The painting movement which, born some ten years ago, has been called 
Cubism, is perhaps not the one which surprised the World the most, nor the 
one which, after getting the greatest number of enemies, recollected the most 
of adepts; but itisundoubtedly the artistic Effort which, being the most im 
portant of our time, brought in it the most of confusion. 
This confusion, in which at first people seemed to delight, itself, lasted long 
enough. The efforts attempted by each artist to make it cease is a proof of 
it. The need of understanding and of better understanding is felt everywhere. 
I am speaking of artists, as it is not only amongst people but also amongst 
artists that the ambiguity existed and, unfortunately, exists still with persis 
tance. 
The matter is not only the divergencies of taste which existed always 
amongst them and will happily ne ver cease, but there are several essential 
points which it would be perhaps useful to reach and to admit in common, in 
order to establish a base for an art which many claim for absolutely different 
and even opposed reasons. The matter is yet an art which by its persistance 
and its development has proved enough its reasons and its rights to exist. 
The opinion of a single man could certainly not make everybody agréé; 
but it is perhaps not useless to attemptto some explanations of general order, 
some précisions of particular order, useful in any caseto résolve a clear diffé 
rence. The serious efforts of several would certainly gain by not being con- 
founded with the more or less justified, more orless honest (artistically spoken) 
fancies of painters which, having nothing to bring to the movement, are only 
attracted by the beyond-measure modernism when it is not by otherless avo- 
wable reasons. 
Some pretentedto go beyond Cubism, which is the art in évolution of our 
time, and in order to get out of it, they went backward. Back again to the art 
of imitation in choosing only between the most modem objects to be repre- 
sented, they believed, in avoiding the difficulty, to solve an arduous problem. 
With the titles under which they were obliged to complété their works, they 
left the plastic domain for a litterary symbolism, the fantasmagoria of which is, 
in the domain of painting, absolutely worthless. Also, if it is difficult to find 
new means in an art, it is only worthy to find them proper to this art and not 
in another one. This to say that the litterary means used for the art of pain 
ting (and vice versa) can only give us an easy and dangerous appearance of 
novelty. 
Cubism is an eminently plastic art; but an art of création and not of 
reproduction or interprétation. 
Now, what can amancreate in painting, if not a picture, and this création 
with new adapted means ? The first cubist painters found proper means and 
those who followed their traces did not pay enough attention to them. The 
latter took the appearance of works yet realised and worked « in the manner » 
with the prétention to starton their account, a new art. It istime to notice it, 
otherwise people would make of this deep art— of which only the superficial 
side was seen — a superficial art. By this di sastrous way of judging, people 
saw only incohérence where there was, even at start, research of discipline. 
To-day, for few rare elected, the discipline is established, and as no one has 
ever dreamed of a cold, mathematic and antiplastic, solely cérébral art, the 
works which the cubist artists produce, appeal direct to the eye and to the sense 
of the lovers of painting. But to love this painting it must be first understood 
why its appearance is so much different from the one our eye is accustomed 
to.