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