Notes to The Epic
[Notes by Gleizes are given in italics]
1 Cézanne's 'state of indecision' is discussed in much greater detail in Gleizes essayPainting and Representational Perspective, written shortly after the present essay (though it was published before it)
2 Paul Sérusier did, as it happens, claim on one occasion that he was the 'Father of Cubism' Back
3 Metzinger knew Picasso, and wrote an article which refers to him in 1910.
4 Matisse used the word 'cubes' referring to paintings submitted by Braque to the Salon d'Automne in 1908. Apollinaire used the word 'Cubism' in a review of the 1910 Salon d'Automne, in which he complains that Metzinger was imitating Picasso. But Gleizes is right to say that the term was not yet in general use.
5 I sometimes translate Gleizes' word plastique by Coleridge's word esemplastic(from eis en plattein -'to shape into one'), partly to avoid the modern connotations of the word plastic, but also to affirm a continuity, which I believe to be valuable, with Coleridge's line of thought. Back
6 Gleizes was engaged in a very heated controversy with the Dadaists in 1920, despite, or perhaps because of, his earlier friendship with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. He almost certainly has the Dadaists in mind here.
7 I remember that at this time I drew Sembat's speech to the attention of Gustav Kahn[the Symbolist poet - translator], whom he had mentioned, and this brought about a renewal of contact between the two men who had not seen each other for several years. One unexpected consequence of this was, two years later, the collaboration of Sembat and of Kahn in the Ministry of Public Works, the one as minister, the other as head of his secretariat. Cubism has been useful in many ways. And I am persuaded that an election to the academy such as that of Paul Valéry was only possible because of the death-blow struck against anecdotal art by the Cubist painters.
8 Gleizes clearly has Picasso in mind. The particular case of Braque and Picasso is discussed in more detail later in the essay.
9 Later, in, for example, the unpublished second part of La Forme et L'Histoire, Gleizes would insist on the etymological definition of the word 'Universe' as the 'one that turns.
10 The word object here signifies the external appearances of the thing represented. Later Gleizes would insist that this should only be referred to as the subject. Theobject is not something that the painter is copying but the real thing with which he is engaged in the act of painting, i.e. the painting itself.
11 'La forme, modifiant ses directions, modifiait ses dimensions'. The meaning would perhaps have been clearer if Gleizes had said 'changing its dimensions will change the directions of its movement'. The schema of La Peinture et ses Lois show how directions can be established on the basis of a repetition, at different levels of magnitude, of the initial proportions of the surface to be painted.
12 The association of Gris and Metzinger is very important. Gris may have admired Picasso more than he admired Metzinger, but there can be no doubt that his own practice was closer to that of Metzinger and that, in the initial stages, (Gleizes is generous in saying that Gris was 'there right from the beginning') he was following Metzinger's lead.
13 An account of this 'patriotic' wartime campaign against Cubism is given in Kenneth Silver's book, Esprit de Corps.
14 The main representative of this 'world of snobbery' making advances to the Cubist painters was Cocteau. Cocteau was godson to Jules Roche, Mme Gleizes' father, and had come to know Gleizes, through the still unmarried Juliette Roche, prior to the war. Mme Gleizes claims that it was Gleizes who aroused Cocteau's interest in Cubism. There is an important wartime correspondence between them, Gleizes painted Cocteau's portrait, and they planned together a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to be performed by the Circus Medrano in Paris. Gleizes in his Souvenirs speaks affectionately of Cocteau but on his return to Paris in 1919 he was deeply upset by the nature of the influence Cocteau was exerting in artistic circles and broke off all contact with him, to the extent of insisting that if his wife, Cocteau's childhood friend, did not also break off contact he would leave her. This was the more remarkable since at that time friendship with Cocteau - and Cocteau certainly wanted to remain friends with Gleizes - was an important means of achieving social and commercial success.
15 For Gleizes, the problem had been posed long before his engagement with Cubism. In 1906, he had been one of the founders of the Abbaye de Créteil, a community of artists trying to secure their independence from the pressures of economic necessity. In 1927, Gleizes repeated this experiment with 'Moly Sabata', in Sablons, in the Rhône Valley.
16 Gleizes had only recently had some experience of this, when Léonce Rosenberg, whom Gleizes found the most sympathetic of the art dealers, offered to push up the price of his pre-war painting La Chasse, which was coming up for auction. Gleizes replied that he rather wanted to buy it himself and therefore wanted the price to be as low as possible.
17 The exclusion of the Dadaists from this exhibition provided the occasion for the quarrel with Gleizes referred to in fn 6 above.
18 In the 1920s Gleizes uses the words metaphysical and physical to signify more or less the meaning that he would later want to convey with the words subjective and objective. As far as painting is concerned, the appearances of the external world are metaphysical because they do not correspond to the order of reality of the painting itself. As early as Du "Cubisme" (1912), Gleizes has argued that we cannot know the external world, we can only know our 'sensations'. At the time of writing the present essay he was in close relations with the mathematician,Charles Henry who, taking this as axiomatic, regarded all scientific research which pretended to describe an external world independent of human sensations as metaphysical. Which is to say that, as used by Gleizes and by Henry, 'metaphysical' and 'physical' mean almost the opposite of what they are usually taken to mean. In the 1930s, Gleizes was to become interested in the thinking of René Guénon which claims to be 'metaphysical', using a different understanding of the word. Gleizes did not in general adopt the word in Guénon's understanding of it but he no longer uses it as he does here, in a derogatory sense.
19 I understand this passage as meaning that the artist's 'sensibility' was no longer on display and, consequently, the artist, in the process of being converted into an artisan doing a job of work according to certain criteria of an objective nature, was no longer obliged to take the attacks that were launched against his work 'personally'.
20 Gleizes may be thinking of Marcel Duchamp, whom he knew very well. They had been together in New York, where Duchamp's development had worried him deeply.
21 The hierarchy of esemplastic acts is a main theme of the theoretical Essai de Généralisation which Gleizes intended should accompany the present essay when it was published by the Bauhaus.
22 As Gleizes said in a letter to Robert Pouyaud, written in 1926: 'A table is as concrete as a horse; but the tablemaker starts from principles that can also be found in the structure of the horse. The painter who starts from the horse to make an image of it, to reproduce it, has no principle. I would go so far as to say that he starts from the concrete (the horse) to arrive at the abstract (the image of the horse); while the tablemaker starts from the abstract (the principle of equilibrium, of movement, the relations of each part to the other) to arrive at the concrete. Oh, words! ...'
23 And there should be no mistaking the fact - it was Braque who, because of his origins, was the person really responsible for these very important initiatives. Picasso only borrowed what Braque had lived. What Picasso had lived was, alas, to return in all its glory in those intellectual works which give such pleasure to the literary people and snobs, to whom his truly great works are as inaccessible today as they were in the past. The son of the builder's decorator and the son of the teacher in an art academy have each revealed themselves according to their origins - that is what the proclamations of a publicity machine that has lost all restraint cannot hide from free spirits not yet completely abandoned by their common sense.
24 This was the exhibition that gave Art Deco its name.
25 Gleizes has in mind in particular his own pupils - Ynaga Poznansky, Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, Robert Pouyaud - and also the pupils of Fernand Léger, in the classes he held in Amédée Ozenfant's Académie Moderne. They included Marcelle Cahn, Otto Carlsund, Francizka and Thorvold Hellersen. All these 'younger elements'were included in the illustrations to Kubismus.