Du "Cubisme", also written Du Cubisme, or Du « Cubisme » (and in English, On Cubism or Cubism), is a book written in 1912 by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. This was the first major text on Cubism, predating Les Peintres Cubistes by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913). The book is illustrated with black and white photographs of works by Paul Cézanne (1), Gleizes (5), Metzinger (5), Fernand Léger (5), Juan Gris (1), Francis Picabia (2), Marcel Duchamp (2), Pablo Picasso (1), Georges Braque (1), André Derain (1), and Marie Laurencin (2).
The highly influential treatise was published by Eugène Figuière Éditeurs, Collection "Tous les Arts", in Paris in 1912. Prior to publication the book was announced in the Revue d'Europe et d'Amérique, March 1912; for the occasion of the Salon de Indépendants during the spring of 1912 in the Gazette des beaux-arts;Les Salons de 1912, Gazette des beaux-arts, VII, 4eme Périod, April 1912, p. 360, Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France and in Paris-Journal, October 26, 1912. It is thought to have appeared in November or early December 1912.William Stanley Rubin, Judith Cousins, Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism, Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., 1989Peter Brooke, On "Cubism" in context It was subsequently published in English and Russian in 1913; a translation and analysis in the latter language by the artist, theorist and musician Mikhail Matiushin appeared in the March 1913 issue of Union of the Youth,Du "Cubisme", translation by Mikhail Matiushin, Soyuz Molodezhi, Sbornik, St. Petersburg, No. 3, March 1913. In , 1989 where the text was quite influential.
A new edition was published in 1947 with an avant-propos by Gleizes and an epilogue by Metzinger. The artists took the occasion to reflect upon the evolution of this avant-garde artistic movement thirty-three years after the appearance of the first publication of Du "Cubism".Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme, R. Girard & Cie for La Compagnie Française des Arts Graphiques, Paris, 1947Fondation Albert GleizesDavis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College - Objects, Du Cubisme, 1947
Background The collaboration between Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger that would lead to the publication of Du "Cubisme" began during the aftermath of the 1910 Salon d'Automne. At this massive Parisian exhibition, renowned for displaying the latest and most radical artistic tendencies, several artists including Gleizes, and in particular Metzinger, stood out from the rest. The utilization of a non-conventional form of geometry had permeated the works of these artists who a priori had little or no contact between one another.
In a review of the 1910 Salon d'Automne the poet Roger Allard (1885-1961) announced the appearance of a new school of French painters who—in contrast with Les Fauves and Neo-Impressionists—concentrated their attention on form rather than on color. A group formed following the exhibition that would include Gleizes, Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, and Robert Delaunay (a friend and associate of Metzinger since 1906). They convened regularly at the studio of le Fauconnier where he worked on his ambitious allegorical painting entitled L'Abondance. "In this painting" writes Brooke, "the simplification of the representational form gives way to a new complexity in which foreground and background are united and the subject of the painting obscured by a network of interlocking geometrical elements".Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1881-1953 But it was Metzinger, a Montmartrois in close contact with Le Bateau-Lavoir and its habitués—including Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Maurice Princet, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque—who introduced to Gleizes and the others of the group, with his Nu à la cheminée (Nu), 1910, an extreme species of 'analytic' Cubism (a term that would emerge years later to describe the 1910–1911 works of Picasso and Braque).
A few months later, during the spring of 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants, the term "Cubisme" (derived by critics' attempts to derogatorily ridicule the "geometrical follies" that gave a "cubic" appearance to their work) would officially be introduced to the public in relation to these artists exhibiting in the 'Salle 41', which included Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Léger, and Delaunay (but not Picasso or Braque, both absent from public exhibitions at the time resulting from a contract with the Kahnweiler gallery).Michael Taylor, 2010, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Jean Metzinger, Tea Time (Woman with a Teaspoon), 1 Audio Stop 439, Podcast
A seminal text written by Metzinger titled Note sur la peinture, published during the fall of 1910, closely coinciding with Salon d'Automne, cites Picasso, Braque, Delaunay and Le Fauconnier as painters who were realising a 'total emancipation' ['affranchissement fondementale'] of painting.Jean Metzinger, October–November 1910, "Note sur la peinture" Pan: 60
The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view-points later treated in Du "Cubisme" was a central idea of Metzinger's Note sur la Peinture. Indeed, prior to Cubism painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point. Metzinger enunciated for the first time in Note sur la peinture the stimulating interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time. In that article, Metzinger notes that Braque and Picasso "discarded traditional perspective and granted themselves the liberty of moving around objects." This is the concept of "mobile perspective" that would tend towards the representation of the "total image"; a series of ideas that still today define the fundamental characteristics of Cubist art.Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, 1985, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press, pp. 9-23
Setting the stage for Du "Cubisme", Metzinger's Note sur la peinture not only highlighted the works of Picasso and Braque, on the one hand, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay on the other. It was also a tactical selection that highlighted the fact that only Metzinger himself was positioned to write about all four. Metzinger, uniquely, had been closely acquainted with the Montmartre group (gallery cubists) and the burgeoning Salon Cubists simultaneously.David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905-1914, Yale University Press, 1998
Section d'Or
The Salon de la Section d'Or was an exhibition organized by the Salon Cubists with the goal of bringing together all the most radical trends in painting and sculpture to date. Scheduled to take place at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris, October 1912, directly after the Salon d'Automne. Gleizes and Metzinger, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published Du "Cubisme", a major defense of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement; predating Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques (The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations) by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913) and Der Weg zum Kubismus by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1920).From Du Cubisme, Paris, 1912, pp. 9-11, 13-14, 17-21, 25-32. In English in Robert L. Herbert, Modern Artists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, 1964, PDF Art Humanities Primary Source Reading 46Tate, Raymond Duchamp-Villon retrieved February 12, 2010Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten: A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, University of Chicago Press, 2008Der Weg zum Kubismus by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, Published by Delphin in Munich, 1920
Before World War I the image of Cubism in France and abroad was founded on an extremely broad definition. "A more heterogeneous view of Cubism is certainly encouraged by the earliest promotional writings by its practitioners and associates", writes art historian Christopher Green:
Picasso, Braque and Gris made almost no published statements on the subject before 1914. The first major text, Du cubisme, was produced by two 'Salle 41' Cubists, Gleizes and Metzinger, in 1912; this was followed in 1913 by a far from systematic collection of reflections and commentaries by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who had been closely involved with Picasso (from 1905) and Braque (from 1907), but who gave as much attention to artists such as Delaunay, Picabia and Duchamp. Along with Léger he identified these three with a new tendency, which he labelled Orphic Cubism or Orphism and which he considered of special significance for the future. Painters such as Gleizes, Metzinger, Delaunay and Duchamp were powerful influences alongside Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger in the development of art related to Cubism in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain and the USA.Christopher Green, Cubism, Origins and application of the term, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009
The Salon d’Automne of 1912 led to a debate on Cubism in the Chambre des Députés: since the exhibition was held in the State's Grand Palais, the State was seen as subsidizing Cubism. It was against this background of public anger and revolt that Gleizes and Metzinger wrote Du "Cubisme". It was not solely an initiative to explain the new art, but an attempt to persuade the masses that their intentions were genuine.Christopher Green, Cubism, Cubist milieux: Kahnweiler’s Cubists and the Salon Cubists, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009
The 'Salle 41' Cubists, through Gleizes, were closely associated with the Abbaye de Créteil; a group of writers and artists that included Alexandre Mercereau, Jules Romains, Georges Chennevière, Henri-Martin Barzun, Pierre Jean Jouve, Georges Duhamel, Luc Durtain, Charles Vildrac and René Arcos. Many were interested in notion of 'duration' proposed by the philosopher Henri Bergson, according to which life is experienced subjectively as a continual movement in the direction of time, with the past flowing into the present and the present merging into the future. Other Cubists showed affinities with this concept, and to Bergson's insistence on the 'elasticity' of our consciousness in both time and space.Christopher Green, Cubism, Meanings and interpretations, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009
The Neo-Symbolist writers Jacques Nayral and Henri-Martin Barzun associated with the Unanimist movement in poetry. In his capacity as Figuière's editorial assistant Nayral had selected for publishing Du "Cubisme" and Les Peintres Cubistes as part of a projected series on the arts. These writers and other Symbolists valued expression and subjective experience over an objective view of the physical world, embracing an antipositivist or antirationalist perspective.Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001
In Du "Cubisme" Gleizes and Metzinger explicitly related the concept of 'multiple perspective' to the Bergsonian sense of time. The faceted treatment of physical objects and space blurred the distinctions (by means of 'passage') between subject and abstraction, between representation and non-objectivity. Effects of non-Euclidean geometry were used to convey a psychophysical sense of fluidity of consciousness. These preoccupations are in tune with Jules Romains’ theory of Unanimism, which stresses the importance of collective feelings in the breaking down of barriers between people.