Cubism

Guillaume Apollinaire · Dorothea Eimert

Dec 2023 · Parkstone International

About this ebook

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: five young women that changed modern art forever. Faces seen simultaneously from the front and in profile, angular bodies whose once voluptuous feminine forms disappear behind asymmetric lines - with this work, Picasso revolutionised the entire history of painting. Cubism was thus born in 1907. Transforming natural forms into cylinders and cubes, painters like Juan Gris and Robert Delaunay, led by Braque and Picasso, imposed a new vision upon the world that was in total opposition to the principles of the Impressionists. Largely diffused in Europe, Cubism developed rapidly in successive phases that brought art history to all the richness of the 20th century: from the futurism of Boccioni to the abstraction of Kandinsky, from the suprematism of Malevich to the constructivism of Tatlin. Linking the core text of Guillaume Apollinaire with the studies of Dr. Dorothea Eimert, this work offers a new interpretation of modernity’s crucial moment, and permits the reader to rediscover, through their biographies, the principal representatives of the movement.

About the author

Guillaume Apollinaire is one of the most widely read and influential of modern French poets. He was born either in Rome, where he was baptized, or in Monaco, where he was educated at the Lycee Saint-Charles. Quintessentially modern, his reputation rests principally on two volumes of poems-Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918), which broke with the traditions of nineteenth-century poetry in both form and content. Apollinaire introduced free verse, eliminated punctuation, and even wrote poems in the form of pictures to express the dynamism of the new twentieth century. Apollinaire wrote novels, short stories, and plays as well as poetry. He wrote The Cubist Painters (1913), which first defined the nature of cubism. In addition, he edited for the Bibliotheque des Curieux erotic books of repute and helped to catalogue the repository of forbidden books in the Bibliotheque Nationale. He became the friend of great cubists, including Picasso and Braque. He died in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.