THE HISTORY AND CHRONOLOGY OF CUBISM Page: 7
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History and Chronology of Cubism:
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Delaunay was himself profoundly aware that he had evolved a new kind of painting and he communicated his discoveries to Apollinaire with whom he had become very friendly. Apollinaire, always ready to welcome and encourage any form of artistic novelty, christened this development 'Orphism'. Apollinaire had recently finished writing Le Bestiaire au Cortège d'Orphée and felt the name to be applicable to Delaunay's work, partly because it was more lyrical and sensuous than the rather austere Cubism of the period, and also because he saw it as a form of 'peinture pure' which had analogies with music. In the nineteenth century music had come to be regarded as queen of the arts because of its non-imitative qualities, and throughout the Cubist period musical analogies become increasingly frequent. With the emergence of abstract painting many felt that painting had become completely 'musicalized'. In his article Du Sujet dans la Peinture Moderne (which became the second section of Les Peintres Cubistes) Apollinaire had written: 'On s'achemine ainsi vers un art entièrement nouveau, qui sera à la peinture, telle qu'on l'avait envisageé jusqu'ici ce que la musique est à la litte'rature pure.' Arthur Eddy, an American critic who in 1914 produced the first book in English on Cubism, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, wrote that 'the comparison that Picabia is fondest of making is that of absolute music'. Valensi, who had shown at the Section d'Or in 1912, in a lecture given late in the following year asked: 'Pourquoi ne pas concevoir alors une peinture pure? De même que le musicien a ses notes, pourquoi ne pas supposer que la couleur par sa force intrinsèque puisse exprimer la pensée du peintre?' In his lecture Le Cubisme écartelé given at the Section d'Or on the 11th of October and later added to Les Peintres Cubistes when the book was already in proof, Apollinaire divided Cubism into four categories, Orphism being the most advanced: 'C'est l'art de peindre des ensembles nouveaux avec des éléments empruntés non à la réalité visuelle, mais entiérement crés par l'artiste et doués par lui d'une puissante réalité. Les oeuvres des artistes orphiques doivent présenter simultanément un agrément esthétique pur, une construction qui tombe sous les sens et une signification sublime, c'est-à-dire le sujet. C'est de l'art pur.'
While waiting to move into a new apartment in the Boulevard Saint Germain, Apollinaire lived with the Delaunays for almost two months during the autumn of 1912, and at this time the Delaunays' studio became the meeting-place of a new group. The poet Blaise Cendrars was drawn into the circle, and he, together with Apollinaire, Chagall, and the American painters Bruce and Frost, joined the Delaunays during the summer of 1913 at the house they had rented at Louveciennes. Early in 1913 Canudo, another friend of Apollinaire's, founded a review called Montjoie which was recognized to be an Orphist mouthpiece, while Apollinaire expanded and developed his ideas on the new style in L'Intransigeant and particularly in Les Soirées de Paris. Archipenko, who had been a friend of Delaunay for some time, now also denied being a Cubist; the Art column of Gil Blas reported on the 14th of December 1912: ' M. Archipenko a déclaré formellement qu'il s'était détaché de la façon la plus absolue du groupe cubiste dont il rejette les principes.' The group used also to frequent the Bal Bullier, a popular Parisian dance hall. There they were sometimes joined by Arp and Arthur Cravan.
Delaunay felt that the basis of his art was 'simultaneous' contrasts of colour, a concept which he adoped from Chevreul, whose colour theory had interested him for some time. He meant by this that the areas of colour in his painting were not to be blended by the eye but were to be seen as acting on each other reciprocally, thus producing pictorial form and space. Sonia Delaunay later expressed this theory in its simplest form: 'Les couleurs pures devenant plans et s'opposant par contrastes simultanés créent pour la première fois la forme nouvelle construite non par le clair-obscur, mais par la profondeur des rapports des couleurs mêmes.' In March 1913, writing on the Salon des Inddpendants in Montjoie, Apollinaire referred to 'L'Orphisme, peinture pure, Simultanétté', and the two terms thus became largely synonymous.
The poets and critics had played a considerable part in stimulating and organizing the first manifestations of the Cubists, but the connections between Orphism and contemporary literature were stronger and more direct. Apollinaire, who at the time was fascinated by the interrelation of the arts, and was exploring the visual possibilities of poetry in his Calligrammes (for which one of the original titles was Moi aussi je suis peintre), was inspired by Delaunay's painting Les Fenêtres to compose, late in 1912, his poem of the same name, in which the means are to a certain extent analogous. This poem, written in free verse, was one of the first in which Apollinaire eliminated punctuation, and was composed of seemingly disconnected, partially self-sufficient phrases and ideas, which by their placing and interaction serve to evoke both form and atmosphere. Early in 1913 Cendrars published the first 'simultaneous' book, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, a poem over six feet in length, which was printed in letters of different colours and sizes on an abstract coloured background designed by Sonia Delaunay. The avowed programme of Montjoie was to find the link between various arts and to investigate their common tendencies, and Canudo invented the term 'cérébrisme' to describe this attitude: 'Montjoie est l'organe de l'art cérébriste, car le cérébrisme, selon sa définition même, comprend et explique toute l'évolution artistique de notre époque depuis quarante ans, dans le sens le plus vaste d'une esthétique indissolublement cérébrale et sensuelle -- contre tout sentimentalisme dans l'art et dans la vie.' Writing about Stravinsky, Canudo gave a practical demonstration of his outlook when he claimed that: 'Il participe de notre esthétique, du cubisme, du synchronisme, du simultanisme des uns, et de la toute nerveuse onyrythme prosaïque des autres.' An author named Henri Martin, who wrote under the name of Barzun, published a Manifeste sur le simultanisme poétique, and disputed with Apollinaire the invention of what he called literary Simultaneism. Apollinaire felt that he had achieved simultaneity in his 'poèmes conversations, où le poète au centre de la vie enrégistre en quelque sorte le lyrisme ambiant'. Later in the same article Simultanisme-Librettisme in which he expounded these views, Apollinaire, using Picasso's work as an example, extended the idea of Simultaneity to cover the combination of various view-points of objects in a single image.
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