Louis Vauxcelles

Louis Vauxcelles , born in 1870 is one of the critic art most influential of the beginning of the 20th century. It will give its name to the Fauvisme and later to the Cubisme.

Of a very preserving spirit, it never included/understood the steps avant-gardists, and tried with eagerness to discredit the cubist cause. Of its true name Louis Mayer, it contributes to various newspapers of which Art and the Life , before holding, as from 1904, the artistic heading of the Gil Blas , where it publishes " papiers" on the Parisian exposures. It is of its assertions in this daily newspaper that is born name from the Fauvisme (“But it is Donatello among the Deer”, October 1905), then cubism (“Mr. Braque reduces all, sites figures houses, with geometrical diagrams, with cubes”, November 1908). Its rejection of any innovation leads it to emit sour criticisms which often make pass the analysis in the second plan. Qualifying Fernand Leger of “Sandhog” following the Living room of Independent the of 1911, it is not décontenancé less by the exposure of the Section of Gold and the King and the Queen surrounded by naked quickly by Marcel Duchamp which makes him say: “the cubist crossed or not by naked of speed, it is Chocarne-Moreau a little " bu" ” (quoted by Hut). Picasso was undoubtedly saved the least, although Vauxcelles does not know its works: “I feared that the mystery of which is surrounded Picasso serf her legend. That it makes to an exposure we will judge it. André Salmon compares it with Goethe. It is quite serious…” ( Arts , 1912). And following the exposures of the Living room of Independent and of autumn of 1911, it treats this one of “Ubu-Kub”, insunuant that its painting is “a company directed by the Germans, against French painting” (Daix). It what Picasso answers by the Bouillon Kub in 1912. Intractable, Vauxcelles was at the origin of a rumor which implied that the Cubisme is only the application of the ideas of popularization on the geometrical not-Euclidean one and theories of Riemann emitted by Maurice Princet: “the cubism, child of Mr. Princet, had been born” (quoted by L. Henderson).

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