Loose thoughts about Apollinaire’s Aesthetic Meditations, followed by its translation (selected fragment)

Abstract

This article gives a brief presentation of a 1913 text by Guillaume Apollinaire, containing some of his theorizations about modern art, in particular the “new” painting, cubism. It points to the central question in Apollinairean art criticism: the problem of the representation of nature in the artwork (mimesis), already manifest in important ancestors such as Diderot and Baudelaire. These reflections, in the form of “loose thoughts,” are followed by the translation of a fragment of Apollinaire’s Méditations Esthétiques, an unpublished text in Brazil.