Relations au travail: dialogue entre poésie et peinture à l’époque du cubisme: Apollinaire–Picasso–Braque–Gris–Reverdy by Philippe Geinoz (review)

It is surprising that no comprehensive study of the links between Apollinaire, Reverdy, and Cubism has appeared before this book by Philippe Geinoz. His meticulous and well-illustrated analysis lives up to its title: he argues that the poets and artists of this period are connected by a shared method, rather than by common subject matter or the practice of transposition. He sets out to show that their works function as a grammar, producing relations between elements; he then emphasizes the work that those texts, in turn, require of the reader or spectator. Throughout, he asserts the importance of the developing relationships between the writers and artists at work. Geinoz’s chronological approach begins with early paintings by Picasso and poems that would appear in Apollinaire’s Alcools, before the latter’s well-known appreciation of Cubist art, to show that, initially, their shared concern was the motif of the acrobat. This sets the tone for a careful and sustained contextualization of the works. In particular, connections with the Italian Futurists led to mutual and developing influences, and writers and artists put into practice contemporary philosophical tendencies including the notion that the self acts upon the world rather than knowing it objectively. Geinoz goes on to argue that the writers aimed at renewing the relations between words and between things; that is why, post-Mallarmé, cliché was no longer seen as problematic, and Apollinaire could write a poem such as ‘Lundi, rue Christine’, which is structured by the combination of apparently overheard phrases, and which places the self in the midst of the world. Geinoz sees the same processes of discontinuity and fragmentation at work in Cubist art. He excels at combining thorough and convincing close reading of texts and images with a developing argument about the cultural moment: this approach is properly interdisciplinary (he writes in terms of ‘mise en relation’, p. 484). He brings out the differences between Picasso, Braque, and Gris, as well as between works by each of those artists, interrogating what might have caused them to make particular decisions and going far beyond the broad critical division of the movement into ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’. Rejecting semiotic readings of Cubist art, Geinoz compares the relations it produces to Reverdy’s understanding of metaphor (a relation between a present and an absent thing that must be uncovered by the reader, rather than presented in the form of a comparison), insisting that visual art does not deal in arbitrary meanings as language does. The reader or viewer is required to make the connections that will then produce a version of the work, in combination with its initial creator (although Geinoz does not make use of reception theory), an argument that counters the view of modern art as leading to abstraction. Geinoz takes account of Reverdy’s later thinking and writing on emotion, arguing that the works he is studying are literally ‘émouvantes’ (p. 487), and the site of the work is that of an expanded present in which two individualities meet. This volume challenges us to re-examine our understanding of Cubism and of the poetry of Apollinaire and Reverdy in their cultural context (it also touches on Cendrars), and will be a valuable resource for scholars of the poetry, art, and text–image relations of the early avant-garde period.