on canvas, 187.3 × 61 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
The fourth dimension as it is presented to the understanding from the plastic point of view would be engendered by the three known dimensions; it would show the immensity of space eternalised in every direction at a given moment. It is space itself, the dimension of the infinite: it is this which endows objects with their plasticity. It gives them the proportions which they merit as a part of the whole, whereas, in Greek art, for example, a somewhat mechanical rhythm unceasingly destroys the proportions.
Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty. It took man as the standard of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as the ideal, and it is this ideal that necessitates a new measure of perfection, which permits the artist to give to the object proportions which conform to the degree of plasticity to which he desires to bring it.
Nietzsche divined the possibility of such an art: “O divine Dionysius, why dost thou pull my ears?” Ariadne demands of her philosophical lover in one of the celebrated dialogues on The Isle of Naxos. “I find something pleasant and agreeable in thy ears, Ariadne. Why are they not still longer?”
Nietzsche, when he recalled this anecdote, put into the mouth of Dionysius the condemnation of Greek art.
Let us add, in order that today nothing more than an historical interest may attach to the utopian expression – the fourth dimension – which must be noted and explained, that it was only a manifestation of the aspirations and disquietudes of a large number of young artists contemplating the Egyptian and Oceanic sculptures, meditating on the works of science, and awaiting a sublime art.
Wishing to attain the proportions of the idea, not limiting themselves to humanity, the young painters offer us works which are more cerebral than sensual. To express the grandeur of metaphysical forms, they withdraw further and further from the former art of optical illusions and local proportions. This is why the present art, even if it is not the direct emanation of determined religious beliefs, presents nevertheless several characteristics of religious art.
It is the social function of the great poets and the great painters to renew unceasingly the appearance which nature assumes in the eyes of men.
Without the poets, without the artists, men would quickly tire of the monotony of natural phenomena.
The sublime idea which they have of the universe would come tumbling down with a vertiginous rapidity.
The order which appears in nature and which is only an effect of art would immediately vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. No more seasons, no more civilisation, no more thought, no more humanity, no more of life itself; impotent obscurity would reign forever. By mutual consent the poets and the artists determine the features of their epoch and docilely the future falls in with their plan.
The general structure of an Egyptian mummy conforms to the figures outlined by the Egyptian artists, and yet the ancient Egyptians differed greatly from each other. They conformed to the art of their epoch.
Sonia Delaunay, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Jehanne of France), 1913.
Collaborative artists’ book by Blaise Cendrars, Copy 139.
Watercolour and text printed on Japanese paper, open book: 199 × 36 cm; closed book: 18 × 11 cm.
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
To create the illusion – the type – is the real quality of art, its social role. God knows how the pictures of Manet and Renoir were mocked! It sufficed to cast an eye upon the photographs of their epoch to see how the people and things conform to the pictures which these great artists have painted.
The works of art being, from the plastic point of view, the most energetic products of a period, this illusion appears to me quite natural. This energy imposes itself on men and is for them the plastic measure of an epoch. Thus, those who mock the new painters make fun of their own features, for the people of the future will imagine the human beings of today as they have been represented by the artists of the most vital, that is to say, the newest art. Do not say to me that there are today other artists who paint in such a way that mankind will recognise itself as portrayed in their image. All the works of art of an epoch end by resembling the most expressive and the most typical art of that period. Dolls are the outlet of a popular art; they seem always to be inspired by the great art of the same epoch. This is a truth easy to verify. And yet who would dare to say that the dolls which were sold in the bazaars of 1880 had been manufactured with a sentiment analogous to that of Renoir when he painted his portraits? Then, nobody noticed it. It signifies, nevertheless, that the art of Renoir was energetic enough and vital enough to impose itself on our senses, while to the great public at the time when he started his conceptions appeared to be mad absurdities.
One has often, and notably in the case of the most recent painters, been confronted by the possibility of a mystification or of a collective error.
But no one knows, in all the history of art, of a single collective mystification any more than of a collective artistic error. There are isolated cases of mystification and error, but the conventional elements of which in part the works of art are composed assure us that errors would not know how to exist collectively.
If the new school of painting had presented us with one of these cases, it would be an event so extraordinary that it could be called a miracle. To conceive a case of this sort would be to conceive that suddenly in a nation all the children should be born without heads or with only one arm or leg, a conception evidently absurd. There are no collective errors or mystifications in art. There are only diverse epochs – diverse schools of art. If the end pursued by each one is not equally elevated, equally pure, all are equally respectable, and according to the ideas which each has of beauty, each school of art is successively admired, despised and again admired.
The new school of painting bears the name of Cubism; it was so called in derision by Henri Matisse, who in the autumn of 1908 had just seen a picture representing houses, the cubic appearance of which had greatly impressed him.
These new aesthetics were first elaborated in the mind of André Derain, but the most important and audacious works which the movement at once produced were those of a great artist, Pablo Picasso, who must also be considered as one of the founders: his inventions strengthened by the good sense of Georges Braque, who exhibited a Cubist picture in the Salon des Indépendants, as early as 1908, were formulated in the studies of Jean Metzinger, who exhibited the first Cubist portrait (it was mine) in the Salon des Indépendants of 1910. Cubist works were also admitted in the same year by the Jury for the Salon d’Autumne. It was also in 1910 that the pictures of Robert Delaunay, Marie Laurencin and Le Fauconnier, followers of the same school, were exhibited at the Indépendants.
Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower, 1911.
Oil on canvas, 202 × 138.4 cm.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Juan Gris, Pack of Coffee, 1914.
Gouache, 64.8 × 47 cm.
Ulmer Museum, Ulm.
