Reviewed by: The Cubist Painters Marjorie Perloff The Cubist Painters. Guillaume Apollinaire. Peter Read, transl. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. 234. $29.95 (paper). The first English translation of Apollinaire's 1913 Les Peintres cubistes [Méditations Esthétiques], by a Mrs. Charles Knoblauch, was published in 1922 in three issues of The Little Review, where it replaced, so Peter Read tells us, the serialization of Ulysses, interrupted when a court ruling banned Joyce's novel for obscenity. "Readers' response was very positive," Read observes, "and included a letter from William Carlos Williams declaring, after the first installment, that he 'enjoyed thoroughly, absorbedly, Apollinaire's article'" (217). The artists who were Apollinaire's subject were less enthusiastic. "Look," Picasso, the book's hero, told André Malraux, "Apollinaire knew nothing about painting, yet he loved the real thing . . . . In the Bateau-Lavoir days the poets had that sixth sense" (213). And Duchamp similarly remarked, "You know [Apollinaire] wrote whatever came into his head," but, so as not to seem ungenerous to his friend, added, "Anyway, I like what he did very much, because it didn't have the formalism of certain critics" (213). Apollinaire, as Picasso and Duchamp recognize, was hardly a systematic critic, much less an art theorist. The Cubist Painters, as Peter Read presents it here, is best understood as a collage of shrewd, sometimes brilliant, aperçus, "a calculated collection of chronologically disparate fragments which began as a collage manuscript and went through at least three sets of proofs" (102). In his excellent commentary, which takes up two-thirds of this new edition, Read meticulously traces the genesis of each section of the book, from its inception in brief articles on various art shows in 1905, to the marginalia added in proof in 1912. Originally called Aesthetic Meditations, the collection of subjective, lyrical art reviews, appearing in such newspapers as Les Soirées de Paris, did not introduce the term cubism until 1911, when Apollinaire deemed it necessary to deflect the endless attacks in the popular press on painters like Georges Braque who were ridiculed for making their landscapes and portraits out of little "cubes." Apollinaire's [End Page 521] initial impulse, Read makes clear, was simply to define l'esprit nouveau in a variety of paintings, ranging from fauve landscapes to the semi-abstractions of Robert Delaunay. Indeed, his chapter on Picasso, the bravura piece of the book, does not so much as mention cubism. Peter Read's precise and elegant new translation replaces the previously standard one of Lionel Abel, reproduced in such art history source books as Herschel B. Chipp's Theories of Modern Art and now over fifty years old. But the translation is less important than the wealth of information Read provides and, best of all, his inclusion of all forty-five plates and the original frontispiece of the 1913 edition. In his chapter-by-chapter commentary, he identifies the specific paintings to which Apollinaire is referring. And further: Read relates the imagery and tropes used to describe artworks to comparable passages in the writings of other poets or related to specific images and references in Apollinaire's own poems. In the commentary on Chapter I (a chapter originally published as the preface to a catalogue for a 1908 Circle of Modern Art exhibition in Le Havre), for example, Read notes that Apollinaire's fervent belief that the potential to appreciate great painting exists in every man is similarly found in his 1913 poem "Un fantôme de nuées" ("A Phantom of Clouds"), inspired by Picasso's saltimbanque paintings, "in which a magical child acrobat, balancing on a ball, cast a spell all around, so what when he finally disappeared, 'every spectator sought within himself the miraculous child'" (126). And further, Read identifies the source of Apollinaire's famous aphorism, "On ne peut pas transporter partout avec soi le cadavre de son père" ("You cannot carry your father's corpse around everywhere you go") as Gérard de Nerval's "Angélique," where we read, "You do not carry your father's ashes around on the soles of your shoes" (126). In both cases, Read points...