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

Reviews 223 offers a rich portrait of Reynaldo Hahn, born in Venezuela, who like Proust, was halfGerman -Jewish, a background that writer would lovingly jest about in his letters to Hahn, filled with a “langasge moschant” that playfully distorted standard French through the prism of German (39). This private send-up of linguistic purity takes on public significance as we learn about Hahn’s early advocacy of French specificity in debates about the place of Germanic influence, particularly Wagner, and his later turn to a cosmopolitan pastiche of identity with the cultural cross-dressing of his“Spanish” operetta Ciboulette. Beyond Hahn, readers will appreciate the story of Gabriel de Yturri, who rose from relative poverty to become Robert de Montesquiou’s lover and an exotic fixture of the social world.Yturri’s flamboyant cosmopolitanism, engagement with exoticism, and performance of gender aroused admiration and reproaches in France and Argentina. A brief portrait of Mexican painter Antonio de la Gandara, whose forgotten career parallels Jacques-Émile Blanche’s, and features as portraitist in Proust’s Jean Santeuil is equally intriguing. In short, Gallo offers a variety of leads for future scholars to investigate and, most importantly, a way to rethink the “étrangeté” that surrounded and inspired the most familiar figure of French letters. Stetson University (FL) Robert J. Watson Geinoz, Philippe. Relations au travail: dialogue entre poésie et peinture à l’époque du cubisme Apollinaire-Picasso-Braque-Gris-Reverdy. Genève: Droz, 2014. ISBN 9782 -600-01794-7. Pp. 559. 49 CHF. Geinoz’s ambitious, densely-written study argues that in 1912 the research of Apollinaire and Picasso in their respective domains began to follow comparable paths. This was the result in part of personal contact, but not exclusively.While they profited from conversations with one another, they were also independently probing new directions in their respective art forms. What makes their work similar, according to Geinoz, is not simply their occasional deployment of comparable themes, but primarily the structure of their works: their poems and paintings are works of art both physically (the shapes they assume on paper or canvas) and intellectually. The artists shared a mutual desire to accentuate the power of the present. This new approach the author will term a méthode apparentée, a choice of words which allows for differences as well as similarities. In this new orientation of the literary and painterly text, the audience is compelled to play an active role since these artworks challenge the continuity of previously dominant aesthetic traditions. Eventually Gris, Braque, and Reverdy would undertake the same form of experimentation. This study is divided into three occasionally overlapping parts. The first part involves an extended dialogue between the works of Apollinaire and Picasso. Although Geinoz supplies more than sufficient biographical information, his emphasis throughout is on the texts. The second part features extensive textual analysis, notably of Apollinaire’s poetry, where the aim is to question the appropriateness of earlier artistic forms to seize the originality and contradictions of the present.What characterizes the work of the poet and the painter is their willingness to experiment with discontinuité, a way of shocking or at least disappointing readers’ expectations and thus forcing them to rethink the work before them. The final section attempts to show that despite numerous variations and innovations, all the artists whose names figure in the title essentially follow this méthode apparentée. Most scholars will be impressed by this ambitious work, but few will be totally satisfied with Geinoz’s sweeping theory. It simply aspires to explain too much and to include too many diverse artists in its purview. Yet questions about the scope of the theory are secondary next to the imaginative, detailed analyses the author presents of both poems and paintings. These analyses are shaped by his theory, but he never allows those considerations to blind him to the subtlety and slyness of the text. Following the elaborations of the theory is sometimes difficult, but reading the thorough evaluations of the poems and paintings is always a pleasure. This is a very good book, but aside from the quibbles about the theory, it would have been stronger if it were shorter, and the...