Méditations esthétiques. Les Peintres cubistes

first edition on current paper despite a mention of second edition, punch of the press service on the second board.
Precious autograph dedication signed by Guillaume Apollinaire: "to Lucien Rolmer, the cantor, the psychologist, his friend".
Illustrated book of 46 portraits and reproductions of works by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp ...
As one of the few defenders of Cubism since its inception, Apollinaire works to its dissemination and understanding through his columns and prefaces including the catalog of the exhibition of the Circle of Modern Art in Le Havre, entitled The Three Virtues Plastics , taken again in introduction of Aesthetic Meditations. Unbeknownst to the poet, the publisher Eugène Figuière highlights the subtitle The Cubist Painters . This timely modification will be decisive for the reception of the work. Thus, instead of simple "meditations", the text acquires, for the readers, the status of true Manifesto of cubism and raises in this respect sometimes violent reactions (more still from the avant-garde circles than natural opponents to modern painting). But at the same time, it becomes one of the first important writings on Cubism, "defining the characteristics of the new pictorial movement: its spiritual 'climate', its ambitions, its historical necessity" and its international significance. A month later, Apollinaire published Alfines , with a frontispiece cubist portrait of the author by Picasso.
A great friend of Apollinaire, the poet Lucien Rolmer, one month older, did not follow the same aesthetic course as his bohemian companion.
Of more classic expression, Rolmer is undoubtedly less sensitive than the future poet of Alfines and Calligrammes to the new artistic forms that Apollinaire defends. However, the two poets share a common aesthetic ambition, the search for a new creative breath. It is in the name of this quest for what he calls "Grace" that Rolmer founds a literary school and a magazine, La Flora, Revue de la Grace in Letters and Art . Apollinaire, for his part, seeks a more radical expression which he finds especially in Cubism and in the primitive arts. Thus he addresses to the "cantor" of Grace these Aesthetic Meditations on works whose "plastic virtues: purity, unity and truth keep under their feet the fallen nature". In so doing, he implicitly questions the "psychologist" about this new expression "which is not an art of imitation, but an art of conception which tends to rise to creation". The year before, he was introducing his friend to the Art Nègre inviting him to nourish his "graceful art" of the contemplation of a large Dahomean metal statue representing the god of war, "the object of art the most unexpected and one of the most graceful there is in Paris.
Strange omen of their common tragic destiny, since it is the war, whose absurd beauty they can yet describe, which carried the two poets alike. In May 1916, refusing his surrender, Lucien Rolmer, a private soldier, was shot in the head. Two months before, the Second Lieutenant Kostrowitzky was hit by a shrapnel in the skull to which the "murdered poet" survived only a short time.
In his latest work, Le Flâneur des deux riviers , published the year of his death, Apollinaire evokes his Parisian wanderings with his friend disappeared: "The last time before the war, I passed rue Berton, it was he a long time ago and in the company of René Dalize, Lucien Rolmer and André Dupont, all three died in the field of honor.
Our copy is presented under a flap folder in half green morocco, combed paper plates, golden date tail, smooth back and a case trimmed with green morocco, flat combed paper.
Precious and moving dedication from one poet to another, witness of the intellectual and artistic effervescence of a youth soon sacrificed to Leviathan 14-18.