The Cubist Painters

"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--Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice--died at thirty-eight, in 1918. He was one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the Surrealists. His Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (2004) is available in a bilingual edition from California.

Publisher's Foreword PART ONE: THE CUBIST PAINTERS On Painting New Painters Picasso Georges Braque Jean Metzinger Albert Gleizes Marie Laurencin Juan Gris Fernand Leger Francis Picabia Marcel Duchamp Appendix Note Plates PART TWO: APOLLINAIRE AND CUBISM Apollinaire as Art Critic Before The Cubist Painters Apollinaire and Cubism The Cubist Painters: Genesis of the Book The Cubist Painters: Structure, Style and Modern Beauty The Cubist Painters and the Enemies of Cubism Aesthetic Meditations. The Cubist Painters Critical Response to The Cubist Painters Translations Conclusion Biographical Notes Bibliography