16 
But no one knows, in all the history of art, of a single collec 
tive mystification any more than of a collective artistic error. 
There are isolated cases of mystification and of error, but the 
conventional elements of which in part the works of art are com 
posed assure us that errors would not know how to exist col 
lectively. 
If the new school of painting had presented us with one of 
these cases, it would be an event so extraordinary that it could 
be called a miracle. To conceive a case of this sort would be to 
conceive that suddenly, in a nation all the children should be 
born without heads or with only one arm or leg, a conception 
evidently absurd. There are not collective errors or mystifica 
tions in art. There are only divers epochs—divers schools of art. 
If the end pursued by each one is not equally elevated, equally 
pure, all are equally respectable, and according to the ideas 
which each has of beauty, each school of art is successively 
admired, despised and again admired. 
VII 
The new school of painting bears the name of Cubism; it was 
so called in derision by Henri Matisse who in the autumn of 
1908 had just seen a picture representing houses, the cubic 
appearance of which had greatly impressed him. 
These new aesthetics were first elaborated in the mind of 
Andre Derain, but the most important and audacious works 
which the movement at once produced were those of a great 
artist, Pablo Picasso, who must also be considered as one of the 
founders: his inventions strengthened by the good sense of 
Georges Braque, who exhibited a Cubist picture in the Salon des 
Independants, as early as 1908, were formulated in the studies 
of Jean Metzinger, who exhibited the first Cubist portrait (it 
was mine) in the Salon des Independants of 1910. Cubist works 
were also admitted in the same year by the Jury for the Salon 
d’Autumne. It was also in 1910 that the pictures of Robert 
Delaunay, of Marie. Laurencin and of Le Fauconnier, followers 
of the same school, were exhibited at the Independants. 
The first general exhibition of Cubism, when its adepts had