When Apollinaire, Malraux and Bonnefoy Write about Art

When Apollinaire, Malraux and Bonnefoy Write about Art Robert W. Greene WHICH WELL-KNOWN TWENTIETH-CENTURY French poets have not written art criticism? I pose this question, only somewhat facetiously, to suggest that it may be easier to name the many twentieth-century French poets who write about art than it would be to identify the few who do not. If similar claims cannot be made about practitioners of fiction in twentieth-century France, a strict separation of novelists and art critics would nonetheless misrepresent what in fact has occurred. Thus the three figures whose extensive writings on art I shall briefly review here—Apollinaire, Malraux and Bonnefoy —are instances of a commonality, namely, the poet, and to a lesser degree the novelist, who in France, in our century, write about art. Also, among them, the three distinct bodies of art criticism that I shall sample will let us track the genre's evolution, if only schematically, across the century, from the Belle Epoque to the present. Apollinaire is an especially suitable writer with whom to begin a selective overview of art criticism by twentieth-century French poets—and novelists. First of all, he began writing texts in the genre in 1902. Also, in 1913 he brought out Méditations esthétiques: les peintres cubistes, which, according to LeRoy Breunig and Jean-Claude Chevalier, merged Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and L'Art Romantique, creating the genre that Jean Cocteau would dub "poésie critique."1 But Apollinaire's 1913 study of the Cubist painters, though pivotal in the development of poésie critique, hardly reflects the scope of his art criticism. Available since 1991 in a Pléiade volume, his complete writings on art reveal an educated enthusiast and multifaceted amateur. Whether extolling the virtues of individual Cubists in oracular fashion, singing the praises of Cézanne, whom he mentions more often than any other preCubist -era painter, or discussing countless other artists in more measured terms, Apollinaire clearly saw himself as "un informateur ... un flâneur des cimaises," to quote Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, editors of the Pléiade volume.2 His self-assigned duty was to keep his readers up to date, moving them to get to know the scores of painters, sculptors and engravers that he found so engaging. In "Georges Braque," the preface 94 Fall 1996 Greene for a 1908 exhibit of the painter's work, for example, Apollinaire seeks to convey what he sees as peculiar to Braque and essential to point out to viewers. Knowing as we do today the painter's entire Âœuvre, we can only marvel at how early and authoritatively the young poet entered into the young painter's universe: (Braque) exprime une beauté pleine de tendresse et la nacre de ses tableaux irise notre entendement. Un lyrisme coloré et dont les exemples sont trop rares l'emplit d'un enthousiasme harmonieux et ses instruments de musique, sainte Cécile même les fait sonner. Dans ses vallons bourdonnent et butinent les abeilles de toutes les jeunesses et le bonheur de l'innocence languit sur ses terrasses civilisées. Ce peintre est angélique. Plus pur que les autres hommes, il ne se préoccupe point de ce qui étant étranger à son art le ferait soudain déchoir du paradis qu'il habite. (112) On the other hand, one cannot ignore the polemical thrust of some passages in Apollinaire's art criticism. Unlike Malraux or Bonnefoy, he thought of himself as both an "informateur" and the defender of a movement, Cubism in his case. Indeed, sections oÃ- Les Peintres cubistes have an urgency that Malraux's or Bonnefoy's writings on art do not possess. Still, within Apollinaire's total production as an art critic, Les Peintres occupies barely 60 of the 880 pages taken up by the poet's art criticism in the Pléiade volume. Apollinaire's collected writings on art thus testify less to a programmatic turn of mind than to a voracious curiosity, or, in the words of the Pléiade editors, "sa grande disponibilité à autrui" (xi). Implicit in the above is Apollinaire's vital dispersion, his capacity to let his critical gaze...