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.