedented adventurousness, yet "the modern school of painting [is] the most daring that ever existed". Cubist artists went "beyond the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry" to take an interest in the possibilities of 'the fourth dimension". Apollinaire rhetorically speaks for these artists who "are men who wish to become inhuman. They painstakingly search for traces of inhumanity, traces which are nowhere encountered in nature. Such traces are the truth, and beyond them we know no reality."

One critic reviewing The Cubist Painters said that Apollinaire "did not understand painting but feels it and expresses it." Another called the book "a poem on painting". We need more books by poets on artists, inspired to perception, inspiration, purple prose, and flights of fancy by the visual works of their art-making friends.

 

 




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