Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques (English, The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations), is a book written by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1905 and 1912, published in 1913. This was the third major text on Cubism; following Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (1912);Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme", published by Eugène Figuière Éditeurs, Paris, 1912 (Eng. trans., London, 1913)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 and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme (1912).André Salmon, L'art vivant, La Jeune Peinture française, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme, (Anecdotal History of Cubism), Paris, Albert Messein, 1912, Collection des Trente. Translated in Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, pp. 41–61André Salmon, Anecdotal History of Cubism, 1912, quoted in Herschel Browning Chipp et al, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, University of California Press, 1968, . pp. 199–206André Salmon on French Modern Art, by André Salmon, Cambridge University Press, Nov 14, 2005, pp. 55–60
Les Peintres Cubistes is illustrated with black and white photographs of works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Duchamp-Villon.Les peintres cubistes. Première série / Guillaume Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques, Watsonline, Thomas J. Watson Library, The Catalog of the Libraries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Also reproduced are photographs of artists Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris, Picabia and Duchamp. In total, there are 46 halftone portraits and reproductions.
Published by Eugène Figuière Éditeurs, Collection "Tous les Arts", Paris, 1913, Les Peintres Cubistes was the only independent volume of art criticism published by Apollinaire, and represented a highly original critical source on Cubism.Pamela A. Genova, The Poetics of Visual Cubism, Guillaume Apollinaire on Pablo Picasso, Studies in 20th Century Literature, Vol. 27, Iss. 1, Article 3, 1 Jan. 2003 He elucidates the history of the Cubist movement, its new aesthetic, its origins, its development, and its various features.Le Figaro, N.108, Friday, 18 April 1913, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Apollinaire first intended this book to be a general collection of his writings on art entitled Méditations Esthétiques rather than specifically on Cubism. In the fall of 1912 he revised the page proofs to include more material on the Cubist painters, adding the subtitle, Les Peintres Cubistes. When the book went to press, the original title was enclosed in brackets and reduced in size, while the subtitle Les Peintres Cubistes was enlarged, dominating the cover. Yet Les Peintres Cubistes appears only on the half t.p. and t.p. pages, while every other page has the title Méditations Esthétiques, suggesting the modification was made so late that only the title pages were reprinted.Leroy C. Breunig and Jean-Claude Chevalier (eds), Paris: Hermann, 1965; Trans. Lionel Abel, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, Wittenborn, New York, 1944, 1949
A portion of the text was translated into English and published with several images from the original book in The Little Review: Quarterly Journal of Art and Letters, New York, Autumn 1922.The Little Review: Quarterly Journal of Art and Letters, Vol. 9, No. 1: Stella Number, editor: Margaret C. Anderson, New York, 1922-09 (Autumn 1922), pp. 41–59. The Modernist Journals Project, Brown University and The University of TulsaThe Little Review, Autumn 1922, archive.org (full text)
Author
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. Italian by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki), Parisian by choice, Apollinaire was a leading figure in early modernist poetry, a permutable figure whose work echoed the Symbolists, the Cubists and foresaw the Surrealists.
As an active figure in well-established literary journals from 1902 to his death in 1918, Apollinaire played a crucial role in the development of early modernism by founding his own artistic journals, by supporting galleries and exhibitions, as a collector of avant-garde art, and as an impassioned supporter of a diverse group of emerging artists. His pervasive influence on these artists is exemplified by a multitude of portraits of Apollinaire painted by artists such as Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Louis Marcoussis, Amedeo Modigliani, Marie Laurencin, Marcel Duchamp, Maurice de Vlaminck, Giorgio de Chirico, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Delaunay, Marc Chagall, Pierre Savigny de Belay and Henri Matisse.Jean Metzinger, 1910, Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, Christie's Paris, 2007Ministère de la Culture - Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais
"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".
As a close friend of all the Cubists, and Marie Laurencin's lover, Apollinaire witnessed the development of Cubism firsthand. He was in close contact with Le Bateau-Lavoir and its habitués—including Max Jacob, Maurice Princet, Picasso, Braque and Metzinger. He was also in close contact with the Groupe de Puteaux (or Section d'Or), based in the western suburbs of Paris—including the Duchamp brothers, Gleizes, Picabia and again Metzinger (who associated with both groups early on).
Apollinaire coined several important terms of the avant-garde, such as Orphism (at the Salon de la Section d'Or in 1912)Hajo Düchting, Orphism, MoMA, From Grove Art Online, 2009 Oxford University Press and Surrealism (concerning the ballet Parade in 1917),Jean-Paul Clébert, Dictionnaire du surréalisme, A.T.P. & Le Seuil, Chamalières, p. 17, 1996Hargrove, Nancy (1998). "The Great Parade: Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, Massine, Diaghilev—and T.S. Eliot". Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31 (1) and was the first to adopt the term "Cubism" on behalf of his fellow artists (at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, Brussels).Préface, Catalogue du 8e Salon annuel du Cercle d'art Les Indépendants, Musée moderne de Bruxelles, 10 June – 3 July 1911Douglas Cooper, "The Cubist Epoch", Phaidon Press Limited 1970 in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 98, Chronique d'un musée: Musée royal des beaux-arts de Belgique, Bruxelles, Françoise Roberts-Jones, pp. 76, 146 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.Christopher Green, Cubism, Origins and application of the term, and Meanings and interpretations, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009 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.Part II adapted from Guillaume Apollinaire, Du sujet dans la peinture moderne, Les Soirées de Paris, No. 1, Feb. 1912, pp. 1-4Part III, IV and V adapted from Guillaume Apollinaire, La peinture moderne, Les Soirées de Paris, No. 3, April 1912, pp. 89-92, and No. 4, May 1912, pp. 113-115Herschel Browning Chipp, Peter Selz, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, University of California Press, 1968, pp. 221-248,
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).
Included are four reproductions of the works by each artist (with the exception of Rousseau), and portrait photographs of Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris, Picabia, and Duchamp.
A landmark in the history of art criticism, this essay synthesizes the aesthetic preoccupations of not just the Cubists, but of Apollinaire himself. The volume is valued today as a work of reference and a vintage example of creative modernist writing.Guillaume Apollinaire, "Les Peintres Cubistes" (The Cubist Painters) published in 1913, Peter Read (Translator), University of California Press, 25 Oct. 2004Guillaume Apollinaire, "Les Peintres Cubistes" (The Cubist Painters) published in 1913, (translated and analyzed by Peter F. Read, University of California Press, 25 Oct. 2004 (back cover)
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, and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme (Anecdotal History of Cubism), 1912.
Classification In his analysis of the new art movement, Apollinaire makes a distinction between four different types of Cubism; scientific, physical, orphic and instinctive. The first, Scientific Cubism, is the art of painting new ensembles with elements borrowed not from the reality of vision, but from the reality of knowledge. It is the tendency of 'pure' painting. The painters Apollinaire places in this category are: Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Laurencin and Gris.
The second, Physical Cubism, is the discipline of constructing painting with elements borrowed mostly from the reality of vision. Its social role is well marked, but it is not a pure art. The 'physicist' who created this trend is Le Fauconnier.
Orphic Cubism is the art of painting with elements borrowed not from visual reality, but entirely created by the artist and endowed by him with a powerful reality. The works of the Orphic artists simultaneously present a pure aesthetic pleasure, a construction to the senses and a sublime meaning. This is pure art, according to Apollinaire, that includes the work of R. Delaunay, Léger, Picabia and M. Duchamp.
Instinctive Cubism is, according to Apollinaire, the art of painting elements borrowed not from visual reality, but suggestive of the artist's instinct and intuition. Instinctive Cubism includes a very large number of artists. Derived from French Impressionism, the movement spans ("is spreading") across all of Europe.