Louis Vauxcelles

Jules Chéret : Portrait of Louis Vauxcelles , 1909

Louis Vauxcelles , actually Louis Mayer , pseudonym Pinturicchio (born January 1, 1870 in Paris , † July 21, 1943 there ) was one of the most influential art critics of the 20th century. Among other things, he coined the art-historical terms Fauvism , Cubism and Tubism .

Act

Influenced by his very conservative attitude, Vauxcelles fundamentally rejected the avant-garde currents of painting at the beginning of the 20th century and attacked the Cubists in particular. He initially worked for a wide variety of magazines (including L'Art et la Vie ), from 1904 mainly for the art section of the influential Gil Blas magazine , on whose behalf he wrote papiers ( e.g. reports) on contemporary Paris art exhibitions. In these “reports” he coined many terms that have entered the art-historical terminology today: for example Fauvism (text passage October 1905: “Mais c'est Donatello parmi les Fauves”, for example: “But that is Donatello among the Fauves” [the “Young savages”, the Parisian painters later referred to by this term]) or Cubism (November 1908: “M Braque [...] réduit tout, sites figures maisons, à des schémas géométriques, à des cubes”, for example) : "Mr. Braque [...] dissolves everything, places, people, houses, into geometric figures, into cubes").

The actual analysis of the works often took a back seat due to the offensive formulation; his “reports” often represented polarizing attacks on almost all recent developments (not only) in painting. After the exhibition in the Salon des Indépendants in 1911, in which the Puteaux group had presented their works, he referred to Fernand Léger as a tuba player and influenced him thus an expression that still plays a role in the description of this painter today. He also denigrated all painters in this group as “ Ubu-Kub ” (derived from the terms “ Ubu Roi ” and the German version of the word Kubus for cube) and spread the rumor that the group was an “entreprise dirigée par les Allemands, contre la peinture française ”(a“ company directed by the Germans against French painting ”). It was this statement that Picasso satirically responded to with his work “ Bouillon Kub ” in 1912 . Picasso himself was also by no means spared from the biting criticism of Vauxcelles, although he obviously hardly knew his works: “J'ai crainte que le mystère dont s'entoure Picasso ne serve sa légende. Qu'il fasse une exposition [...] nous le jugerons. André Salmon le compare à Goethe. C'est bien grave… ”-“ I fear that Picasso's secrecy will not serve his afterlife. Should he do an exhibition [...] we will judge him. André Salmon compares him to Goethe. That is an exaggeration ... ”(Article in Les Arts , 1912). Also from the pen of Vauxcelles originally came the rumor, which later became widespread, that Cubism merely represented the combination of vulgarization ideas for non-Euclidean geometry and the theories of Riemann published by Maurice Princet .

Web links

• Louis Vauxcelles in Dictionary of Art Historians (English)