Guillaume Apollinaire
The new painters paint works that do not have a real subject, and from now on, the titles in catalogues will he like names that identify a man without describing him. Just as there are some very skinny people named Portly and some very dark- haired people named lair. l have seen paintings entitled Solitiude that show several figures. Painters sometimes still condescend to use vaguely explanatory words such as portrait landscape, or still- life; but many young painters simply employ the general term painting.
If painters still observe nature, they no longer imitate it, and they carefully avoid the representation of natural scenes observed directly or reconstituted through study. Modern art rejects all the means of pleasing that were employed by the greatest artists of the past: the perfect representation of the human figure, voluptuous dudes, carefully finished details, etc….. Today’s art is austere, and even the most prudish senator could find nothing to criticize in it.
Indeed, it is well known that one of the reasons cubism has enjoyed such success in elegant society is precisely this austerity.
Verisimilitude no longer has an importance, for the artist sacrifices everything to the composition of his picture. The subject no longer counts, or if it counts, it counts for very little.
If the aim of painting has remained what it always was – namely, to give pleasure to the eye – the works of the new painters require the viewer to find in them a different kind of pleasure from the one lie can just as easily find in the spectacle of nature.
An entirely new art is thus being evolved, an art that will be to painting, as
painting has hitherto been envisaged, what music is to literature
It will be pure painting, just as music is pure literature.
In listening to a concert, the music- lover experiences a joy qualitatively different from that he experiences in listening to natural sounds, such as the murmur of a stream, the rushing of a torrent, the whistling of the wind in the forest, or to the harmonics of a human language founded on reason and not on aesthetics.
Similarly, the new painters provide their admirers with artistic sensations due
exclusively to the harmony of lights and shades and independent of the subject depicted in the picture.
We all know the story of Apelles and Protogenes, as it is told by Pliny.
It provides an excellent illustration of aesthetic pleasure independent of the
subject treated by the artist and resulting solely from the contrasts I have just mentioned. Apelles arrived one day on the island of Rhodes to see the works of Protogenes, who lived there. Protogenes was not in his studio when Apelles arrived. Only an old woman was there, keeping watch over a large canvas ready to he painted. Instead of leaving his name, Apelles drew on the camas a line so fine that one could hardly imagine anything more perfect.
On his return, Protogenes noticed the line and, recognizing the hand of Apelles,
drew on top of it another line in a different color, even more subtle than the first, thus
making it appear as if there were three lines on the canvas. Apelles returned the next
day, and the subtlety of the line he drew then made Protogenes despair. That work was
for a long time admired by connoisseurs, who contemplated it with as much pleasure as
if, instead of some barely visible lines, it had contained representations of gods and
goddesses.
The young painters of the avant-garde schools, then, wish to do pure painting.
Theirs is an entirely new plastic art. It is only at its beginnings, and is not yet as
abstract as it would like to be. The new painters are in a sense mathematicians without
knowing it, but they have not yet abandoned nature, and they examine it patiently.
A Picasso studies an object the way a surgeon dissects a corpse.
If this art of pure painting succeeds in disengaging itself entirely from the
traditional way of painting, the latter will not necessarily disappear. The development
of music, after all, did not cause the disappearance of the various literary genres, nor
did the acrid taste of tobacco replace the savor of food.
Guillaume Apollinaire (1912)
