Dictionnaire du cubisme

Due undoubtedly to a race against time to put out the book, this edition has some shortcomings that are regretful for a collection of this quality: the alphabetical order is not always respected -such as Puteaux before Primitivisme, Charles Ratton placed under the letter C, or some shuffling about with the dates, such as those given in the notice in the case of Douglas Cooper, born in 1915, 21 years old in 1932, death in 1984 then in 1985! We would have liked to see in this who’s who some surprising personalities better developed such as Gallatin who is not even mentioned (he did open one of the first public collections in the USA after all!), while 7 whole pages are dedicated to Alexandre Mercereau. As for the rest, it is an efficient vade-mecum that reviews the key moments and characters (Apollinaire and Vlaminck as well as Picabia and Picasso) of a movement that was synthetic, analytical, and had links with cinema, geometry, music, occultism or even photography

• Dictionnaire du cubisme, directed by Brigitte Leal, collection Bouquins, Robert Laffont, 2018, 896 p. €32