Les Peintres Cubistes Guillaume Apollinaire

APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume. [Méditations Esthétiques] Les Peintres Cubistes. Première Série. Pablo Picasso – George Braques – Jean Metzinger – Albert Gleizes – Juan Gris – Mlle Marie Laurencin – Fernand Léger – Francis Picabia – Marcel Duchamp – Duchamp-Villon, etc. Ouvrage accompagné de 46 portraits et reproductions hors texte. Paris, Eugène Figuière et Cie, Éditeurs, 1913. First edition of this groundbreaking and richly illustrated text on cubism, from the library of the French-born artist Alice Thevin (1862-1937). Published two years after the first Cubist exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, Les Peintres Cubistes delves into the artistic movement’s aesthetic, origins, and development. The text includes excerpts from Guillaume Apollinaire’s literary journal, Les Soirées de Paris, complemented by 45 black and white photographs of artworks by Picasso, Braques, Duchamp, and several others. It was released as part of the ‘Tous les Arts’ series, overseen by Apollinaire himself. The poet, playwright, writer, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire played a pivotal role in the French avant-garde movement. He is credited with coining the term ‘cubism’ in his preface to the catalogue for the Indépendants exhibition in Brussels in 1911. In his Les Peintres cubistes, he was among the first critics to articulate the principles of Cubism. Originally from Paris, Alice Thevin spent much of her life in the US, where she taught art and literature in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. After her death, her partner Fanny Peabody Mason established a fund in her memory at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Small quarto, pp. 84, with 45 plates as called for (46 are inaccurately advertised); very good in original yellow wrappers, titles in black to covers and spine, with early glassine (some minor spotting, wrappers slightly soiled and creased, with tears to edges); pencil ownership inscription of Alice Thevin to front cover and her pencil annotations and underlining throughout.