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ON "CUBISM"
Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger
Du "Cubisme", Eugène Figuière, Paris 1912; Compagnie française des Arts Graphiques, Paris, 1947; Éditions Présence, Sisteron, 1980; R.G.Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 1993; Hermann éditeurs, Paris, 2012.
English translations: T.Fisher Unwin, London and Leipzig, 1913; Robert L.Herbert: Modern Artists on Art, Spectrum Books, Englewood Cliffs; R.G.Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 1993; Catalogue of the exhibition Albert Gleizes, Cubism in Majesty, 2002; Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten: A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2008.
According to the chronology established by Judith Cousins and Pierre Daix (Rubin: Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism), publication of On "Cubism" was announced in the Revue d'Europe et d'Amérique in March 1912, and again in the Paris-Journal on 26th October. They give the end of November, beginning of December rather tentatively as the actual date of its appearance. Françoise Lucbert, in the chronology she gives for the Section d'Or exhibition [Debray and Lucbert: La Section d'Or, p,335] says that what was announced in the October article in the Paris-Journal was the first thirty copies. This was, presumably, the first edition. I have not seen it but both the fifth and the fourteenth editions are marked as 'achevé d'imprimer le 27 décembre 1912'. There are discrepancies between these and the edition published in 1947. These are indicated in the notes. For the most part they could be errors - albeit rather gross errors - in copying but the differences in the conclusions to the two volumes are sufficiently radical to suggest that the 1947 edition was drawing from a different text. I am unable to account for this. The 1980 edition surprisingly follows the 1947 version. This translation is based on the 1912 version, which is also the basis for the 1913 English translation.
Introductory remarks and first section: Cubism as a continuation of the French realist tradition. How it stands in relation to Cézanne.
Second section: Cubism in relation to form, both as it is found in the conditions of the work of art and in those of the external world.
Third section: Cubism in relation to colour, in particular Neo-Impressionist colour theory.
Fourth section: Painting determined by a 'plastic dynamism' - independent of the thing represented - in which colour and form are inseparable.
Fifth section: On 'taste' - the individual's ability to savour the painting - as transcendent to all the possible methods and principles.