Chapter Three By Apollinaire

The readings for week three by Apollinaire (1913) and Gleize and Metzinger (1912) were written in a time when Cubism was an artistic style not wholly accepted by the viewing public. As a result of this, their works are defending, extolling, and analysing the conceptual advancements of cubism for the progression of the plastic arts. Apollinaire breaks his Aesthetic Meditations down into two main sections. First his opinion on painting with a focus on the notion of plastic virtues of purity unity and truth in relation to nature, with a specific focus on the idea of purity and how cubism is upholding these plastic virtues, and secondly he goes into detail about the leading cubist artist of the day. In Apollinaire’s definition of how to achieve ‘pure’ painting he

A common theme in the article that separates cubism from the natural is the sphere that cubism exist in. By throwing off the chains of representation and depicting multiple angles and perspectives of an object, Cubism can depict the ‘fourth dimension’ and extend infinitely in space, with Gleizes and Metzinger focusing on how Cubism addresses pictorial space versus visual or Euclidean space. [18, 423,424] Apollinaire argues that Cubism offers the viewer a different type of pleasure with a lessened importance on subject matter and representation - which he compares to literature - to a purer form of aesthetic pleasure experienced while viewing art given through harmony and contrast, as comparable to music [15]. This harmony is looked at by Gleize and Metzinger through the dichotomy of form and color which they argue must act together to give a ‘plastic consciousness’ to our instinct thus allowing for purer creation [420, 428]. Both mention the history of Cubism and the artist that make up the