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);[1][2] and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme (1912).[3][4][5]
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.[6] Also reproduced are photographs of artists Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris, Picabia and Duchamp. In total, there are 46 halftone portraits and reproductions.[6]
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.[7] He elucidates the history of the Cubist movement, its new aesthetic, its origins, its development, and its various features.[8]
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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.[6][7][9]
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.[10][11]
- ^ 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
- ^ 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. 41–61
- ^ André 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, ISBN 0-520-01450-2. pp. 199–206
- ^ André Salmon on French Modern Art, by André Salmon, Cambridge University Press, Nov 14, 2005, pp. 55–60 ISBN 0-521-85658-2
- ^ a b c 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
- ^ a b 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
- ^ Le Figaro, N.108, Friday, 18 April 1913, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ISSN 0182-5852
- ^ Leroy C. Breunig and Jean-Claude Chevalier (eds), Paris: Hermann, 1965; Trans. Lionel Abel, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, Wittenborn, New York, 1944, 1949
- ^ 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 Tulsa
- ^ The Little Review, Autumn 1922, archive.org (full text)