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70 6 modernist tide The public spectacle of Cubism, like a gathering parade through Paris, took time to develop. To be an avant-garde movement, it needed a consciousness, which began to emerge in 1910 among the “salon Cubists”—those who showed at the salons. These were the young men (and a few women) who had studied art at various schools around Paris and were trying to make it as painters, a group that included the Duchamp brothers, among many others. At the Grand Palais their paintings were hung like so many postage stamps in many rooms, the walls in dark colors—maroon or forest green. As they saw each other’s works, often hung together by coincidence, they began to talk. Then they began to meet. Their first meeting places were amid Paris’s vibrant cafe scene, which had been cultivated for decades already, bringing together poets, artists, and entertainers. Some of the nascent Cubists began branching off on their own. By early 1911, the painter Albert Gleizes, who had already lived in an artists’ commune, made his suburban studio a place for Cubist discussions . The idea caught on with the two older Duchamp brothers, Raymond and Jacques. Over in Puteaux, they began to hold Sunday meetings. This was 1911, the year that all three Duchamp brothers had switched to the modern style, with Marcel achieving the most unearthly look. He began to paint fleshy machines, adding bizarre titles. At Puteaux, Marcel was invariably the youngest. An older set of quickwitted , fast-talking painters and poets surrounded him at every turn. It was hard for him to express his views, if he had any. Luckily, whenever the atmosphere got too smothering, a chess game came to the rescue. It was a welcome diversion for everyone at Puteaux. It was also an added dimension of competition, a matching of wits, suited to a mélange of outgoing creative artists. In chess Marcel could express himself, even win, but finally, withdrawal into chess was not enough, given his temperament . Marcel began to plot his withdrawal from the Cubist collective that he’d fallen into. modernist tide || 71 Until he made that break, Marcel tried his best to participate. Salon Cubism was the center of action. The salon Cubists were gaining confidence , and Marcel’s brothers had given him entrée to that exciting circle . By the end of 1910, the circle took its first bold action in public. Its leaders, Apollinaire, Gleizes, and another painter, Jean Metzinger, led the charge. They asked the 1911 Salon des Indépendants committee to give them an exclusive Cubist room at the Grand Palais. They even ran a campaign to oust some recalcitrant salon committee members to obtain a positive vote on their request. Naturally, Apollinaire, Gleizes, and Metzinger fast emerged as the chief theorists of Cubism. As an intellectual, Metzinger had trumpeted the Cubist renaissance as early as anyone. His October 1910 article in Pan, a literary review, explained that while the new painting built upon Cézanne, it did much more. It also took cues from the new non-Euclidean geometry, even the fourth dimension, as articulated by the local mathematician Maurice Princet. The Cubist room at the Grand Palais, though small, drew sizable crowds when the Salon des Indépendants opened in March 1911. The viewers were greeted with the new Cubist conceit: painting must also be intellectual, a deeper dimension to the visual. As chief propagandist, Apollinaire picked up from there. He praised the work of the different painters in his reviews for the magazine L’Intransigeant, and by the end of 1911 he was spending most of his time advocating for the salon Cubists, who were far more theoretical than his old friend Picasso.1 All three Duchamp brothers were enthused by the idea that art could be intellectual, an idea found especially in the writings of Gleizes and Metzinger. In previous art, from Courbet to Impressionism, Gleizes and Metzinger said, “the retina predominates over the brain.”2 Art that pleased only the eyeball was merely decorative, an “absurdity.” True art should appeal to higher faculties, such as intuition or intellect. This salon Cubist quest for pure, intellectual art became salient enough that even the popular press began to pick up on it, both seriously and in satire. A cartoon showed a painter with a blank canvas, signed, trying to explain that the idea is more important than paint. “It is not painting that matters,” one artist told a journalist...

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