Robert L. Herbert - Modern Artists on Art, 2nd Edition

Herbert Read, David Sylvester, and Alan Bowness. Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings. London, 3 vols., 194465.

Philip James, ed. Henry Moore on Sculpture: A Collection of the Sculptors Writings and Spoken Words. London, 1966.

Roger Berthoud. The Life of Henry Moore. New York, 1987.

Cubism, the collaborative effort of the painters Albert Gleizes (18811953) and Jean Metzinger (18831956), has been read less than Apollinaires Cubist Painters, due to the poets reputation, the charm and wit of his essay, and its greater availability. Yet there can be no doubt that Cubism is a more certain embodiment of the ideas of one large group of Cubist painters, and a much more reasoned presentation of artistic theory.

Gleizes and Metzinger had met in 1910, when both had already adopted the new visual language whose initial impulse came from Picasso and Braque. By the spring of 1911, Gleizes and Metzinger banded together with Lger, Delaunay, and Le Fauconnier at the Salon des Indpendants to form a self-aware artistic movement. Although Picasso and Braque remained aloof, Cubism burgeoned over the next months, with public exhibitions, many articles, and incessant interchange of ideas in the studios of Puteaux and Courbevoie. Unlike the two initiators, whose still lifes, nudes, and interiors of studios and cafs showed no overt social concern, the Puteaux-Courbevoie group (by now including among others, the brothers Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon) chose themes which they considered more modern, especially the city and its industrial suburbs. In October 1912, they joined in the Section dOr exhibition, one of the climactic events of prewar painting. Just a few weeks earlier, the essay Cubism had been published.

Gleizes and Metzinger had written the essay in the span of months preceding the Section dOr, the most dynamic period in the history of Cubism. In contrast to Picasso and Braque, who, by keeping to themselves, tended to let others speak for them, the Puteaux group was anxious to explain itself. From their many interviews and articles of 1911 to 1913, we are entitled to conclude that Cubism embodies some of the ideas of the circle as well as those of its two artist-authors.

Published by Figuire in 1912, Cubism was given its first and only English translation in 1913 by the firm of T. Fisher Unwin. Their successors, Ernest Benn Limited, as far as their rights are involved, have kindly authorized me to reprint it. The 1913 translation is an excellent one, but at times a bit insensitive and lacking in nuance. I have revised it accordingly, especially in order to preserve the flavor of its coined words, and its assertive, energetic mood. I am immensely grateful to the late Daniel Robbins for his comments on my revisions and for his contributions to two editions of this essay, Du Cubisme (Sisteron, 1980) and, with Fritz Metzinger, Die Entstehung des Kubismus: eine Neubewertung (Frankfurt, 1990).