Cubism. Guillaume Apollinaire
reality is never discovered once and for all. The truth will always be new. Otherwise, truth would be a system even more miserable than nature.
In this case, the deplorable truth, every day more distant, less distinct, less real, would reduce painting to a state of plastic writing destined simply to facilitate the relations between people of the same race.
In our day, a machine would quickly be invented which without our comprehension reproduced such signs.
Many of the new painters paint only pictures which have no actual subject. And the titles which one finds in the catalogues play merely the role of the names that designate men without characterising them.
I have seen canvases entitled: Solitude, where there were several people, just as there are Mr. Stouts who are very thin, and Mr. Blonds who are very dark.
In the cases in question, the artists even condescend occasionally to make use of vaguely explicative terms, such as portrait, landscape, still life; many, however, of the young artists use only the general term, painting.
These painters, even if they still observe nature, no longer imitate her, and they carefully avoid the representation of natural scenes studiously observed and reconstructed.
Actual resemblance no longer has any importance because everything is sacrificed by the artists to the verities, to the necessities of a superior nature which he presupposes without exposing. The subject no longer counts, or if it counts at all, counts for very little.
Generally speaking, modern art repudiates most of the means of pleasing which were used by the great artists of past times.
Today, as formerly, the aim of painting is still the pleasure of the eye, but the demand henceforward made upon the amateur is to find a pleasure other than the one which the spectacle of natural things could just as well provide.
Thus one travels toward an entirely new art, which compared to painting as it has been looked upon heretofore, shall be what music is to literature.
It will be the essence of painting, just as music is the essence of literature.
The amateur of music experiences, in listening to a concert, joy of a different order from the joy he feels in listening to natural sounds, like the murmur of a stream, the roar of a waterfall, the whistling of the wind in a forest, or the harmonies of human language founded on reason and not on aesthetics.
In the same way, the new painters will provide their admirers with artistic sensations due solely to the harmony of odd lights.
Everyone knows Pliny’s anecdote of Apelles and Protogenes. It demonstrates clearly the aesthetic pleasure resulting solely from this odd combination of which I have spoken.
Apelles landed one day on the Isle of Rhodes to see the works of Protogenes, who lived there. Protogenes was not in his studio when Apelles arrived. An old woman was there guarding a large canvas ready to be painted. Instead of leaving his name, Apelles drew on the canvas a line so delicate that nothing subtler could be conceived.
On his return Protogenes, seeing the drawn line, recognised the hand of Apelles, and traced thereupon a line of another colour even more subtle, in such a way that there appeared to be three.
Apelles came back again the next day, without finding him whom he sought, and the subtlety of the line he drew that day reduced Protogenes to despair. This sketch was for a long time the admiration of connoisseurs who viewed it with as much pleasure as if gods and goddesses had been depicted instead of almost invisible tracings.
The secret aim of the young artists of the extreme schools is to produce pure painting. It is an entirely new art. It is still in its first stage, and is not yet as abstract as it would like to be. Most of the young painters work a great deal with mathematics without knowing it, but they have not yet abandoned nature whom they patiently question so that she may teach them the way of life. A Picasso studies an object as a surgeon dissects a body.
This art of pure painting, if it succeeds in disengaging itself entirely from the ancient school of painting, will not necessarily cause such painting to disappear, any more than the development of music has caused the disappearance of different kinds of literature, or than the acridity of tobacco has replaced the savour of food.
The new artists have been violently reproached for their geometric preoccupations. And yet, geometric figures are the essence of drawing. Geometry, the science which has for its scope space, its measurements and its relations, has been from time immemorial the rule even of painting.
Up to now, the three dimensions of the Euclidean geometry have sufficed for the solicitude which the sentiment of the infinite arouses in the soul of great artists.
The new painters do not propose, any more than did the old, to be geometricians. But, it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today scholars no longer hold to the three dimensions of the Euclidean geometries. The painters have been led quite naturally and, so to speak, by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with possible new measures of space, which in the language of modern studios has been designated briefly and altogether by the term the fourth dimension.
Pablo Picasso, Bread and Fruit Bowl on a Table, 1908–1909.
Oil on canvas, 164 × 132.5 cm.
Kunstmuseum, Basel.
Georges Braque, The Factories of Rio-Tinto in Estaque, 1910.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm.
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
Georges Braque, Pitcher and Violin, 1909–1910.
Oil on canvas, 117 × 73.5 cm.
Kunstmuseum, Basel.
Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman, 1910.
Oil on canvas, 187.3 × 61 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
The fourth dimension as it is presented to the understanding from the plastic point of view would be engendered by the three known dimensions; it would show the immensity of space eternalised in every direction at a given moment. It is space itself, the dimension of the infinite: it is this which endows objects with their plasticity. It gives them the proportions which they merit as a part of the whole, whereas, in Greek art, for example, a somewhat mechanical rhythm unceasingly destroys the proportions.
Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty. It took man as the standard of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as the ideal, and it is this ideal that necessitates a new measure of perfection, which permits the artist to give to the object proportions which conform to the degree of plasticity to which he desires to bring it.
Nietzsche divined the possibility of such an art: “O divine Dionysius, why dost thou pull my ears?” Ariadne demands of her philosophical lover in one of the celebrated dialogues on The Isle of Naxos. “I find something pleasant and agreeable in thy ears, Ariadne. Why are they not still longer?”
Nietzsche, when he recalled this anecdote, put into the mouth of Dionysius the condemnation of Greek art.
Let us add, in order that today nothing more than an historical interest may attach to the utopian expression – the fourth dimension – which must be noted and explained, that it was only a manifestation of the aspirations and disquietudes of a large number of young artists contemplating the Egyptian and Oceanic sculptures, meditating on the works of science, and awaiting a sublime art.
Wishing to attain the proportions of the idea, not limiting themselves to humanity, the young painters offer us works which are more cerebral than sensual. To express the grandeur of metaphysical forms, they withdraw