Review of Philippe Geinoz, Relations au travail: Dialogue entre poésie et peinture à l’époque du cubisme: Apollinaire-Picasso-Braque-Gris-Reverdy

As a literary genre, the thèse- or habilitation-turned-book will have few genuine enthusiasts. These texts are long and often not very lively. Among the examples I’ve encountered, Philippe Geinoz’s Relations au travail: Dialogue entre poésie et peinture à l’époque du cubism: Apollinaire-Picasso-Braque-Gris-Reverdy [Relations at work: Dialogue between poetry and painting in the cubist epoch—Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, Gris, Reverdy] is among the very best. Indeed, if I had encountered it sooner, it might have enriched some of my own recent work on Pablo Picasso’s milieu. That’s because the issues in which Geinoz and I are both interested revolve around the same formal and interpretive problems: what kind of work does a Cubist painting by Picasso or a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire require of its viewer/reader, and how does this demand raise methodological issues for us