Published by Eugène Figuière Éditeurs, Collection "Tous les Arts", Paris, 1913, Les Peintres Cubistes was the only independent volume of art criticism published by Apollinaire, and represented a highly original critical source on Cubism.[7] He elucidates the history of the Cubist movement, its new aesthetic, its origins, its development, and its various features.[8]
Apollinaire first intended this book to be a general collection of his writings on art entitled Méditations Esthétiques rather than specifically on Cubism. In the fall of 1912 he revised the page proofs to include more material on the Cubist painters, adding the subtitle, Les Peintres Cubistes. When the book went to press, the original title was enclosed in brackets and reduced in size, while the subtitle Les Peintres Cubistes was enlarged, dominating the cover. Yet Les Peintres Cubistes appears only on the half t.p. and t.p. pages, while every other page has the title Méditations Esthétiques, suggesting the modification was made so late that only the title pages were reprinted.[6][7][9]
A portion of the text was translated into English and published with several images from the original book in The Little Review: Quarterly Journal of Art and Letters, New York, Autumn 1922.[10][11]
^Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme", published by Eugène Figuière Éditeurs, Paris, 1912 (Eng. trans., London, 1913)
^Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, 1985, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press, pp. 9–23
^André Salmon, L'art vivant, La Jeune Peinture française, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme, (Anecdotal History of Cubism), Paris, Albert Messein, 1912, Collection des Trente. Translated in Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, pp. 41–61
^Leroy C. Breunig and Jean-Claude Chevalier (eds), Paris: Hermann, 1965; Trans. Lionel Abel, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, Wittenborn, New York, 1944, 1949