ABSTRACT
Cubism was not a coherent movement so much as a simultaneous search for a new way of expressing reality. The Cubists were not an organized group with a single leader but rather a loose federation of artists pursuing a common goal. Despite Pablo Picasso's boundless energy and enormous talent, he did not invent Cubism all by himself. When Guillaume Apollinaire introduced Picasso to Georges Braque toward the end of 1907, Apollinaire set the stage for one of the most unusual collaborations in the history of art. Just as the Cubist painters sought to create an impression of simultaneity by superimposing multiple perspectives and overlapping planes, Apollinaire switches back and forth from one personal pronoun to another and juxtaposes disparate experiences in different locales. In 1930, Gertrude Stein published a bilingual collection of ten poetic portraits that caused a stir among the Parisian avant-garde.
