Cubism. Guillaume Apollinaire

former art of optical illusions and local proportions. This is why the present art, even if it is not the direct emanation of determined religious beliefs, presents nevertheless several characteristics of religious art.

V

      It is the social function of the great poets and the great painters to renew unceasingly the appearance which nature assumes in the eyes of men.

      Without the poets, without the artists, men would quickly tire of the monotony of natural phenomena.

      The sublime idea which they have of the universe would come tumbling down with a vertiginous rapidity.

      The order which appears in nature and which is only an effect of art would immediately vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. No more seasons, no more civilisation, no more thought, no more humanity, no more of life itself; impotent obscurity would reign forever. By mutual consent the poets and the artists determine the features of their epoch and docilely the future falls in with their plan.

      The general structure of an Egyptian mummy conforms to the figures outlined by the Egyptian artists, and yet the ancient Egyptians differed greatly from each other. They conformed to the art of their epoch.

      Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Jehanne of France), 1913.

      Collaborative artists’ book by Blaise Cendrars, Copy 139.

      Watercolour and text printed on Japanese paper, open book: 199 × 36 cm; closed book: 18 × 11 cm.

      Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

      To create the illusion – the type – is the real quality of art, its social role. God knows how the pictures of Manet and Renoir were mocked! It sufficed to cast an eye upon the photographs of their epoch to see how the people and things conform to the pictures which these great artists have painted.

      The works of art being, from the plastic point of view, the most energetic products of a period, this illusion appears to me quite natural. This energy imposes itself on men and is for them the plastic measure of an epoch. Thus, those who mock the new painters make fun of their own features, for the people of the future will imagine the human beings of today as they have been represented by the artists of the most vital, that is to say, the newest art. Do not say to me that there are today other artists who paint in such a way that mankind will recognise itself as portrayed in their image. All the works of art of an epoch end by resembling the most expressive and the most typical art of that period. Dolls are the outlet of a popular art; they seem always to be inspired by the great art of the same epoch. This is a truth easy to verify. And yet who would dare to say that the dolls which were sold in the bazaars of 1880 had been manufactured with a sentiment analogous to that of Renoir when he painted his portraits? Then, nobody noticed it. It signifies, nevertheless, that the art of Renoir was energetic enough and vital enough to impose itself on our senses, while to the great public at the time when he started his conceptions appeared to be mad absurdities.

VI

      One has often, and notably in the case of the most recent painters, been confronted by the possibility of a mystification or of a collective error.

      But no one knows, in all the history of art, of a single collective mystification any more than of a collective artistic error. There are isolated cases of mystification and error, but the conventional elements of which in part the works of art are composed assure us that errors would not know how to exist collectively.

      If the new school of painting had presented us with one of these cases, it would be an event so extraordinary that it could be called a miracle. To conceive a case of this sort would be to conceive that suddenly in a nation all the children should be born without heads or with only one arm or leg, a conception evidently absurd. There are no collective errors or mystifications in art. There are only diverse epochs – diverse schools of art. If the end pursued by each one is not equally elevated, equally pure, all are equally respectable, and according to the ideas which each has of beauty, each school of art is successively admired, despised and again admired.

VII

      The new school of painting bears the name of Cubism; it was so called in derision by Henri Matisse, who in the autumn of 1908 had just seen a picture representing houses, the cubic appearance of which had greatly impressed him.

      These new aesthetics were first elaborated in the mind of André Derain, but the most important and audacious works which the movement at once produced were those of a great artist, Pablo Picasso, who must also be considered as one of the founders: his inventions strengthened by the good sense of Georges Braque, who exhibited a Cubist picture in the Salon des Indépendants, as early as 1908, were formulated in the studies of Jean Metzinger, who exhibited the first Cubist portrait (it was mine) in the Salon des Indépendants of 1910. Cubist works were also admitted in the same year by the Jury for the Salon d’Autumne. It was also in 1910 that the pictures of Robert Delaunay, Marie Laurencin and Le Fauconnier, followers of the same school, were exhibited at the Indépendants.

      Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower, 1911.

      Oil on canvas, 202 × 138.4 cm.

      Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

      Juan Gris, Pack of Coffee, 1914.

      Gouache, 64.8 × 47 cm.

      Ulmer Museum, Ulm.

      Marcel Duchamp, Coffee Mill, 1911.

      Oil and pencil on cardboard, 33 × 12.7 cm.

      Tate Modern, London.

      The first general exhibition of Cubism, when its adepts had become more numerous, took place in 1911 at the Indépendants where Room 41, reserved for the Cubists, produced a profound impression. Here were seen the skilful and seductive works of Jean Metzinger; landscapes, Male Nude and the Femme aux Phlox (Woman with Phlox) by Albert Gleizes; Portrait of Mme. Fernande × and Young Girls by Mlle. Marie Laurencin; Eiffel Tower by Robert Delaunay, L’Abondance by Le Fauconnier, Nudes in the Forest by Fernand Léger.

      The first foreign exhibition of the Cubists was held in Brussels in the same year, and in the preface of the catalogue to this exhibition I accepted, in the name of the exhibitors, the appellation Cubism, and Cubist.

      At the close of the year 1911, the exhibition of Cubists at the Salon d’Autumne made a considerable noise; ridicule was spared neither Gleizes (Hunting, Portrait of Jacques Nayral) nor Metzinger (Tea Time (Woman with a Teaspoon)), nor Fernand Léger. A new painter, Marcel Duchamp, and a sculptor architect, Duchamp-Villon, were added to the group.

      Other collective exhibitions took place in November of 1911, at the gallery of Contemporary Art, rue Tronchet, Paris; in 1912 the Salon des Indépendants was marked by the advent of Juan Gris. At Barcelona, in the month of May, Spain received the young Frenchman with enthusiasm. Finally in June, at Rouen, at an exhibition organised by the Society of Norman Artists, the advent of Francis Picabia was hailed by the new school.

      That which differentiates Cubism from the old schools of painting is that it is not an art of painting, but an art of conception which tends to rise to that of creation.

      In representing the concept of reality, or the created reality, the painter can give the appearance of three dimensions, he can, so to speak, cube it. He cannot do this in rendering simply the reality as seen, unless he makes use of an illusion either in perspective or foreshortening which deforms the quality of the form conceived or created.

      In Cubism, as I have analysed it, four tendencies have manifested themselves, of which two are parallel and pure.

      Scientific Cubism is one of the pure tendencies. It is the art of painting new ensembles with elements borrowed, not from the reality of vision, but from the reality of consciousness. Every man has the perception of this inner reality. It