Maurice Raynal

The art critic, patron, and collector Maurice Raynal was among the most influential early theorists of Cubism and a tireless supporter of modern art in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. A native Parisian, Raynal lived in Montmartre as a young writer, where he befriended painters Amedeo Modigliani and Maurice Utrillo, poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, and the critic André Salmon, who introduced him to Pablo Picasso. Raynal’s important personal collection, like his prescient criticism, reflected his firsthand awareness of developments in the work of four primary artists he championed personally and professionally throughout his life: Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris.

Raynal’s collection, comprised primarily of gifts from the artists he counted among his closest friends, included a rare preparatory sketch for Picasso’s Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Picasso’s La Guitare (1916; private collection) given to Raynal in 1916. Raynal owned several paintings by Gris, including Portrait of Maurice Raynal (1911; private collection, Paris), Portrait of Germaine Raynal (1912; private collection), and Apples (1924; private collection) as well as drawings by the artist such as Still Life (1911; private collection) and Still Life with Glass and Tureen (1911; private collection, previously in the collection of Douglas Cooper.) Raynal’s collection reflected his lasting friendship with Henri Matisse, who painted Germaine in Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal) (1914; The Museum of Modern Art, New York.) In addition to works on paper inscribed with dedications by Utrillo, Max Jacob, Léger and Marc Chagall, Raynal also owned sculptures by Jacques Lipschitz. Constantin Brancusi created a soapstone chimney (1933–34) for Raynal, installed at the collector’s country home at Quincy-Voisin.

Raynal’s writings of 1912 to 1913 were among the most influential early theories of Cubism, helping to define and communicate the central preoccupations of the movement. Raynal contributed to some of the first exhibitions of Cubism in France, writing the catalogue introduction for the Norman Society of Modern Painting in Rouen (1911), and, in fall 1912, publishing an essay in the single issue of the journal La Section d’Or that accompanied the exhibition of the same name at the Galerie la Boétie. In his professional capacity as a critic, he published alongside Apollinaire and Salmon in newspapers L’Intransigeant and Paris-Journal. Bridging his personal knowledge of his artist-friends’ development and his professional awareness of critical positions espoused by his contemporaries, Raynal also identified and refined a conceptual—as opposed to a perceptual—theory of Cubist representation in his article “Conception et vision” (1912) published in Gil-blas. Contributing to Apollinaire’s Soirées de Paris in 1913−14, he was among the first Parisian critics to publish on the topic of film.

In 1919 Léonce Rosenberg hired Raynal as literary director of the Galerie l’Effort Moderne to write a series of texts highlighting each of the Cubist artists supported by the dealer. His 1919 pamphlet, Quelques intentions du cubisme (Some Aims of Cubism), which analyzed the work of Georges Braque, Gris, Fernand Léger, and Picasso, did much to promote Cubism’s links to French tradition in the aftermath of the Great War; however, further projects failed to materialize. The following year Raynal completed a study on Picasso, which was translated into German, published in Munich in 1921, and printed the following year in Paris. In addition to monographic works, Raynal continued to publish rigorous critical essays in such avant-garde journals as L’esprit nouveau and Minotaure. Writing for L’Intransigeant from 1921 to 1928, he intervened in debates surrounding the histories of literary and visual modernism. Between 1928 and 1932, he published a popular column with his friend, the critic Tériade, signed Les deux aveugles (The Two Blind Men). In 1933, Raynal published an essay on sculptors’ studios in the journal Minotaure, accompanied by photographs of the ateliers belonging to artists including Jacques Lipchitz, Alberto Giacometti, and Constantin Brancusi.

Raynal completed a decisive three-volume history of modern painting in 1953, a year before his death. Distributed by the Swiss publisher Albert Skira, the publication expanded the ideas and categories of inquiry set out in his 1927 Anthology of French Painting Since 1906. In so doing, he parlayed his nearly five decades of work as a critic into a dynamic history of art, working to situate not only Cubism but also the development of modern art through Dada, Surrealism, Purism and beyond. As he prepared this major retrospective contribution, Raynal returned to the site where he first encountered modern French painting; a series of unpublished reflections on his time in Montmartre numbered among his final compositions. At the time of his death his collection, too, reflected his continued allegiance to the work of Braque, Picasso, and above all, Gris, as well as his interest in the development of the work of Alexander Archipenko, Chagall, Léger, and others. His collection was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in 1991.