The Cubist Painters (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art) - Softcover

"Peter Read's excellent English translation of Les Peintres cubistes is the first since 1944. Read identifies a thread of essential consistency running throughout the anthology, pregnant with meaning for twentieth-century art to come: Apollinaire's insistence on the self-referentiality and autonomy of modern art - the new painting, abstract or otherwise, had no real subject other than artistic expression itself." - Times Literary Supplement; "[Read's] text follows Apollinaire's French more closely than Abel's and in so doing restores to The Cubist Painters a poetic dimension sometimes suppressed in Abel's version. This is the principal virtue of the new translation, yet this virtue is not simply one of fidelity, for Read's translation also serves to clarify the position of Apollinaire's 1913 text in relation to other early accounts of Cubism. Read provides detailed commentaries on each section of the book, and here he effectively links Apollinaire's criticism to his poetry." - Simon Dell, University of East Anglia"

Guillaume Apollinaire's only book on art, The Cubist Painters, was first published in 1913. This essential text in twentieth-century art presents the poet and critic's aesthetic meditations on nine painters: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. As Picasso's closest friend and Marie Laurencin's lover, Apollinaire witnessed the development of Cubism firsthand. This collection of essays and reviews, written between 1905 and 1912, is a milestone in the history of art criticism, valued today as both a work of reference and a classic example of modernist creative writing. In addition to a faithful and fluid translation of Apollinaire's text, Peter Read provides his own scholarly analysis of its importance in the history of modernism. He examines Apollinaire's art criticism, his relationship to the Cubist movement, and, more specifically, the genesis of Cubist Painters through its various revisions and proofs. Supported by all forty-five plates from the original edition, this new volume brings Apollinaire's vitality and vision to life for a new generation.