Du "Cubisme"

First edition, exceedingly rare copy without statement of edition, with the correct imprint dated 20 October 1912.

Restorations to spine and inner margins of the covers, a discreet fold to the low­er right corner of the front cover.

Illustrated with 26 artworks by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Ma­rie Laurencin, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris and Francis Picabia.

 
A fine copy despite restorations, rare without statement of edition, of this Cubist manifesto published on the oc­casion of the historic exhibition of the "Section d'Or" at the Galerie La Boétie.
 

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"It is difficult to imagine today the im­pact of Gleizes and Metzinger's book. Read, reread, celebrated or rejected, it was very quickly translated into Rus­sian and English. The Russian cultural avant-garde discussed it passionately. From the American critic Arthur Jerome Eddy to the Romanian painter Marcel Janco, they recommended reading it, at the risk of forgetting that it was less the theorists than the good painters who expressed themselves in it. The Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen considered the book as useful for a writer as for an art­ist, and, in fact, the abandonment of the concern for resemblance of the cubist painters corresponds to the fragmenta­tion of meaning and the unusual images of Apollinaire or Reverdy. Du cubisme ends with these words: "To the par­tial freedoms conquered by Courbet, Manet, Cézanne and the Impression­ists, Cubism substitutes infinite free­dom. We now know that Cubism was not a break with the past but a door wide open to the future." (Serge Fau­chereau)