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Jean Metzinger

January 01, 1970

Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger (French: [mɛtsɛ̃ʒe]; 24 June 1883 – 3 November 1956) was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism.[1][2][3][4] His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907, Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.

Jean Metzinger
Metzinger, before 1913
Born
Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger

(1883-06-24)24 June 1883
Nantes, France
Died3 November 1956(1956-11-03) (aged 73)
Paris, France
EducationÉcole des Beaux-Arts (Nantes)
Known forPainting, drawing, writing, poetry
Notable work
MovementNeo-Impressionism, Divisionism, Fauvism, Cubism
Websitejeanmetzinger.art

From 1908, Metzinger experimented with the faceting of form, a style that would soon become known as Cubism. His early involvement in Cubism saw him both as an influential artist and an important theorist of the movement. The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view-points is treated, for the first time, in Metzinger's Note sur la Peinture, published in 1910.[5] Before the emergence of Cubism, painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point. Metzinger, for the first time, in Note sur la peinture, enunciated the interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time. Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote the first major treatise on Cubism in 1912, entitled Du "Cubisme". Metzinger was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists.

Metzinger was at the center of Cubism both because of his participation and identification of the movement when it first emerged, because of his role as intermediary among the Bateau-Lavoir group and the Section d'Or Cubists, and above all because of his artistic personality.[6] During the First World War, Metzinger furthered his role as a leading Cubist with his co-founding of the second phase of the movement, referred to as Crystal Cubism. He recognized the importance of mathematics in art, through a radical geometrization of form as an underlying architectural basis for his wartime compositions. The establishing of the basis of this new perspective, and the principles upon which an essentially non-representational art could be built, led to La Peinture et ses lois (Painting and its Laws), written by Albert Gleizes in 1922–23. As post-war reconstruction began, a series of exhibitions at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie de L'Effort Moderne were to highlight order and allegiance to the aesthetically pure. The collective phenomenon of Cubism—now in its advanced revisionist form—became part of a widely discussed development in French culture, with Metzinger at its helm. Crystal Cubism was the culmination of a continuous narrowing of scope in the name of a return to order; based upon the observation of the artist's relation to nature, rather than on the nature of reality itself. In terms of the separation of culture and life, this period emerges as the most important in the history of Modernism.[7]

For Metzinger, the classical vision had been an incomplete representation of real things, based on an incomplete set of laws, postulates and theorems. He believed the world was dynamic and changing in time, appearing different depending on the observer's point of view. Each of these viewpoints were equally valid according to underlying symmetries inherent in nature. For inspiration, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist and one of the founders of quantum mechanics, hung in his office a large painting by Metzinger, La Femme au Cheval,[8] a conspicuous early example of "mobile perspective" implementation (also called simultaneity).[9]

Early life edit

 
Jean Metzinger, 1912, Danseuse au café (Dancer in a café), oil on canvas, 146.1 x 114.3 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Published in Au Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants" 1912, Exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne

Jean Metzinger came from a prominent military family. His great-grandfather, Nicolas Metzinger (18 May 1769 – 1838),[10] Captain in the 1st Horse Artillery Regiment, and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, had served under Napoleon Bonaparte.[11] A street in the Sixième arrondissement of Nantes (Rue Metzinger) was named after Jean's grandfather, Charles Henri Metzinger (10 May 1814 – ?).[12] Following the early death of his father, Eugène François Metzinger, Jean pursued interests in mathematics, music and painting, though his mother, a music professor by the name of Eugénie Louise Argoud, had ambitions of his becoming a medical doctor.[13] Jean's younger brother Maurice (born 24 Oct. 1885) became a musician, excelling as a cellist.[13] By 1900 Metzinger was studying painting under Hippolyte Touront, a well-known portrait painter who taught an academic, conventional style of painting.[13] Metzinger, however, was interested in the current trends in painting.[14]

Metzinger sent three paintings to the Salon des Indépendants in 1903, and subsequently moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale. From the age of 20, Metzinger supported himself as a professional painter. He exhibited regularly in Paris from 1903, participating in the first Salon d'Automne[15] the same year and taking part in a group show with Raoul Dufy, Lejeune and Torent, from 19 January-22 February 1903 at the gallery run by Berthe Weill, with another show November 1903.

Metzinger exhibited at Weill's gallery 23 November-21 December 1905 and again 14 January-10 February 1907, with Robert Delaunay, in 1908 (6–31 January) with André Derain, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso, and 28 April-28 May 1910 with Derain, Georges Rouault and Kees van Dongen. He exhibited again at Weill's gallery, 17 January-1 February 1913, March 1913, June 1914 and February 1921.[16] It is at Berthe Weill's that he met Max Jacob for the first time.[13] Berthe Weill was the first Parisian art dealer to sell works of Picasso (1906). Along with Picasso and Metzinger, she promoted Matisse, Derain, Amedeo Modigliani and Maurice Utrillo.[17]

In 1904 Metzinger exhibited six paintings in the Divisionist style at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne[18] (where he showed regularly throughout the crucial years of Cubism).[19]

 
Jean Metzinger, c.1905, Baigneuses, Deux nus dans un jardin exotique (Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape), oil on canvas, 116 x 88.8 cm, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid[20][21]

In 1905 Metzinger exhibited eight paintings at Salon des Indépendants.[22] In this exhibition Metzinger is directly associated with the artists soon to be known as Fauves: Camoin, Delaunay, Derain, van Dongen, Dufy, Friesz, Manguin, Marquet, Matisse, Valtat, Vlaminck and others. Matisse was in charge of the hanging committee, assisted by Metzinger, Bonnard, Camoin, Laprade Luce, Manguin, Marquet, Puy and Vallotton.[23]

In 1906 Metzinger exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants.[24] Once again he was elected member of the hanging committee, with Matisse, Signac and others. Again with the Fauves and associated artists, Metzinger exhibited at the 1906 Salon d'Automne, Paris. He exhibited six works at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants, followed by the presentation of two works at the 1907 Salon d'Automne.[23][25]

In 1906 Metzinger met Albert Gleizes at the Salon des Indépendants, and visited his studio in Courbevoie several days later. In 1907, at Max Jacob's room, Metzinger met Guillaume Krotowsky, who already signed his works Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1908 a poem by Metzinger, Parole sur la lune, was published in Guillaume Apollinaire's La Poésie Symboliste.[26]

From 21 December 1908 to 15 January 1909, Metzinger exhibited at the gallery of Wilhelm Uhde, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs (Paris) with Georges Braque, Sonia Delaunay, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Auguste Herbin, Jules Pascin and Pablo Picasso.[27]

1908 continued with the Salon de la Toison d'Or, Moscow. Metzinger exhibited five paintings with Braque, Derain, van Dongen, Friesz, Manguin, Marquet, Matisse, Puy, Valtat and others. At the 1909 Salon d’Automne Metzinger exhibited alongside Constantin Brâncuși, Henri Le Fauconnier and Fernand Léger.[23]

Jean Metzinger married Lucie Soubiron in Paris on 30 December of the same year.[17]

Neo-Impressionism, Divisionism edit

 
Jean Metzinger, ca. 1906, Coucher de Soleil No. 1 (Landscape), oil on canvas, 72.5 x 100 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

By 1903, Metzinger was a keen participant in the Neo-Impressionist revival led by Henri-Edmond Cross. By 1904–05, Metzinger began to favor the abstract qualities of larger brushstrokes and vivid colors. Following the lead of Seurat and Cross, he began incorporating a new geometry into his works that would free him from the confines of nature as much as any artwork executed in Europe to date.[28] The departure from naturalism had only just begun. Metzinger, along with Derain, Delaunay, Matisse, between 1905 and 1910, helped revivify Neo-Impressionism, albeit in a highly altered form. In 1906 Metzinger had acquired enough prestige to be elected to the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants. He formed a close friendship at this time with Robert Delaunay, with whom he shared an exhibition at Berthe Weill early in 1907. The two of them were singled out by one critic (Louis Vauxcelles) in 1907 as Divisionists who used large, mosaic-like 'cubes' to construct small but highly symbolic compositions.[29]

Robert Herbert writes: "Metzinger's Neo-Impressionist period was somewhat longer than that of his close friend Delaunay. At the Indépendants in 1905, his paintings were already regarded as in the Neo-Impressionist tradition by contemporary critics, and he apparently continued to paint in large mosaic strokes until some time in 1908. The height of his Neo-Impressionist work was in 1906 and 1907, when he and Delaunay did portraits of each other (Art market, London, and Museum of Fine Arts Houston) in prominent rectangles of pigment. (In the sky of Coucher de soleil, 1906–1907, Collection Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller is the solar disk which Delaunay was later to make into a personal emblem.)"[30][31]

 
Jean Metzinger, 1906, La danse (Bacchante), oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum. At the outbreak of World War I this painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at Hôtel Drouot in 1921[32]

The vibrating image of the sun in Metzinger's painting, and so too of Delaunay's Paysage au disque (1906–1907), "is an homage to the decomposition of spectral light that lay at the heart of Neo-Impressionist color theory...".[30][33][34]

Jean Metzinger's mosaic-like Divisionist technique had its parallel in literature; a characteristic of the alliance between Symbolist writers and Neo-Impressionist artists:

I ask of divided brushwork not the objective rendering of light, but iridescences and certain aspects of color still foreign to painting. I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables I use strokes which, variable in quantity, cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature. (Jean Metzinger, circa 1907)[35]

 
Jean Metzinger, 1907, Paysage coloré aux oiseaux aquatiques, oil on canvas, 74 x 99 cm, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Robert Herbert interprets Metzinger's statement: "What Metzinger meant is that each little tile of pigment has two lives: it exists as a plane whose mere size and direction are fundamental to the rhythm of the painting and, secondly, it also has color which can vary independently of size and placement. This is only a degree beyond the preoccupations of Signac and Cross, but an important one. Writing in 1906, Louis Chassevent[36] recognized the difference, and as Daniel Robbins pointed out in his Gleizes catalogue, used the word "cube" which later would be taken up by Louis Vauxcelles to baptize Cubism: "M. Metzinger is a mosaicist like M. Signac but he brings more precision to the cutting of his cubes of color which appear to have been made mechanically". The interesting history of the word "cube" goes back at least to May 1901 when Jean Béral, reviewing Cross's work at the Indépendants in Art et Littérature, commented that he "uses a large and square pointillism, giving the impression of mosaic. One even wonders why the artist has not used cubes of solid matter diversely colored: they would make pretty revetments."[30]

Metzinger, followed closely by Delaunay—the two often painting together, 1906–07—developed a new sub-style that had great significance shortly thereafter within the context of their Cubist works. Piet Mondrian, in the Netherlands, developed a similar mosaic-like Divisionist technique circa 1909. The Futurists later (1909–1916) would adapt the style, thanks to Gino Severini's Parisian experience (from 1907 onward), into their dynamic paintings and sculpture.[30]

In 1910 Gelett Burgess writes in The Wild Men of Paris: "Metzinger once did gorgeous mosaics of pure pigment, each little square of color not quite touching the next, so that an effect of vibrant light should result. He painted exquisite compositions of cloud and cliff and sea; he painted women and made them fair, even as the women upon the boulevards fair. But now, translated into the idiom of subjective beauty, into this strange Neo-Classic language, those same women, redrawn, appear in stiff, crude, nervous lines in patches of fierce color."[37]: 3 

"Instead of copying Nature," Metzinger explained circa 1909, "we create a milieu of our own, wherein our sentiment can work itself out through a juxtaposition of colors. It is hard to explain it, but it may perhaps be illustrated by analogy with literature and music. Your own Edgar Poe (he pronounced it ‘Ed Carpoe’) did not attempt to reproduce Nature realistically. Some phase of life suggested an emotion, as that of horror in ‘The Fall of the House of Ushur.’ That subjective idea he translated into art. He made a composition of it."

"So, music does not attempt to imitate Nature’s sounds, but it does interpret and embody emotions awakened by Nature through a convention of its own, in a way to be aesthetically pleasing. In some such way, we, taking out hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiment." (Jean Metzinger, c. 1909, The Wild Men of Paris, 1910)[37]

Cubism edit

 
Jean Metzinger, 1908–1909, Baigneuses (Bathers)[37]: 412 

By 1907 several avant-garde artists in Paris were reevaluating their own work in relation to that of Paul Cézanne. A retrospective of Cézanne's paintings had been held at the Salon d'Automne of 1904. Current works were displayed at the 1905 and 1906 Salon d'Automne, followed by two commemorative retrospectives after his death in 1907. Metzinger's interest in the work of Cézanne suggests a means by which Metzinger made the transformation from Divisionism to Cubism. In 1908 Metzinger frequented the Bateau Lavoir and exhibited with Georges Braque at Berthe Weill's gallery.[38] By 1908 Metzinger experimented with the fracturing of form, and soon thereafter with complex multiple views of the same subject.

A critic wrote of Metzinger's work exhibited during the spring of 1909:

If M. J. Metzinger had really realized the "Nude" that we see at Madame Weill's, and wished to demonstrate the value of his work, the schematic figure that he shows us would serve this demonstration. As such, it is a skeletal frame without its flesh; this is better than flesh without a skeletal frame: the spirit at least finds some security. But this excess of abstraction interests us much more than possesses us.[39]

Metzinger's early 1910 style had transited to a robust form of analytical Cubism.[19][38]

Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of the 26th Salon des Indépendants (1910), made a passing and imprecise reference to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger and Le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes."[19][40]

 
Jean Metzinger, 1910, Nu à la cheminée (Nude). Exhibited at the 1910 Salon d'Automne. Published in Les Peintres Cubistes by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1913
 
Jean Metzinger, 1910–11, Deux Nus (Two Nudes, Two Women), oil on canvas, 92 x 66 cm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden. Exhibited at the first Cubist manifestation, Room 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, Paris

In 1910 a group began to form which included Metzinger, Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay, a longstanding friend and associate of Metzinger. They met regularly at Henri le Fauconnier's studio on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, near the boulevard du Montparnasse. Together with other young painters, the group wanted to emphasize a research into form, in opposition to the Divisionist, or Neo-Impressionist, emphasis on color. Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay, Léger and Marie Laurencin were shown together in Room 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, which provoked the 'involuntary scandal' out of which Cubism emerged and spread in Paris, in France and throughout the world. Laurencin was included at the suggestion of Guillaume Apollinaire who had become an enthusiastic supporter of the new group despite his earlier reservations. Both Metzinger and Gleizes were discontent with the conventional perspective, which they felt gave only a partial idea of a subject's form as experienced in life.[41] The idea that a subject could be seen in movement and from many different angles was born.[19]

In Room 7 and 8 of the 1911 Salon d'Automne (1 October – 8 November) at the Grand Palais in Paris, hung works by Metzinger (Le goûter (Tea Time)), Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, André Lhote, Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, František Kupka and Francis Picabia. The result was a public scandal which brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the second time. Apollinaire took Picasso to the opening of the exhibition in 1911 to see the cubist works in Room 7 and 8.[42]

While Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are generally acknowledged as the founders of the twentieth-century movement that became known as Cubism, it was Jean Metzinger, together with Albert Gleizes, that created the first major treatise on the new art-form, Du "Cubisme", in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or held in October 1912. Du "Cubisme", published the same year by Eugène Figuière in Paris,[43] represented the first theoretical interpretation, elucidation and justification of Cubism, and was endorsed by both Picasso and Braque. Du "Cubisme", which preceded Apollinaire's well known essays, Les Peintres Cubistes (published 1913), emphasized the Platonic belief that the mind is the birthplace of the idea: "to discern a form is to verify a pre-existing idea",[44][45] and that "The only error possible in art is imitation" [La seule erreur possible en art, c'est l'imitation].[46]

Du "Cubisme" quickly gained popularity running through fifteen editions the same year and translated into several European languages including Russian and English (the following year).

In 1912 Metzinger was the leading figure in the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain[47] at Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona, with Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Le Fauconnier, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, and August Agero.[48][49][50]

In 1913, Apollinaire wrote in Les Peintres Cubistes:

In drawing, in composition, in the judiciousness of contrasted forms, Metzinger's works have a style which sets them apart from, and perhaps even above most of the works of his contemporaries... It was then that Metzinger, joining Picasso and Braque, founded the Cubist City... There is nothing unrealized in the art of Metzinger, nothing which is not the fruit of a rigorous logic. A painting by Metzinger always contains its own explanation ... it is certainly the result of great hindmindedness and is something unique it seems to me, in the history of art.

Apollinaire continues:

The new structures he is composing are stripped of everything that was known before him... Each of his paintings contains a judgement of the universe, and his work is like the sky at night: when, cleared of the clouds, it trembles with lovely lights. There is nothing unrealized in Metzinger's works: poetry ennobles their slightest details.[51]

 
Jean Metzinger, Le goûter (Tea Time), 1911, 75.9 x 70.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Exhibited at the 1911 Salon d'Automne. André Salmon dubbed this painting "The Mona Lisa of Cubism"

Jean Metzinger, through the intermediary of Max Jacob, met Apollinaire in 1907. Metzinger's 1909–10 Portrait de Guillaume Apollinaire, is as important a work in the history of Cubism as it was in Apollinaire's own life. In his Anecdotiques of 16 October 1911, the poet proudly states: "I am honored to be the first model of a Cubist painter, Jean Metzinger, for a portrait exhibited in 1910 at the Salon des Indépendants." So according to Apollinaire it was not only the first cubist portrait, but it was also the first great portrait of the poet exhibited in public.[52]

Two works directly preceding Apollinaire's portrait, Nu and Landscape, circa 1908 and 1909 respectively, indicate that Metzinger had already departed from Divisionism by 1908. Turning his attention fully towards the geometric abstraction of form, Metzinger allowed the viewer to reconstruct the original volume mentally and to imagine the object within space. His concerns for color that had assumed a primary role both as a decorative and expressive device before 1908 had given way to the primacy of form. But his monochromatic tonalities would last only until 1912, when both color and form would boldly combine to produce such works as Dancer in a café (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo New York). "The works of Jean Metzinger" Apollinaire writes in 1912 "have purity. His meditations take on beautiful forms whose harmony tends to approach sublimity. The new structures he is composing are stripped of everything that was known before him."

As a resident of la Butte Montmartre in Paris, Metzinger entered the circle of Picasso and Braque (in 1908). "It is to the credit of Jean Metzinger, at the time, to have been the first to recognize the commencement of the Cubist Movement as such" writes S. E. Johnson, "Metzinger's portrait of Apollinaire, the poet of the Cubist Movement, was executed in 1909 and, as Apollinaire himself has pointed out in his book The Cubist Painters (written in 1912 and published in 1913), Metzinger, following Picasso and Braque, was chronologically the third Cubist artist.[53]

Crystal Cubism edit

Main article: Crystal Cubism

Metzinger's evolution toward synthesis in 1914–15 has its origins in the configuration of flat squares, trapezoidal and rectangular planes that overlap and interweave, a "new perspective" in accord with the "laws of displacement".[19] In the case of Le Fumeur Metzinger filled in these simple shapes with gradations of color, wallpaper-like patterns and rhythmic curves. So too in Au Vélodrome. But the underlying armature upon which all is built is palpable. Vacating these non-essential features would lead Metzinger on a path towards Soldier at a Game of Chess (1914–15), and a host of works created after the artist's demobilization as a medical orderly during the war, such as L'infirmière (The Nurse) location unknown, and Femme au miroir, private collection.[19]

Before Maurice Raynal coined the term Crystal Cubism, one critic by the name of Aloës Duarvel, writing in L'Élan, referred to Metzinger's entry exhibited at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune (28 December 1915 – 15 January 1916) as 'jewellery' ("joaillerie").[54]

For Metzinger, the Crystal period was synonymous with a return to "a simple, robust art".[55] Crystal Cubism represented an opening up of possibilities.[56] His belief was that technique should be simplified and that the "trickery" of chiaroscuro should be abandoned, along with the "artifices of the palette".[55] He felt the need to do without the "multiplication of tints and detailing of forms without reason, by feeling":[55]

Eventually all the Cubists (except for Gleizes, Delaunay and a handful of others) would return to some form of classicism at the end of World War I. Even so, the lessons of Cubism would not be forgotten.

Metzinger's apparent departure from Cubism circa 1918 would leave open the "spatial" susceptibility to classical observation, but the "form" could only be grasped by the "intelligence" of the observer, something that escaped classical observation.

 
Jean Metzinger, 1912, Femme à l'Éventail (Woman with a Fan), oil on canvas, 90.7 x 64.2 cm. Exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, 1912, Paris, and De Moderne Kunstkring, 1912, Amsterdam. Published in Les Peintres Cubistes, by Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

In a letter to Léonce Rosenberg (September 1920) Jean Metzinger wrote of a return to nature that appeared to him both constructive and not at all a renunciation of Cubism. His exhibition at l'Effort Moderne at the outset of 1921 was exclusively of landscapes: his formal vocabulary remained rhythmic, linear perspective was avoided. There was a motivation to unite the pictorial and the natural. Christopher Green writes: "The willingness to adapt Cubist language to the look of nature was quickly to affect his figure painting too. From that exhibition of 1921 Metzinger continued to cultivate a style that was not only less obscure, but clearly took subject-matter as its starting point far more than an abstract play with flat pictorial elements." Green continues:

Yet, style, in the sense of his own special way of handling form and color, remained for Metzinger the determining factor, something imposed on his subjects to give them their special pictorial character. His sweet, rich colour between 1921 and 1924 was unashamedly artificial, and is itself symptomatic of the fact that his return to lucid representation did not mean a return to nature approached naturalistically... Metzinger himself, writing in 1922 [published by Montparnasse] could claim quite confidently that this was not at all a betrayal of Cubism but a development within it. 'I know works,' he said, 'whose thoroughly classical appearance conveys the most personal [the most original] the newest conceptions... Now that certain Cubists have pushed their constructions so far as to take in clearly objective appearances, it has been declared that Cubism is dead [in fact] it approaches realization.'[57][58]

The strict constructive ordering that had become so pronounced in Metzinger's pre-1920 Cubist works continued throughout the subsequent decades, in the careful positioning of form, color, and in the way in which Metzinger delicately assimilates the union of figure and background, of light and shadow. This can be seen in many figures: From the division (in two) of the model's features emerges a subtle profile view—resulting from a free and mobile perspective used by Metzinger to some extent as early as 1908 to constitute the image of a whole—one that includes the fourth dimension.[59]

Both as a painter and theorist of the Cubist movement, Metzinger was at the forefront. It was too Metzinger's role as a mediator between the general public, Picasso, Braque and other aspiring artists (such as Gleizes, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier and Léger) that places him directly at the center of Cubism. Daniel Robbins writes:

Jean Metzinger was at the center of Cubism, not only because of his role as intermediary among the orthodox Montmartre group and right bank or Passy Cubists, not only because of his great identification with the movement when it was recognized, but above all because of his artistic personality. His concerns were balanced; he was deliberately at the intersection of high intellectuality and the passing spectacle.[6]

Theory edit

 
Jean Metzinger, 1912–1913, L'Oiseau bleu, (The Blue Bird), oil on canvas, 230 x 196 cm, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote with reference to non-Euclidean geometry in their 1912 manifesto, Du "Cubisme". It was argued that Cubism itself was not based on any geometrical theory, but that non-Euclidean geometry corresponded better than classical, or Euclidean geometry, to what the Cubists were doing. The essential was in the understanding of space other than by the classical method of perspective; an understanding that would include and integrate the fourth dimension with 3-space.[60]

Though the rupture with the past seemed total, there was still within the avant-garde something of the past. Metzinger, for example, writes in a Pan article, two years before the publication of Du "Cubisme", that the greatest challenge to the modern artist is not to 'cancel' tradition, but to accept "it is in us," acquired by living. It was the combination of the past (himself inspired by Ingres and Seurat) with the present, and its progression into the future that most intrigued Metzinger. Observed was the tendency; a "balance between the pursuit of the transient and the mania for the eternal. But the result would be an unstable equilibrium. The domination would no longer be of the external world. The progression was from the specific to the universal, from the special to the general, from the physical to the temporary, towards a complete synthesis of the whole—however unattainable—towards an 'elemental common denominator' (to use the words of Daniel Robbins).[19]

 
Metzinger in about 1912. (Unknown photographer, possibly Pierre Choumoff)

Whereas Cézanne had been influential to the development of Metzinger's Cubism between 1908 and 1911, during its most expressionistic phase, the work of Seurat would once again attract attention from the Cubists and Futurists between 1911 and 1914, when flatter geometric structures were being produced. What the Cubists found attractive, according to Apollinaire, was the manner in which Seurat asserted an absolute "scientific clarity of conception." The Cubists observed in his mathematical harmonies, geometric structuring of motion and form, the primacy of idea over nature (something the Symbolists had recognized). In their eyes, Seurat had "taken a fundamental step toward Cubism by restoring intellect and order to art, after Impressionism had denied them" (to use the words of Herbert). The "Section d'Or" group founded by some of the most prominent Cubists was in effect an homage to Seurat. Within the works by Seurat—of cafés, cabarets and concerts, of which the avant-garde were fond—the Cubists' discovered an underlying mathematical harmony: one that could easily be transformed into mobile, dynamical configurations.[30]

The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view-points is treated in Du "Cubisme" (1912). It was also a central idea of Jean Metzinger's Note sur la Peinture, 1910; Indeed, prior to Cubism painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point. And it was Jean Metzinger, for the first time in Note sur la peinture who enunciated the stimulating interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time. In that article, Metzinger notes that Braque and Picasso "discarded traditional perspective and granted themselves the liberty of moving around objects." This is the concept of "mobile perspective" that would tend towards the representation of the "total image."[5]

 
Jean Metzinger, 1913, La Femme à l'Éventail (Woman with a Fan), oil on canvas, 92.8 x 65.2 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

Metzinger's Note sur la peinture not only highlighted the works of Picasso and Braque, on the one hand, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay on the other, but it was also a tactical selection that highlighted the fact that only Metzinger himself was positioned to write about all four. Metzinger, uniquely, had been closely acquainted with the gallery cubists and the burgeoning salon cubists simultaneously.[61]

Though the idea of moving around objects to capture several angles at the same time would shock the public they eventually came to accept it, as they came to accept the 'atomist' representation of the universe as a multitude of dots consisting of primary colors. Just as each color is modified by its relation to adjacent colors within the context of Neo-Impressionist color theory, so too the object is modified by the geometric forms adjacent to it within the context of Cubism. The concept of 'mobile perspective' is essentially an extension of a similar principle stated in Paul Signac's D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, with respect to color. Only now, the idea is extended to deal with questions of form.[30] (See Jean Metzinger, 1912, Dancer in a café[62]).

Cubism by 1912 had abstracted almost to the point of total non-representation. In Du "Cubisme" Metzinger and Gleizes had realized that figurative aspects of the new art could be abandoned:

"we visit an exhibition to contemplate painting, not to enlarge our knowledge of geography, anatomy etc. [...] 'Let the picture imitate nothing; let it nakedly present its motive, and we should indeed be ungrateful were we to deplore the absence of all those things – flowers or landscapes or faces – of which it could never have been anything other than a reflection'. Though Metzinger and Gleizes hesitate to do away with nature entirely: 'Nevertheless, let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished; as yet, at all events. An art cannot be raised all at once to the level of a pure effusion.' [...] 'This is understood by the Cubist painters, who tirelessly study pictorial form and the space which it engenders'.[63]

 
Jean Metzinger, c.1913, Le Fumeur (Man with Pipe), oil on canvas, 129.7 x 96.68 cm, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Exhibited at the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, Paris

One of the essential arguments of Du "Cubisme", was that knowledge of the world is to be gained through 'sensations' alone. Classical figurative painting offered only one point of view, a restrained 'sensation' of the world, limited to the sensation of a motionless human being who sees only that which is in front of him from a single point in space frozen in a moment of time (time was absolute in the Newtonian sense and separate from the spatial dimensions). But the human being is mobile and dynamic, occupying both space and to time. The observer sees the world from a multitude of angles (not one unique angle) forming a continuum of sensations in constant evolution, i.e., events and natural phenomena are observed in a continuum of constant change. Just as the formulations of Euclidean geometry, classical perspective is only a 'convention' (Henri Poincaré's term), rendering the phenomena of nature more palpable, susceptible to thought and understandable. Yet these classical conventions obscured the truth of our sensations, and consequently, the truth of our own human nature was limited. The world was seen as an abstraction, as Ernst Mach implied. In this sense, it could be argued that classical painting, with its immobile perspective and Euclidean geometry, was an abstraction, not an accurate representation of the real world.

What made Cubism progressive and truly modern, according to Metzinger and Gleizes, was its new geometric armature; with that it broke free from the immobility of 3-dimensional Euclidean geometry and attained a dynamic representation of the 4-dimensional continuum in which we live, a better representation of reality, of life's experience, something that could be grasped through the senses (not through the eye) and expressed onto a canvas.

In Du "Cubisme" Metzinger and Gleizes write that we can only know our sensations, not because they reject them as a means of inspiration. On the contrary, because understanding our sensations more deeply gave them the primary inspiration for their own work. Their attack on classical painting was leveled precisely because the sensations it offered were poor in comparison with the richness and diversity of the sensations offered by the natural world it wished to imitate. The reason classical painting fell short of its goal, according to Metzinger and Gleizes, is that it attempted to represent the real world as a moment in time, in the belief that it was 3-dimensional and geometrically Euclidean.[64]

Scientific aspects edit

 
Jean Metzinger, 1913, En Canot (Im Boot), oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm (57.5 in × 44.9 in), exhibited at Moderni Umeni, S.V.U. Mánes, Prague, 1914, acquired in 1916 by Georg Muche at the Galerie Der Sturm, confiscated by the Nazis circa 1936, displayed at the Degenerate Art show in Munich, and missing ever since.[65]

The question of whether the theoretical aspects of Cubism enunciated by Metzinger and Gleizes bore any relation to the development in science at the beginning of the twentieth century has been vigorously disputed by art critics, historians and scientists alike. Yet in Du "Cubisme" Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes articulate: "If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems."

There was, after all, little to prevent the Cubists from developing their own pictorial variants on the topological space in parallel to (or independently of) relativistic considerations. Though the concept of observing a subject from different points in space and time simultaneously (multiple or mobile perspective) developed by Metzinger and Gleizes was not derived directly from Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, it was certainly influenced in a similar way, through the work of Jules Henri Poincaré (particularly Science and Hypothesis), the French mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, who made many fundamental contributions to algebraic topology, celestial mechanics, quantum theory and made an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.

A multitude of analogies, similarities or parallels have been drawn over the decades between modern science and Cubism. But there has not always been agreement as to how the writings of Metzinger and Gleizes should be interpreted, with respect to 'simultaneity' of multiple view-points.

Metzinger had already written in 1910 of 'mobile perspective', as an interpretation of what would soon be dubbed "Cubism" with respect to Picasso, Braque, Delaunay and Le Fauconnier (Metzinger, "Note sur la peinture", Pan, Paris, Oct–Nov 1910). And Apollinaire would echo the same tune a year later regarding the observer's state of motion. Mobile perspective was akin to "cinematic" movement around an object that consisted of a plastic truth compatible with reality by showing the spectator "all its facets." Gleizes too, the same year, remarks, Metzinger is "haunted by the desire to inscribe a total image [...] He will put down the greatest number of possible planes: to purely objective truth he wishes to add a new truth, born from what his intelligence permits him to know. Thus—and he said himself: to space he will join time. [...] he wishes to develop the visual field by multiplying it, to inscribe them all in the space of the same canvas: it is then that the cube will play a role, for Metzinger will utilize this means to reestablish the equilibrium that these audacious inscriptions will have momentarily broken."[19]

Poincaré's writings, unlike Einstein's, were well known leading up to and during the crucial years of the Cubism (roughly between 1908 and 1914). Note that Poincaré's widely read book, La Science et l'Hypothèse, was published in 1902 (by Flammarion).

 
Jean Metzinger, 1914–15, Soldat jouant aux échecs (Soldier at a Game of Chess, Le Soldat à la partie d'échecs), oil on canvas, 81.3 x 61 cm, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago

The common denominator between the special relativistic notions—the lack an absolute reference frame, metric transformations of the Lorentzian type, the relativity of simultaneity, the incorporation of the time dimension with three spatial dimensions—and the Cubist idea of mobile perspective (observing the subject from several view-points simultaneously) published by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes was, in effect, a descendant from the work of Poincaré and others, at least from the theoretical standpoint. Whether the concept of mobile perspective accurately describes the work of Picasso and Braque (or other Cubists') is certainly debatable. Undoubtedly though, both Metzinger and Gleizes implemented the theoretical principles derived in Du "Cubisme" onto canvas; something clearly visible in their works produced at the time.

Metzinger's early interests in mathematics are documented. He was likely familiar with the works of Gauss, Riemann and Poincaré (and perhaps Galilean relativity) prior to the development of Cubism: something that reflects in his pre-1907 works. It was perhaps the French mathematician Maurice Princet who introduced the work of Poincaré, along with the concept of the fourth spatial dimension, to artists at the Bateau-Lavoir. He was a close associate of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jean Metzinger and Marcel Duchamp. Princet is known as "le mathématicien du cubisme." Princet brought to attention of these artists a book entitled Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions by Esprit Jouffret (1903) a popularization of Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis. In this book Jouffret described hypercubes and complex polyhedra in four dimensions projected onto a two-dimensional page. Princet became estranged from the group after his wife left him for André Derain. However, Princet would remain close to Metzinger and participate in meetings of the Section d'Or in Puteaux. He gave informal lectures to the artists, many of whom were passionate about mathematical order. In 1910, Metzinger said of him, "[Picasso] lays out a free, mobile perspective, from which that ingenious mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced a whole geometry".[5]

Later, Metzinger wrote in his memoirs (Le Cubisme était né):

Maurice Princet joined us often. Although quite young, thanks to his knowledge of mathematics he had an important job in an insurance company. But, beyond his profession, it was as an artist that he conceptualized mathematics, as an aesthetician that he invoked n-dimensional continuums. He loved to get the artists interested in the new views on space that had been opened up by Schlegel and some others. He succeeded at that.

 
Jean Metzinger, April 1916, Femme au miroir (Femme à sa toilette, Lady at her Dressing Table), oil on canvas, 92.4 x 65.1 cm, private collection

Louis Vauxcelles sarcastically dubbed Princet "the father of cubism":

M. Princet has studied at length non-Euclidean geometry and the theorems of Riemann, of which Gleizes and Metzinger speak... Princet one day met M. Max Jacob and confided him one or two of his discoveries relating to the fourth dimension. M. Jacob informed the ingenious Picasso of it, and Picasso saw there a possibility of new ornamental schemes. Picasso explained his intentions to Apollinaire, who hastened to write them up in formularies and codify them. The thing spread and propagated. Cubism, the child of M. Princet, was born. (Vauxcelles, December 29, 1918).[66]

In addition to mathematics, both human sensation and intelligence were important to Metzinger. It was lack of the latter human attribute that the principle theorists of Cubism were to reproach the Impressionists and Fauves, for whom sensation was the sole necessity. Intelligence had to work in harmony with sensation, thus together providing the building blocks for the Cubists construction. Metzinger, with his mathematical education and prowess had realized this relation early on. Indeed, the geometrization of space that would characterize Cubism can already be observed in his works as early as 1905, following the lead of Seurat and Cézanne. (See Jean Metzinger, 1905–1906, Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape, oil on canvas, 116 x 88.8 cm).

For Metzinger, along with to some extent both Gleizes and Malevich, the classical vision had been an incomplete representation of real things, based on an incomplete set of laws, postulates and theorems. It represented, quite simply, the belief that space is the only thing that separates two points. It was the belief in the geocentric reality of the observable world, unchanging and immobile. The Cubists had been delighted to discover that the world was in reality dynamic, changing in time, it appeared different depending on the point of view of the observer. And yet each one of these viewpoints were equally valid, there was no preferred reference frame, all reference frames were equal. This underlying symmetry inherent in nature, in fact, is the essence of Einstein's relativity.

 
Jean Metzinger, 1911–1912, La Femme au Cheval, Woman with a horse, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark. Published in Apollinaire's 1913 Les Peintres Cubistes, Exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, and the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912, Paris.[67] Provenance: Jacques Nayral, Niels Bohr

Influence on quantum mechanics edit

Main article: La Femme au Cheval

On the question as to whether creativity in the domain of science has ever been influenced by art, Arthur I. Miller, author of Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (2002), answers: "Cubism directly helped Niels Bohr discover the principle of complementarity in quantum theory, which says that something can be a particle and a wave at the same time, but it will always be measured to be either one or the other. In analytic cubism, artists tried to represent a scene from all possible viewpoints on one canvas. [...] How you view the painting, that’s the way it is. Bohr read the book by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes on cubist theory, Du "Cubisme". It inspired him to postulate that the totality of an electron is both a particle and a wave, but when you observe it you pick out one particular viewpoint."[68]

Niels Bohr (1885–1962), the Danish physicist and one of the principle founders of quantum mechanics, had hung in his office a large painting by Jean Metzinger, La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a horse) 1911–12 (now in the Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark). This work is one of Metzinger's most conspicuous early examples of 'mobile perspective' implementation. Bohr's interest in Cubism, according to Miller, was anchored in the writings of Metzinger. Arthur Miller concludes: "If cubism is the result of the science in Art, the quantum theory is the result of art in science."[69]

In the epistemological words of Bohr, 1929:

...depending upon our arbitrary point of view...we must, in general, be prepared to accept the fact that a complete elucidation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description. (Niels Bohr, 1929)[70]

Within the context of Cubism, artists were forced into the position of re-evaluating the role of the observer. Classical linear and aerial perspective, uninterrupted surface transitions and chiaroscuro were pushed aside. What remained was a series of images obtained by the observer (the artist) in different frames of reference as the object was being painted. Essentially, observations became linked through a system of coordinate transformations. The result was Metzinger's 'total image' or a combination of successive images. In Metzinger's theory, the artist and the object being observed became equivocally linked so that the results of any observation seemed to be determined, at least partially, by actual choices made by the artist. "An object has not one absolute form; it has many," Metzinger wrote. Furthermore, part of the role of placing together various images was left to the observer (the one looking at the painting). The object represented, depending on how the observer perceives it, could have as many forms "as there are planes in the region of perception." (Jean Metzinger, 1912)[71]

Exhibitions, students and later work edit

 
Jean Metzinger, invitation card for the exhibition at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, January 1919

On 19 June 1916 Metzinger signed a three-year contract (later renewed for 15 years) with the dealer, art collector and gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg.[13] The agreement gave full rights for exhibitions and sales of Metzinger's production to Rosenberg. The contract fixed the prices of Metzinger's works bought by Rosenberg, who agreed to purchase a certain number of works (or a fixed value) every month. A contract between the two dated 1 January 1918 modified the first contract; the engagement was now renewable every two years, and prices of Metzinger's works purchased by Rosenberg increased.[13]

In 1923 Metzinger moved away from Cubism towards realism, while still retaining elements of his earlier Cubist style. In subsequent stages of his career another important change is noticeable, from 1924 to 1930: a development that paralleled the 'mechanical world' of Fernand Léger. Throughout these years Metzinger continued to retain his own marked artistic individuality. These firmly constructed pictures are brightly colored and visually metaphoric, consisting of urban and still-life subject-matter, with clear references to science and technology. At the same time he was romantically involved with a young Greek woman, Suzanne Phocas. The two were married in 1929. After 1930, until his death in 1956, Metzinger turned towards a more classical or decorative approach to painting with elements of Surrealism, still concerned with questions of form, volume, dimension, relative position and relationship of figures, along with visible geometric properties of space. Metzinger was commissioned to paint a large mural, Mystique of Travel, which he executed for the Salle de Cinema in the railway pavilion of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris 1937.[72]

Jean Metzinger had been appointed to teach at the Académie de La Palette, in Paris, 1912, where Le Fauconnier served as director. Among his many students were Serge Charchoune, Jessica Dismorr, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Varvara Stepanova, Aristarkh Lentulov, Vera Efimovna Pestel and Lyubov Popova.[72][73] In 1913 Metzinger taught at the Académie Arenius and Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He later moved to Bandol in Provence where he lived until 1943 and then returned to Paris where he was given a teaching post for three years at the Académie Frochot in 1950. In Paris, 1952, he taught New Zealand artist Louise Henderson, who became one of the leading Modernist painters in Auckland upon her return.[74]

In 1913 Metzinger exhibited in New York City at the Exhibition of Cubist and Futurist Pictures, Boggs & Buhl Department Store, Pittsburgh. The show traveled to four other cities; Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, over the course of one year.[75] The Milwaukee exhibition of Cubist works—including paintings by Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Villon—opened 11 May 1913.[75] Metzinger's Man with a Pipe was reproduced on the cover of catalogue for the exhibition. Though he did not exhibit with his Cubist colleagues at the Armory Show of 1913, Metzinger contributed, through this exhibition and others, toward the integration of modern art into the United States.[75]

During the spring of 1916 Metzinger participated in one of the largest exhibitions of modern art in New York City organized by Walter Pach and a group of European and American artists in New York; The Annual Exhibition of Modern Art, held at Bourgeois Gallery. Initially, some American exhibitors were offended by the 'continental' nature of the show, but as Pack informed Matisse, "the petty nationalism that had one had tried to throw inside had failed to advance, and I am certain of that".[76] The exhibition included works by Cézanne, Matisse, Duchamp, Picasso, Seurat, Signac, van Gogh, Duchamp-Villon, in addition to works by Pach, the Italian-born American Futurist painter Joseph Stella, and other American artists.[76]

Metzinger again exhibited in New york at the Bourgeois Gallery for the occasion of the 1917 and 1919 Annual Exhibition of Modern Art.[77][78]

 
Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, 1985[19]

Further exhibitions: 6–31 January 1919 Metzinger had a solo exhibition at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, and again 1–25 February 1921,[79] in addition to participating in various group exhibitions. He would exhibit regularly at L'Effort Moderne throughout the 1920s. The same year he showed in New York with Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, and Albert Gleizes at the Montross Gallery (where the Frenchmen became known as The Four Musketeers).[76] Among his solo exhibitions were those at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1930, the Hanover Gallery in London in 1932, the Arts Club of Chicago in 1953[80] (for which he traveled to the United States on the transatlantic ocean liner Le Flandre)[81] and International Galleries, Chicago, 1964. In 1985–1986, a retrospective of Metzinger's works, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, took place at The University of Iowa Museum of Art, and traveled to Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery University of Texas at Austin, The David Alfred Smart Gallery University of Chicago, and Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Metzinger, a sensitive and intelligent theoretician of Cubism, sought to communicate the principles of this movement through his paintings as well as his writings. (Lucy Flint, Peggy Guggenheim Collection)[82]

Many exhibitions document the painter's national and international success.[83] His works can be found in private and public collections and institutions around the world.

The artist died in Paris on November 3, 1956.[80]

Legacy edit

In the words of S.E. Johnson, an in-depth analysis of Metzinger's Pre-Cubist period—his first artistic peak—"can only class that painter, in spite of his youth, as being already one of the leading artistic personalities in that period directly preceding Cubism. [...] In an attempt to understand the importance of Jean Metzinger in Modern Art, we could limit ourselves to three considerations. Firstly, there is the often overlooked importance of Metzinger's Divisionist Period of 1900–1908. Secondly, there is the role of Metzinger in the founding of the Cubist School. Thirdly, there is the consideration of Metzinger's whole Cubist Period from 1909 to 1930. In taking into account these various factors, we can understand why Metzinger must be included among that small group of artists who have taken a part in the shaping of Art History in the first half of the Twentieth Century."[53]

Gallery edit

See also: List of works by Jean Metzinger
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, c.1905-06, Nu dans un paysage, oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm. 2nd Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Sale of Sequestered Art, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 17–18 November 1921, reproduced n. 162
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, c.1906, Femme au Chapeau (Woman with a Hat), oil on canvas, 44.8 x 36.8 cm, Korban Art Foundation
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, 1910–11, Nu (Nu debout), oil on carton, 52 x 35 cm. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", 1912
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, c.1911, Nature morte (Compotier et cruche décorée de cerfs), oil on canvas, 93.5 by 66.5 cm, published in Nya Konstgalleriet, Flamman, Stockholm, 1917
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, 1911–12, Le Port (The Harbor). Exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, Paris. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, 1912, Paris, and Les Peintres Cubistes Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913. Dimensions and current location unknown
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, 1911–12, Man with a Pipe (Portrait of an American Smoker), oil on canvas, 92.7 x 65.4 cm (36.5 x 25.75 in), Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin. Reproduced on the catalogue cover of Exhibition of Cubist and Futurist Pictures, Boggs & Buhl Department Store, Pittsburgh, July 1913
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, c.1912, Paysage (Landscape). Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", 1912
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, 1912, At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome), oil and sand on canvas, 130.4 x 97.1 cm (51.4 x 38.25 in.) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, 1912, Landscape (Marine, Composition Cubiste), oil on canvas, 51.4 x 68.6 cm, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. Published in Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst: Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus (1917), Der Sturm, 1912 - 1917
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, 1912, Paysage (Landscape), oil on canvas, 59.2 x 73 cm, published in Der Sturm, 5 January 1921, Art Institute of Chicago
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, 1913, Etude pour L'Oiseau bleu (Study for The Blue Bird), watercolor, graphite and ink on paper, 37 x 29.5 cm, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, c.1915, L'infirmière (The Nurse), work on paper, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Published in l'Elan, Number 9, 12 February 1916
  •  
    Jean Metzinger, 1916-1918, Fruit and a Jug on a Table, oil and sand on canvas, 115.9 x 81 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Published in Paul Erich Küppers, Der Kubismus; ein künstlerisches Formproblem unserer Zeit, 1920

Press articles edit

Catalogue raisonné edit

The Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonné (or critical catalogue), researched and written by art historian Alexander Mittelmann, published by the nonprofit association Défense et promotion de l'œuvre de l'artiste Jean Metzinger, assembles and classifies the complete works of the artist (paintings, works on paper). It comprises historiography, documentation, and inventory, with bibliographic, iconographic commentary, technical and chronological analysis of Metzinger's life and work. In addition to the catalogue raisonné, the forthcoming Jean Metzinger Monograph is set to be released in three volumes; the first in-depth study on the artist.[84][85][86]

Commemoration edit

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Du "Cubisme" by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, the Musée de La Poste in Paris presents a show entitled "Gleizes – Metzinger. Du cubisme et après" from 9 May to 22 September 2012. Over 80 paintings and drawings, along with documents, films and 15 works by other members of the Section d'Or group (Villon, Duchamp-Villon, Kupka, Le Fauconnier, Lhote, La Fresnaye, Survage, Herbin, Marcoussis, Archipenko...) are included in the show. A catalogue in French and English accompanies the event. A French postage stamp is issued representing works by Metzinger (L'Oiseau bleu, 1912–13) and Gleizes (Le Chant de Guerre, 1915). This is the first major exhibition of works by Metzinger in Europe since his death in 1956, and it is the first time that a museum has organized an exhibit showcasing both Metzinger and Gleizes together.[87][88]

Art market edit

On 6 November 2007, Metzinger's Paysage, c.1916–17, oil on canvas, 81.2 x 99.3 cm, sold for US$2.393 million at Christie's, New York, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale.[89][90]

On 4 February 2020 the painting Le cycliste (1912) by Metzinger sold at Sotheby's London for £3.015 (US$3.926 million).[91] The sale represents a world record auction price for the artist. The oil on canvas with sand, measuring 100 x 81 cm, was purchased by a private American collector.[92]

Partial list of works edit

Main article: List of works by Jean Metzinger

Publications edit

  • Note sur la peinture, Pan (Paris), n° 10, October–November 1910
  • Cubisme et tradition, Paris Journal, 16 August 1911
  • Alexandre Mercereau, Vers et prose 27 (October–November 1911): 122–129
  • Du "Cubisme", written with Albert Gleizes, Edition Figuière, Paris, 1912 (First English edition: Cubism, Unwin, London, 1913)
  • Art et esthétique, Lettres Parisiennes, le Salon des Indépendants, suppl. au n.9 (April 1920): 6–7
  • Réponse à notre enquête – Où va la peinture moderne?, written with Fernand Léger, Bulletin de l'Effort moderne, February 1924, 5–6
  • Bulletin de l'Effort moderne, June 1924, No. 6
  • L'Evolution du coloris, Bulletin de l'Effort moderne, Paris, 1925
  • Enquête du bulletin, Bulletin de l'Effort moderne, October 1925, 14–15
  • Metzinger, Chabaud, Chagall, Gruber et André Mouchard répondent à l'enquête des Beaux-Arts sur le métric, Beaux-Arts, 2 October 1936, 1
  • Un souper chez G. Apollinaire, Apollinaire, Paris, 1946
  • Ecluses, 27 poems by Jean Metzinger, Preface by Henri Charpentier, Paris: G.L. Arlaud, 1947
  • 1912–1946, Afterword to reprint of Du "Cubisme" by A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, pp. 75–79, Paris, Compagnie française des Arts Graphiques, 1947
  • Le Cubisme apporta à Gleizes le moyen d'écrire l'espace, Arts spectacles, no. 418, 3–9, July 1953
  • Structures de peinture, Structure de l'esprit, Hommage à Albert Gleizes, with essays, statements and fragments of works by Gleizes, Metzinger, André Beaudin, Gino Severini, et al., Lyons, Atelier de la Rose, 1954
  • Suzanne Phocas, Paris, Galerie de l'Institut, February 1955
  • Le Cubisme était né, Souvenirs, Chambéry, Editions Présence, 1972

Museum collections edit

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, US
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
  • Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands
  • Museum of Fine Arts Boston 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine, Massachusetts, US
  • , Paris, France (archived)
  • Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France
  • Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, US
  • , Venice, Italy (archived)
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, US
  • Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, US
  • National Galleries Scotland
  • Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  • Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
  • Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota
  • National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria, Australia
  • , Chicago, Illinois, US (archived)
  • Tate Gallery, London, UK
  • University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, Iowa, US
  • Art Museum of West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia, US

References edit

  1. ^ André Salmon, La Jeune Peinture française, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme, (Anecdotal History of Cubism), Paris, Albert Messein, 1912, Collection des Trente
  2. ^ Salmon, André (1968). Anecdotal History of Cubism. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520014503., quoted in Chipp, Herschel Browning; et al. (1968). Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. University of California Press. p. 205. ISBN 0-520-01450-2.
  3. ^ Salmon, André (2005). André Salmon on French Modern Art. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-85658-2.
  4. ^ Apollinaire, Guillaume (1913). The Cubist Painters. Translated by Peter F. Read (also accompanying commentary) (2004 ed.). University of California Press. ISBN 9780520243545.
  5. ^ a b c Jean Metzinger, October–November 1910, "Note sur la peinture" Pan: 60
  6. ^ a b Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, 1985, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, p. 22
  7. ^ Green, Christopher (2009). "Late Cubism". MoMA.com. Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press.
  8. ^ Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity, Clarendon Press, 1991, p. 335, ISBN 0198520492
  9. ^ Miller, A., 2002, Einstein, Picasso: space, time and the beauty that causes havoc, Basic Books, New York, 2001, pp. 166–169, 256–258
  10. ^ . Archived from the original on 2014-08-26.
  11. ^ Leonore, culture.gouv.fr database, Nicolas Metzinger
  12. ^ "Page:Notices sur les rues de Nantes 1906.djvu/217 - Wikisource". fr.wikisource.org.
  13. ^ a b c d e f Jean Metzinger, 1883–1956: exposition, Nantes, École des beaux-arts, Atelier sur l'herbe, 4 au 26 janvier 1985
  14. ^ Jean Metzinger, Le Cubisme était né, Souvenirs, Chambéry, Editions Présence, 1972
  15. ^ Salon d'automne; Société du Salon d'automne, Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, dessin, gravure, architecture et art décoratif. Exposés au Petit Palais des Champs-Élysées, 1903
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  19. ^ a b c d e f g h i Robbins, Daniel (1985). Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism. Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press. pp. 9–23.
  20. ^ Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Jean Metzinger, Bañistas (Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape)
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  26. ^ Guillaume Apollinaire, La Poésie symboliste. L'Après-midi des poètes: la Phalange nouvelle, p. 131-242, Paris, 1908
  27. ^ Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 1937, L'Art Indépendant, ex. cat. ISBN 2-85346-044-4, Paris-Musées, 1987, p. 188
  28. ^ Mittelmann, Alex (2012). "Jean Metzinger, Divisionism, Cubism, Neoclassicism and Post Cubism". Alex Mittelmann.
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  32. ^ "Vente de biens allemands ayant fait l'objet d'une mesure de Séquestre de Guerre: Collection Uhde. Paris". The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries. 30 May 1921.
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  34. ^ "Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo". Archived from the original on 9 July 2012.
  35. ^ Jean Metzinger, circa 1907, quoted by Georges Desvallières in La Grande Revue, vol. 124, 1907
  36. ^ Louis Chassevent: Les Artistes indépendants, 1906, quoted in Daniel Robbins, preface to the catalogue Albert Gleizes, Paris (MNAM) 1964–65, p.20
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  39. ^ Bovy, Adrien (27 March 1909). La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité : supplément à la Gazette des beaux-arts, La Chronique des Arts, Petites Expositions, Union central des Arts décoratifs. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France. p. 102.
  40. ^ Vauxcelles, Louis (18 March 1910). A travers les salons: promenades aux Indépendants. Gil Blas.
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  51. ^ Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes, Paris, 1912
  52. ^ Guillaume Apollinaire, Anecdotiques, Jean Metzinger, Portrait of Apollinaire, 16 October, 1911, p. 44, gallica.bnf.fr Bibliothèque nationale de France
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  54. ^ "La Tombola artistique au profit des artistes polonais victimes de la guerre, 28 décembre 1915 au 15 janvier 1916, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 25, boulevard de la Madeleine". L'Élan (8). January 1916 – via bluemountain.princeton.edu.
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  56. ^ Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies, Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 13–47, 215
  57. ^ Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies, Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 52, 53, 166. See also Jean Metzinger, 'Tristesse d'Automne,' Montparnasse, 1 December 1922, p. 2
  58. ^ Léonce Rosenberg, Cubisme et empirisme, 1920–1926, in E.M., no. 31, January 1927
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  63. ^ Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger: Du "Cubisme", from Peter Brooke, Ampuis, Autumn 1990, English translation, Brecon, Spring 1991
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  87. ^ . ladressemuseedelaposte.fr. Archived from the original on 2019-08-20. Retrieved 2015-04-18.
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External links edit

  • Jean Metzinger: Divisionism, Cubism, Neoclassicism and Post Cubism
  • Ministère de la Culture, Plateforme Ouverte du Patrimoine (POP) (144 works from the Collection of Léonce Rosenberg)
  • Agence Photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées
  • Images d'art, Les œuvres des musées Français, Jean Metzinger
  • New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)
  • Site du ministère de la culture et de la communication
  • Blue Mountain Project, Historic Avant-Garde Periodicals for Digital Research, Princeton University Library
  • Alexander Mittelmann, Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonné and Monograph

January 01, 1970
jean, metzinger, jean, dominique, antony, metzinger, french, mɛtsɛ, june, 1883, november, 1956, major, 20th, century, french, painter, theorist, writer, critic, poet, along, with, albert, gleizes, wrote, first, theoretical, work, cubism, earliest, works, from,. Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger French mɛtsɛ ʒe 24 June 1883 3 November 1956 was a major 20th century French painter theorist writer critic and poet who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism 1 2 3 4 His earliest works from 1900 to 1904 were influenced by the neo Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri Edmond Cross Between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cezannian component leading to some of the first proto Cubist works Jean MetzingerMetzinger before 1913BornJean Dominique Antony Metzinger 1883 06 24 24 June 1883Nantes FranceDied3 November 1956 1956 11 03 aged 73 Paris FranceEducationEcole des Beaux Arts Nantes Known forPainting drawing writing poetryNotable workTwo Nudes in an Exotic Landscape 1905 06 Coucher de soleil no 1 1905 06 La danse Bacchante c 1906 Nu a la cheminee 1910 Le gouter Tea Time 1911 La Femme au Cheval 1911 12 Dancer in a cafe 1912 L Oiseau bleu 1912 13 En Canot 1913 MovementNeo Impressionism Divisionism Fauvism CubismWebsitejeanmetzinger wbr art From 1908 Metzinger experimented with the faceting of form a style that would soon become known as Cubism His early involvement in Cubism saw him both as an influential artist and an important theorist of the movement The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view points is treated for the first time in Metzinger s Note sur la Peinture published in 1910 5 Before the emergence of Cubism painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view point Metzinger for the first time in Note sur la peinture enunciated the interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote the first major treatise on Cubism in 1912 entitled Du Cubisme Metzinger was a founding member of the Section d Or group of artists Metzinger was at the center of Cubism both because of his participation and identification of the movement when it first emerged because of his role as intermediary among the Bateau Lavoir group and the Section d Or Cubists and above all because of his artistic personality 6 During the First World War Metzinger furthered his role as a leading Cubist with his co founding of the second phase of the movement referred to as Crystal Cubism He recognized the importance of mathematics in art through a radical geometrization of form as an underlying architectural basis for his wartime compositions The establishing of the basis of this new perspective and the principles upon which an essentially non representational art could be built led to La Peinture et ses lois Painting and its Laws written by Albert Gleizes in 1922 23 As post war reconstruction began a series of exhibitions at Leonce Rosenberg s Galerie de L Effort Moderne were to highlight order and allegiance to the aesthetically pure The collective phenomenon of Cubism now in its advanced revisionist form became part of a widely discussed development in French culture with Metzinger at its helm Crystal Cubism was the culmination of a continuous narrowing of scope in the name of a return to order based upon the observation of the artist s relation to nature rather than on the nature of reality itself In terms of the separation of culture and life this period emerges as the most important in the history of Modernism 7 For Metzinger the classical vision had been an incomplete representation of real things based on an incomplete set of laws postulates and theorems He believed the world was dynamic and changing in time appearing different depending on the observer s point of view Each of these viewpoints were equally valid according to underlying symmetries inherent in nature For inspiration Niels Bohr the Danish physicist and one of the founders of quantum mechanics hung in his office a large painting by Metzinger La Femme au Cheval 8 a conspicuous early example of mobile perspective implementation also called simultaneity 9 Contents 1 Early life 2 Neo Impressionism Divisionism 3 Cubism 3 1 Crystal Cubism 4 Theory 4 1 Scientific aspects 4 2 Influence on quantum mechanics 5 Exhibitions students and later work 6 Legacy 7 Gallery 8 Press articles 9 Catalogue raisonne 10 Commemoration 11 Art market 12 Partial list of works 13 Publications 14 Museum collections 15 References 16 External linksEarly life edit nbsp Jean Metzinger 1912 Danseuse au cafe Dancer in a cafe oil on canvas 146 1 x 114 3 cm Albright Knox Art Gallery Buffalo New York Published in Au Salon d Automne Les Independants 1912 Exhibited at the 1912 Salon d Automne Jean Metzinger came from a prominent military family His great grandfather Nicolas Metzinger 18 May 1769 1838 10 Captain in the 1st Horse Artillery Regiment and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour had served under Napoleon Bonaparte 11 A street in the Sixieme arrondissement of Nantes Rue Metzinger was named after Jean s grandfather Charles Henri Metzinger 10 May 1814 12 Following the early death of his father Eugene Francois Metzinger Jean pursued interests in mathematics music and painting though his mother a music professor by the name of Eugenie Louise Argoud had ambitions of his becoming a medical doctor 13 Jean s younger brother Maurice born 24 Oct 1885 became a musician excelling as a cellist 13 By 1900 Metzinger was studying painting under Hippolyte Touront a well known portrait painter who taught an academic conventional style of painting 13 Metzinger however was interested in the current trends in painting 14 Metzinger sent three paintings to the Salon des Independants in 1903 and subsequently moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale From the age of 20 Metzinger supported himself as a professional painter He exhibited regularly in Paris from 1903 participating in the first Salon d Automne 15 the same year and taking part in a group show with Raoul Dufy Lejeune and Torent from 19 January 22 February 1903 at the gallery run by Berthe Weill with another show November 1903 Metzinger exhibited at Weill s gallery 23 November 21 December 1905 and again 14 January 10 February 1907 with Robert Delaunay in 1908 6 31 January with Andre Derain Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso and 28 April 28 May 1910 with Derain Georges Rouault and Kees van Dongen He exhibited again at Weill s gallery 17 January 1 February 1913 March 1913 June 1914 and February 1921 16 It is at Berthe Weill s that he met Max Jacob for the first time 13 Berthe Weill was the first Parisian art dealer to sell works of Picasso 1906 Along with Picasso and Metzinger she promoted Matisse Derain Amedeo Modigliani and Maurice Utrillo 17 In 1904 Metzinger exhibited six paintings in the Divisionist style at the Salon des Independants and the Salon d Automne 18 where he showed regularly throughout the crucial years of Cubism 19 nbsp Jean Metzinger c 1905 Baigneuses Deux nus dans un jardin exotique Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape oil on canvas 116 x 88 8 cm Thyssen Bornemisza Museum Madrid 20 21 In 1905 Metzinger exhibited eight paintings at Salon des Independants 22 In this exhibition Metzinger is directly associated with the artists soon to be known as Fauves Camoin Delaunay Derain van Dongen Dufy Friesz Manguin Marquet Matisse Valtat Vlaminck and others Matisse was in charge of the hanging committee assisted by Metzinger Bonnard Camoin Laprade Luce Manguin Marquet Puy and Vallotton 23 In 1906 Metzinger exhibited at the Salon des Independants 24 Once again he was elected member of the hanging committee with Matisse Signac and others Again with the Fauves and associated artists Metzinger exhibited at the 1906 Salon d Automne Paris He exhibited six works at the 1907 Salon des Independants followed by the presentation of two works at the 1907 Salon d Automne 23 25 In 1906 Metzinger met Albert Gleizes at the Salon des Independants and visited his studio in Courbevoie several days later In 1907 at Max Jacob s room Metzinger met Guillaume Krotowsky who already signed his works Guillaume Apollinaire In 1908 a poem by Metzinger Parole sur la lune was published in Guillaume Apollinaire s La Poesie Symboliste 26 From 21 December 1908 to 15 January 1909 Metzinger exhibited at the gallery of Wilhelm Uhde rue Notre Dame des Champs Paris with Georges Braque Sonia Delaunay Andre Derain Raoul Dufy Auguste Herbin Jules Pascin and Pablo Picasso 27 1908 continued with the Salon de la Toison d Or Moscow Metzinger exhibited five paintings with Braque Derain van Dongen Friesz Manguin Marquet Matisse Puy Valtat and others At the 1909 Salon d Automne Metzinger exhibited alongside Constantin Brancuși Henri Le Fauconnier and Fernand Leger 23 Jean Metzinger married Lucie Soubiron in Paris on 30 December of the same year 17 Neo Impressionism Divisionism edit nbsp Jean Metzinger ca 1906 Coucher de Soleil No 1 Landscape oil on canvas 72 5 x 100 cm Kroller Muller Museum Otterlo Netherlands By 1903 Metzinger was a keen participant in the Neo Impressionist revival led by Henri Edmond Cross By 1904 05 Metzinger began to favor the abstract qualities of larger brushstrokes and vivid colors Following the lead of Seurat and Cross he began incorporating a new geometry into his works that would free him from the confines of nature as much as any artwork executed in Europe to date 28 The departure from naturalism had only just begun Metzinger along with Derain Delaunay Matisse between 1905 and 1910 helped revivify Neo Impressionism albeit in a highly altered form In 1906 Metzinger had acquired enough prestige to be elected to the hanging committee of the Salon des Independants He formed a close friendship at this time with Robert Delaunay with whom he shared an exhibition at Berthe Weill early in 1907 The two of them were singled out by one critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1907 as Divisionists who used large mosaic like cubes to construct small but highly symbolic compositions 29 Robert Herbert writes Metzinger s Neo Impressionist period was somewhat longer than that of his close friend Delaunay At the Independants in 1905 his paintings were already regarded as in the Neo Impressionist tradition by contemporary critics and he apparently continued to paint in large mosaic strokes until some time in 1908 The height of his Neo Impressionist work was in 1906 and 1907 when he and Delaunay did portraits of each other Art market London and Museum of Fine Arts Houston in prominent rectangles of pigment In the sky of Coucher de soleil 1906 1907 Collection Rijksmuseum Kroller Muller is the solar disk which Delaunay was later to make into a personal emblem 30 31 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1906 La danse Bacchante oil on canvas 73 x 54 cm Kroller Muller Museum At the outbreak of World War I this painting from the collection of Wilhelm Uhde was confiscated by the French state and sold at Hotel Drouot in 1921 32 The vibrating image of the sun in Metzinger s painting and so too of Delaunay s Paysage au disque 1906 1907 is an homage to the decomposition of spectral light that lay at the heart of Neo Impressionist color theory 30 33 34 Jean Metzinger s mosaic like Divisionist technique had its parallel in literature a characteristic of the alliance between Symbolist writers and Neo Impressionist artists I ask of divided brushwork not the objective rendering of light but iridescences and certain aspects of color still foreign to painting I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables I use strokes which variable in quantity cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature Jean Metzinger circa 1907 35 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1907 Paysage colore aux oiseaux aquatiques oil on canvas 74 x 99 cm Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Robert Herbert interprets Metzinger s statement What Metzinger meant is that each little tile of pigment has two lives it exists as a plane whose mere size and direction are fundamental to the rhythm of the painting and secondly it also has color which can vary independently of size and placement This is only a degree beyond the preoccupations of Signac and Cross but an important one Writing in 1906 Louis Chassevent 36 recognized the difference and as Daniel Robbins pointed out in his Gleizes catalogue used the word cube which later would be taken up by Louis Vauxcelles to baptize Cubism M Metzinger is a mosaicist like M Signac but he brings more precision to the cutting of his cubes of color which appear to have been made mechanically The interesting history of the word cube goes back at least to May 1901 when Jean Beral reviewing Cross s work at the Independants in Art et Litterature commented that he uses a large and square pointillism giving the impression of mosaic One even wonders why the artist has not used cubes of solid matter diversely colored they would make pretty revetments 30 Metzinger followed closely by Delaunay the two often painting together 1906 07 developed a new sub style that had great significance shortly thereafter within the context of their Cubist works Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands developed a similar mosaic like Divisionist technique circa 1909 The Futurists later 1909 1916 would adapt the style thanks to Gino Severini s Parisian experience from 1907 onward into their dynamic paintings and sculpture 30 In 1910 Gelett Burgess writes in The Wild Men of Paris Metzinger once did gorgeous mosaics of pure pigment each little square of color not quite touching the next so that an effect of vibrant light should result He painted exquisite compositions of cloud and cliff and sea he painted women and made them fair even as the women upon the boulevards fair But now translated into the idiom of subjective beauty into this strange Neo Classic language those same women redrawn appear in stiff crude nervous lines in patches of fierce color 37 3 Instead of copying Nature Metzinger explained circa 1909 we create a milieu of our own wherein our sentiment can work itself out through a juxtaposition of colors It is hard to explain it but it may perhaps be illustrated by analogy with literature and music Your own Edgar Poe he pronounced it Ed Carpoe did not attempt to reproduce Nature realistically Some phase of life suggested an emotion as that of horror in The Fall of the House of Ushur That subjective idea he translated into art He made a composition of it So music does not attempt to imitate Nature s sounds but it does interpret and embody emotions awakened by Nature through a convention of its own in a way to be aesthetically pleasing In some such way we taking out hint from Nature construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiment Jean Metzinger c 1909 The Wild Men of Paris 1910 37 Cubism edit nbsp Jean Metzinger 1908 1909 Baigneuses Bathers 37 412 By 1907 several avant garde artists in Paris were reevaluating their own work in relation to that of Paul Cezanne A retrospective of Cezanne s paintings had been held at the Salon d Automne of 1904 Current works were displayed at the 1905 and 1906 Salon d Automne followed by two commemorative retrospectives after his death in 1907 Metzinger s interest in the work of Cezanne suggests a means by which Metzinger made the transformation from Divisionism to Cubism In 1908 Metzinger frequented the Bateau Lavoir and exhibited with Georges Braque at Berthe Weill s gallery 38 By 1908 Metzinger experimented with the fracturing of form and soon thereafter with complex multiple views of the same subject A critic wrote of Metzinger s work exhibited during the spring of 1909 If M J Metzinger had really realized the Nude that we see at Madame Weill s and wished to demonstrate the value of his work the schematic figure that he shows us would serve this demonstration As such it is a skeletal frame without its flesh this is better than flesh without a skeletal frame the spirit at least finds some security But this excess of abstraction interests us much more than possesses us 39 Metzinger s early 1910 style had transited to a robust form of analytical Cubism 19 38 Louis Vauxcelles in his review of the 26th Salon des Independants 1910 made a passing and imprecise reference to Metzinger Gleizes Delaunay Leger and Le Fauconnier as ignorant geometers reducing the human body the site to pallid cubes 19 40 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1910 Nu a la cheminee Nude Exhibited at the 1910 Salon d Automne Published in Les Peintres Cubistes by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1913 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1910 11 Deux Nus Two Nudes Two Women oil on canvas 92 x 66 cm Gothenburg Museum of Art Sweden Exhibited at the first Cubist manifestation Room 41 of the 1911 Salon des Independants Paris In 1910 a group began to form which included Metzinger Gleizes Fernand Leger and Robert Delaunay a longstanding friend and associate of Metzinger They met regularly at Henri le Fauconnier s studio on rue Notre Dame des Champs near the boulevard du Montparnasse Together with other young painters the group wanted to emphasize a research into form in opposition to the Divisionist or Neo Impressionist emphasis on color Metzinger Gleizes Le Fauconnier Delaunay Leger and Marie Laurencin were shown together in Room 41 of the 1911 Salon des Independants which provoked the involuntary scandal out of which Cubism emerged and spread in Paris in France and throughout the world Laurencin was included at the suggestion of Guillaume Apollinaire who had become an enthusiastic supporter of the new group despite his earlier reservations Both Metzinger and Gleizes were discontent with the conventional perspective which they felt gave only a partial idea of a subject s form as experienced in life 41 The idea that a subject could be seen in movement and from many different angles was born 19 In Room 7 and 8 of the 1911 Salon d Automne 1 October 8 November at the Grand Palais in Paris hung works by Metzinger Le gouter Tea Time Henri Le Fauconnier Fernand Leger Albert Gleizes Roger de La Fresnaye Andre Lhote Jacques Villon Marcel Duchamp Frantisek Kupka and Francis Picabia The result was a public scandal which brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the second time Apollinaire took Picasso to the opening of the exhibition in 1911 to see the cubist works in Room 7 and 8 42 While Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are generally acknowledged as the founders of the twentieth century movement that became known as Cubism it was Jean Metzinger together with Albert Gleizes that created the first major treatise on the new art form Du Cubisme in preparation for the Salon de la Section d Or held in October 1912 Du Cubisme published the same year by Eugene Figuiere in Paris 43 represented the first theoretical interpretation elucidation and justification of Cubism and was endorsed by both Picasso and Braque Du Cubisme which preceded Apollinaire s well known essays Les Peintres Cubistes published 1913 emphasized the Platonic belief that the mind is the birthplace of the idea to discern a form is to verify a pre existing idea 44 45 and that The only error possible in art is imitation La seule erreur possible en art c est l imitation 46 Du Cubisme quickly gained popularity running through fifteen editions the same year and translated into several European languages including Russian and English the following year In 1912 Metzinger was the leading figure in the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain 47 at Galeries Dalmau Barcelona with Albert Gleizes Marcel Duchamp Henri Le Fauconnier Juan Gris Marie Laurencin and August Agero 48 49 50 In 1913 Apollinaire wrote in Les Peintres Cubistes In drawing in composition in the judiciousness of contrasted forms Metzinger s works have a style which sets them apart from and perhaps even above most of the works of his contemporaries It was then that Metzinger joining Picasso and Braque founded the Cubist City There is nothing unrealized in the art of Metzinger nothing which is not the fruit of a rigorous logic A painting by Metzinger always contains its own explanation it is certainly the result of great hindmindedness and is something unique it seems to me in the history of art Apollinaire continues The new structures he is composing are stripped of everything that was known before him Each of his paintings contains a judgement of the universe and his work is like the sky at night when cleared of the clouds it trembles with lovely lights There is nothing unrealized in Metzinger s works poetry ennobles their slightest details 51 nbsp Jean Metzinger Le gouter Tea Time 1911 75 9 x 70 2 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibited at the 1911 Salon d Automne Andre Salmon dubbed this painting The Mona Lisa of Cubism Jean Metzinger through the intermediary of Max Jacob met Apollinaire in 1907 Metzinger s 1909 10 Portrait de Guillaume Apollinaire is as important a work in the history of Cubism as it was in Apollinaire s own life In his Anecdotiques of 16 October 1911 the poet proudly states I am honored to be the first model of a Cubist painter Jean Metzinger for a portrait exhibited in 1910 at the Salon des Independants So according to Apollinaire it was not only the first cubist portrait but it was also the first great portrait of the poet exhibited in public 52 Two works directly preceding Apollinaire s portrait Nu and Landscape circa 1908 and 1909 respectively indicate that Metzinger had already departed from Divisionism by 1908 Turning his attention fully towards the geometric abstraction of form Metzinger allowed the viewer to reconstruct the original volume mentally and to imagine the object within space His concerns for color that had assumed a primary role both as a decorative and expressive device before 1908 had given way to the primacy of form But his monochromatic tonalities would last only until 1912 when both color and form would boldly combine to produce such works as Dancer in a cafe Albright Knox Art Gallery Buffalo New York The works of Jean Metzinger Apollinaire writes in 1912 have purity His meditations take on beautiful forms whose harmony tends to approach sublimity The new structures he is composing are stripped of everything that was known before him As a resident of la Butte Montmartre in Paris Metzinger entered the circle of Picasso and Braque in 1908 It is to the credit of Jean Metzinger at the time to have been the first to recognize the commencement of the Cubist Movement as such writes S E Johnson Metzinger s portrait of Apollinaire the poet of the Cubist Movement was executed in 1909 and as Apollinaire himself has pointed out in his book The Cubist Painters written in 1912 and published in 1913 Metzinger following Picasso and Braque was chronologically the third Cubist artist 53 Crystal Cubism edit Main article Crystal Cubism Metzinger s evolution toward synthesis in 1914 15 has its origins in the configuration of flat squares trapezoidal and rectangular planes that overlap and interweave a new perspective in accord with the laws of displacement 19 In the case of Le Fumeur Metzinger filled in these simple shapes with gradations of color wallpaper like patterns and rhythmic curves So too in Au Velodrome But the underlying armature upon which all is built is palpable Vacating these non essential features would lead Metzinger on a path towards Soldier at a Game of Chess 1914 15 and a host of works created after the artist s demobilization as a medical orderly during the war such as L infirmiere The Nurse location unknown and Femme au miroir private collection 19 Before Maurice Raynal coined the term Crystal Cubism one critic by the name of Aloes Duarvel writing in L Elan referred to Metzinger s entry exhibited at Galerie Bernheim Jeune 28 December 1915 15 January 1916 as jewellery joaillerie 54 For Metzinger the Crystal period was synonymous with a return to a simple robust art 55 Crystal Cubism represented an opening up of possibilities 56 His belief was that technique should be simplified and that the trickery of chiaroscuro should be abandoned along with the artifices of the palette 55 He felt the need to do without the multiplication of tints and detailing of forms without reason by feeling 55 Eventually all the Cubists except for Gleizes Delaunay and a handful of others would return to some form of classicism at the end of World War I Even so the lessons of Cubism would not be forgotten Metzinger s apparent departure from Cubism circa 1918 would leave open the spatial susceptibility to classical observation but the form could only be grasped by the intelligence of the observer something that escaped classical observation nbsp Jean Metzinger 1912 Femme a l Eventail Woman with a Fan oil on canvas 90 7 x 64 2 cm Exhibited at the Salon d Automne 1912 Paris and De Moderne Kunstkring 1912 Amsterdam Published in Les Peintres Cubistes by Guillaume Apollinaire 1913 Solomon R Guggenheim Museum New YorkIn a letter to Leonce Rosenberg September 1920 Jean Metzinger wrote of a return to nature that appeared to him both constructive and not at all a renunciation of Cubism His exhibition at l Effort Moderne at the outset of 1921 was exclusively of landscapes his formal vocabulary remained rhythmic linear perspective was avoided There was a motivation to unite the pictorial and the natural Christopher Green writes The willingness to adapt Cubist language to the look of nature was quickly to affect his figure painting too From that exhibition of 1921 Metzinger continued to cultivate a style that was not only less obscure but clearly took subject matter as its starting point far more than an abstract play with flat pictorial elements Green continues Yet style in the sense of his own special way of handling form and color remained for Metzinger the determining factor something imposed on his subjects to give them their special pictorial character His sweet rich colour between 1921 and 1924 was unashamedly artificial and is itself symptomatic of the fact that his return to lucid representation did not mean a return to nature approached naturalistically Metzinger himself writing in 1922 published by Montparnasse could claim quite confidently that this was not at all a betrayal of Cubism but a development within it I know works he said whose thoroughly classical appearance conveys the most personal the most original the newest conceptions Now that certain Cubists have pushed their constructions so far as to take in clearly objective appearances it has been declared that Cubism is dead in fact it approaches realization 57 58 The strict constructive ordering that had become so pronounced in Metzinger s pre 1920 Cubist works continued throughout the subsequent decades in the careful positioning of form color and in the way in which Metzinger delicately assimilates the union of figure and background of light and shadow This can be seen in many figures From the division in two of the model s features emerges a subtle profile view resulting from a free and mobile perspective used by Metzinger to some extent as early as 1908 to constitute the image of a whole one that includes the fourth dimension 59 Both as a painter and theorist of the Cubist movement Metzinger was at the forefront It was too Metzinger s role as a mediator between the general public Picasso Braque and other aspiring artists such as Gleizes Delaunay Le Fauconnier and Leger that places him directly at the center of Cubism Daniel Robbins writes Jean Metzinger was at the center of Cubism not only because of his role as intermediary among the orthodox Montmartre group and right bank or Passy Cubists not only because of his great identification with the movement when it was recognized but above all because of his artistic personality His concerns were balanced he was deliberately at the intersection of high intellectuality and the passing spectacle 6 Theory edit nbsp Jean Metzinger 1912 1913 L Oiseau bleu The Blue Bird oil on canvas 230 x 196 cm Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote with reference to non Euclidean geometry in their 1912 manifesto Du Cubisme It was argued that Cubism itself was not based on any geometrical theory but that non Euclidean geometry corresponded better than classical or Euclidean geometry to what the Cubists were doing The essential was in the understanding of space other than by the classical method of perspective an understanding that would include and integrate the fourth dimension with 3 space 60 Though the rupture with the past seemed total there was still within the avant garde something of the past Metzinger for example writes in a Pan article two years before the publication of Du Cubisme that the greatest challenge to the modern artist is not to cancel tradition but to accept it is in us acquired by living It was the combination of the past himself inspired by Ingres and Seurat with the present and its progression into the future that most intrigued Metzinger Observed was the tendency a balance between the pursuit of the transient and the mania for the eternal But the result would be an unstable equilibrium The domination would no longer be of the external world The progression was from the specific to the universal from the special to the general from the physical to the temporary towards a complete synthesis of the whole however unattainable towards an elemental common denominator to use the words of Daniel Robbins 19 nbsp Metzinger in about 1912 Unknown photographer possibly Pierre Choumoff Whereas Cezanne had been influential to the development of Metzinger s Cubism between 1908 and 1911 during its most expressionistic phase the work of Seurat would once again attract attention from the Cubists and Futurists between 1911 and 1914 when flatter geometric structures were being produced What the Cubists found attractive according to Apollinaire was the manner in which Seurat asserted an absolute scientific clarity of conception The Cubists observed in his mathematical harmonies geometric structuring of motion and form the primacy of idea over nature something the Symbolists had recognized In their eyes Seurat had taken a fundamental step toward Cubism by restoring intellect and order to art after Impressionism had denied them to use the words of Herbert The Section d Or group founded by some of the most prominent Cubists was in effect an homage to Seurat Within the works by Seurat of cafes cabarets and concerts of which the avant garde were fond the Cubists discovered an underlying mathematical harmony one that could easily be transformed into mobile dynamical configurations 30 The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view points is treated in Du Cubisme 1912 It was also a central idea of Jean Metzinger s Note sur la Peinture 1910 Indeed prior to Cubism painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view point And it was Jean Metzinger for the first time in Note sur la peinture who enunciated the stimulating interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time In that article Metzinger notes that Braque and Picasso discarded traditional perspective and granted themselves the liberty of moving around objects This is the concept of mobile perspective that would tend towards the representation of the total image 5 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1913 La Femme a l Eventail Woman with a Fan oil on canvas 92 8 x 65 2 cm Art Institute of Chicago Illinois Metzinger s Note sur la peinture not only highlighted the works of Picasso and Braque on the one hand Le Fauconnier and Delaunay on the other but it was also a tactical selection that highlighted the fact that only Metzinger himself was positioned to write about all four Metzinger uniquely had been closely acquainted with the gallery cubists and the burgeoning salon cubists simultaneously 61 Though the idea of moving around objects to capture several angles at the same time would shock the public they eventually came to accept it as they came to accept the atomist representation of the universe as a multitude of dots consisting of primary colors Just as each color is modified by its relation to adjacent colors within the context of Neo Impressionist color theory so too the object is modified by the geometric forms adjacent to it within the context of Cubism The concept of mobile perspective is essentially an extension of a similar principle stated in Paul Signac s D Eugene Delacroix au neo impressionisme with respect to color Only now the idea is extended to deal with questions of form 30 See Jean Metzinger 1912 Dancer in a cafe 62 Cubism by 1912 had abstracted almost to the point of total non representation In Du Cubisme Metzinger and Gleizes had realized that figurative aspects of the new art could be abandoned we visit an exhibition to contemplate painting not to enlarge our knowledge of geography anatomy etc Let the picture imitate nothing let it nakedly present its motive and we should indeed be ungrateful were we to deplore the absence of all those things flowers or landscapes or faces of which it could never have been anything other than a reflection Though Metzinger and Gleizes hesitate to do away with nature entirely Nevertheless let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished as yet at all events An art cannot be raised all at once to the level of a pure effusion This is understood by the Cubist painters who tirelessly study pictorial form and the space which it engenders 63 nbsp Jean Metzinger c 1913 Le Fumeur Man with Pipe oil on canvas 129 7 x 96 68 cm Carnegie Museum of Art Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Exhibited at the 1914 Salon des Independants Paris One of the essential arguments of Du Cubisme was that knowledge of the world is to be gained through sensations alone Classical figurative painting offered only one point of view a restrained sensation of the world limited to the sensation of a motionless human being who sees only that which is in front of him from a single point in space frozen in a moment of time time was absolute in the Newtonian sense and separate from the spatial dimensions But the human being is mobile and dynamic occupying both space and to time The observer sees the world from a multitude of angles not one unique angle forming a continuum of sensations in constant evolution i e events and natural phenomena are observed in a continuum of constant change Just as the formulations of Euclidean geometry classical perspective is only a convention Henri Poincare s term rendering the phenomena of nature more palpable susceptible to thought and understandable Yet these classical conventions obscured the truth of our sensations and consequently the truth of our own human nature was limited The world was seen as an abstraction as Ernst Mach implied In this sense it could be argued that classical painting with its immobile perspective and Euclidean geometry was an abstraction not an accurate representation of the real world What made Cubism progressive and truly modern according to Metzinger and Gleizes was its new geometric armature with that it broke free from the immobility of 3 dimensional Euclidean geometry and attained a dynamic representation of the 4 dimensional continuum in which we live a better representation of reality of life s experience something that could be grasped through the senses not through the eye and expressed onto a canvas In Du Cubisme Metzinger and Gleizes write that we can only know our sensations not because they reject them as a means of inspiration On the contrary because understanding our sensations more deeply gave them the primary inspiration for their own work Their attack on classical painting was leveled precisely because the sensations it offered were poor in comparison with the richness and diversity of the sensations offered by the natural world it wished to imitate The reason classical painting fell short of its goal according to Metzinger and Gleizes is that it attempted to represent the real world as a moment in time in the belief that it was 3 dimensional and geometrically Euclidean 64 Scientific aspects edit nbsp Jean Metzinger 1913 En Canot Im Boot oil on canvas 146 x 114 cm 57 5 in 44 9 in exhibited at Moderni Umeni S V U Manes Prague 1914 acquired in 1916 by Georg Muche at the Galerie Der Sturm confiscated by the Nazis circa 1936 displayed at the Degenerate Art show in Munich and missing ever since 65 The question of whether the theoretical aspects of Cubism enunciated by Metzinger and Gleizes bore any relation to the development in science at the beginning of the twentieth century has been vigorously disputed by art critics historians and scientists alike Yet in Du Cubisme Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes articulate If we wished to relate the space of the Cubist painters to geometry we should have to refer it to the non Euclidean mathematicians we should have to study at some length certain of Riemann s theorems There was after all little to prevent the Cubists from developing their own pictorial variants on the topological space in parallel to or independently of relativistic considerations Though the concept of observing a subject from different points in space and time simultaneously multiple or mobile perspective developed by Metzinger and Gleizes was not derived directly from Albert Einstein s theory of relativity it was certainly influenced in a similar way through the work of Jules Henri Poincare particularly Science and Hypothesis the French mathematician theoretical physicist and philosopher of science who made many fundamental contributions to algebraic topology celestial mechanics quantum theory and made an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity A multitude of analogies similarities or parallels have been drawn over the decades between modern science and Cubism But there has not always been agreement as to how the writings of Metzinger and Gleizes should be interpreted with respect to simultaneity of multiple view points Metzinger had already written in 1910 of mobile perspective as an interpretation of what would soon be dubbed Cubism with respect to Picasso Braque Delaunay and Le Fauconnier Metzinger Note sur la peinture Pan Paris Oct Nov 1910 And Apollinaire would echo the same tune a year later regarding the observer s state of motion Mobile perspective was akin to cinematic movement around an object that consisted of a plastic truth compatible with reality by showing the spectator all its facets Gleizes too the same year remarks Metzinger is haunted by the desire to inscribe a total image He will put down the greatest number of possible planes to purely objective truth he wishes to add a new truth born from what his intelligence permits him to know Thus and he said himself to space he will join time he wishes to develop the visual field by multiplying it to inscribe them all in the space of the same canvas it is then that the cube will play a role for Metzinger will utilize this means to reestablish the equilibrium that these audacious inscriptions will have momentarily broken 19 Poincare s writings unlike Einstein s were well known leading up to and during the crucial years of the Cubism roughly between 1908 and 1914 Note that Poincare s widely read book La Science et l Hypothese was published in 1902 by Flammarion nbsp Jean Metzinger 1914 15 Soldat jouant aux echecs Soldier at a Game of Chess Le Soldat a la partie d echecs oil on canvas 81 3 x 61 cm Smart Museum of Art University of Chicago The common denominator between the special relativistic notions the lack an absolute reference frame metric transformations of the Lorentzian type the relativity of simultaneity the incorporation of the time dimension with three spatial dimensions and the Cubist idea of mobile perspective observing the subject from several view points simultaneously published by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes was in effect a descendant from the work of Poincare and others at least from the theoretical standpoint Whether the concept of mobile perspective accurately describes the work of Picasso and Braque or other Cubists is certainly debatable Undoubtedly though both Metzinger and Gleizes implemented the theoretical principles derived in Du Cubisme onto canvas something clearly visible in their works produced at the time Metzinger s early interests in mathematics are documented He was likely familiar with the works of Gauss Riemann and Poincare and perhaps Galilean relativity prior to the development of Cubism something that reflects in his pre 1907 works It was perhaps the French mathematician Maurice Princet who introduced the work of Poincare along with the concept of the fourth spatial dimension to artists at the Bateau Lavoir He was a close associate of Pablo Picasso Guillaume Apollinaire Max Jacob Jean Metzinger and Marcel Duchamp Princet is known as le mathematicien du cubisme Princet brought to attention of these artists a book entitled Traite elementaire de geometrie a quatre dimensions by Esprit Jouffret 1903 a popularization of Poincare s Science and Hypothesis In this book Jouffret described hypercubes and complex polyhedra in four dimensions projected onto a two dimensional page Princet became estranged from the group after his wife left him for Andre Derain However Princet would remain close to Metzinger and participate in meetings of the Section d Or in Puteaux He gave informal lectures to the artists many of whom were passionate about mathematical order In 1910 Metzinger said of him Picasso lays out a free mobile perspective from which that ingenious mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced a whole geometry 5 Later Metzinger wrote in his memoirs Le Cubisme etait ne Maurice Princet joined us often Although quite young thanks to his knowledge of mathematics he had an important job in an insurance company But beyond his profession it was as an artist that he conceptualized mathematics as an aesthetician that he invoked n dimensional continuums He loved to get the artists interested in the new views on space that had been opened up by Schlegel and some others He succeeded at that nbsp Jean Metzinger April 1916 Femme au miroir Femme a sa toilette Lady at her Dressing Table oil on canvas 92 4 x 65 1 cm private collection Louis Vauxcelles sarcastically dubbed Princet the father of cubism M Princet has studied at length non Euclidean geometry and the theorems of Riemann of which Gleizes and Metzinger speak Princet one day met M Max Jacob and confided him one or two of his discoveries relating to the fourth dimension M Jacob informed the ingenious Picasso of it and Picasso saw there a possibility of new ornamental schemes Picasso explained his intentions to Apollinaire who hastened to write them up in formularies and codify them The thing spread and propagated Cubism the child of M Princet was born Vauxcelles December 29 1918 66 In addition to mathematics both human sensation and intelligence were important to Metzinger It was lack of the latter human attribute that the principle theorists of Cubism were to reproach the Impressionists and Fauves for whom sensation was the sole necessity Intelligence had to work in harmony with sensation thus together providing the building blocks for the Cubists construction Metzinger with his mathematical education and prowess had realized this relation early on Indeed the geometrization of space that would characterize Cubism can already be observed in his works as early as 1905 following the lead of Seurat and Cezanne See Jean Metzinger 1905 1906 Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape oil on canvas 116 x 88 8 cm For Metzinger along with to some extent both Gleizes and Malevich the classical vision had been an incomplete representation of real things based on an incomplete set of laws postulates and theorems It represented quite simply the belief that space is the only thing that separates two points It was the belief in the geocentric reality of the observable world unchanging and immobile The Cubists had been delighted to discover that the world was in reality dynamic changing in time it appeared different depending on the point of view of the observer And yet each one of these viewpoints were equally valid there was no preferred reference frame all reference frames were equal This underlying symmetry inherent in nature in fact is the essence of Einstein s relativity nbsp Jean Metzinger 1911 1912 La Femme au Cheval Woman with a horse oil on canvas 162 x 130 cm Statens Museum for Kunst National Gallery of Denmark Published in Apollinaire s 1913 Les Peintres Cubistes Exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Independants and the Salon de la Section d Or 1912 Paris 67 Provenance Jacques Nayral Niels Bohr Influence on quantum mechanics edit Main article La Femme au Cheval On the question as to whether creativity in the domain of science has ever been influenced by art Arthur I Miller author of Einstein Picasso Space Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc 2002 answers Cubism directly helped Niels Bohr discover the principle of complementarity in quantum theory which says that something can be a particle and a wave at the same time but it will always be measured to be either one or the other In analytic cubism artists tried to represent a scene from all possible viewpoints on one canvas How you view the painting that s the way it is Bohr read the book by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes on cubist theory Du Cubisme It inspired him to postulate that the totality of an electron is both a particle and a wave but when you observe it you pick out one particular viewpoint 68 Niels Bohr 1885 1962 the Danish physicist and one of the principle founders of quantum mechanics had hung in his office a large painting by Jean Metzinger La Femme au Cheval Woman with a horse 1911 12 now in the Statens Museum for Kunst National Gallery of Denmark This work is one of Metzinger s most conspicuous early examples of mobile perspective implementation Bohr s interest in Cubism according to Miller was anchored in the writings of Metzinger Arthur Miller concludes If cubism is the result of the science in Art the quantum theory is the result of art in science 69 In the epistemological words of Bohr 1929 depending upon our arbitrary point of view we must in general be prepared to accept the fact that a complete elucidation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description Niels Bohr 1929 70 Within the context of Cubism artists were forced into the position of re evaluating the role of the observer Classical linear and aerial perspective uninterrupted surface transitions and chiaroscuro were pushed aside What remained was a series of images obtained by the observer the artist in different frames of reference as the object was being painted Essentially observations became linked through a system of coordinate transformations The result was Metzinger s total image or a combination of successive images In Metzinger s theory the artist and the object being observed became equivocally linked so that the results of any observation seemed to be determined at least partially by actual choices made by the artist An object has not one absolute form it has many Metzinger wrote Furthermore part of the role of placing together various images was left to the observer the one looking at the painting The object represented depending on how the observer perceives it could have as many forms as there are planes in the region of perception Jean Metzinger 1912 71 Exhibitions students and later work edit nbsp Jean Metzinger invitation card for the exhibition at Leonce Rosenberg s Galerie de L Effort Moderne January 1919 On 19 June 1916 Metzinger signed a three year contract later renewed for 15 years with the dealer art collector and gallery owner Leonce Rosenberg 13 The agreement gave full rights for exhibitions and sales of Metzinger s production to Rosenberg The contract fixed the prices of Metzinger s works bought by Rosenberg who agreed to purchase a certain number of works or a fixed value every month A contract between the two dated 1 January 1918 modified the first contract the engagement was now renewable every two years and prices of Metzinger s works purchased by Rosenberg increased 13 In 1923 Metzinger moved away from Cubism towards realism while still retaining elements of his earlier Cubist style In subsequent stages of his career another important change is noticeable from 1924 to 1930 a development that paralleled the mechanical world of Fernand Leger Throughout these years Metzinger continued to retain his own marked artistic individuality These firmly constructed pictures are brightly colored and visually metaphoric consisting of urban and still life subject matter with clear references to science and technology At the same time he was romantically involved with a young Greek woman Suzanne Phocas The two were married in 1929 After 1930 until his death in 1956 Metzinger turned towards a more classical or decorative approach to painting with elements of Surrealism still concerned with questions of form volume dimension relative position and relationship of figures along with visible geometric properties of space Metzinger was commissioned to paint a large mural Mystique of Travel which he executed for the Salle de Cinema in the railway pavilion of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne Paris 1937 72 Jean Metzinger had been appointed to teach at the Academie de La Palette in Paris 1912 where Le Fauconnier served as director Among his many students were Serge Charchoune Jessica Dismorr Nadezhda Udaltsova Varvara Stepanova Aristarkh Lentulov Vera Efimovna Pestel and Lyubov Popova 72 73 In 1913 Metzinger taught at the Academie Arenius and Academie de la Grande Chaumiere He later moved to Bandol in Provence where he lived until 1943 and then returned to Paris where he was given a teaching post for three years at the Academie Frochot in 1950 In Paris 1952 he taught New Zealand artist Louise Henderson who became one of the leading Modernist painters in Auckland upon her return 74 In 1913 Metzinger exhibited in New York City at the Exhibition of Cubist and Futurist Pictures Boggs amp Buhl Department Store Pittsburgh The show traveled to four other cities Milwaukee Cleveland Pittsburgh and Philadelphia over the course of one year 75 The Milwaukee exhibition of Cubist works including paintings by Albert Gleizes Fernand Leger Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Villon opened 11 May 1913 75 Metzinger s Man with a Pipe was reproduced on the cover of catalogue for the exhibition Though he did not exhibit with his Cubist colleagues at the Armory Show of 1913 Metzinger contributed through this exhibition and others toward the integration of modern art into the United States 75 During the spring of 1916 Metzinger participated in one of the largest exhibitions of modern art in New York City organized by Walter Pach and a group of European and American artists in New York The Annual Exhibition of Modern Art held at Bourgeois Gallery Initially some American exhibitors were offended by the continental nature of the show but as Pack informed Matisse the petty nationalism that had one had tried to throw inside had failed to advance and I am certain of that 76 The exhibition included works by Cezanne Matisse Duchamp Picasso Seurat Signac van Gogh Duchamp Villon in addition to works by Pach the Italian born American Futurist painter Joseph Stella and other American artists 76 Metzinger again exhibited in New york at the Bourgeois Gallery for the occasion of the 1917 and 1919 Annual Exhibition of Modern Art 77 78 nbsp Jean Metzinger in Retrospect University of Iowa Museum of Art Iowa City 1985 19 Further exhibitions 6 31 January 1919 Metzinger had a solo exhibition at Leonce Rosenberg s Galerie de L Effort Moderne and again 1 25 February 1921 79 in addition to participating in various group exhibitions He would exhibit regularly at L Effort Moderne throughout the 1920s The same year he showed in New York with Jean Crotti Marcel Duchamp and Albert Gleizes at the Montross Gallery where the Frenchmen became known as The Four Musketeers 76 Among his solo exhibitions were those at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1930 the Hanover Gallery in London in 1932 the Arts Club of Chicago in 1953 80 for which he traveled to the United States on the transatlantic ocean liner Le Flandre 81 and International Galleries Chicago 1964 In 1985 1986 a retrospective of Metzinger s works Jean Metzinger in Retrospect took place at The University of Iowa Museum of Art and traveled to Archer M Huntington Art Gallery University of Texas at Austin The David Alfred Smart Gallery University of Chicago and Museum of Art Carnegie Institute Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Metzinger a sensitive and intelligent theoretician of Cubism sought to communicate the principles of this movement through his paintings as well as his writings Lucy Flint Peggy Guggenheim Collection 82 Many exhibitions document the painter s national and international success 83 His works can be found in private and public collections and institutions around the world The artist died in Paris on November 3 1956 80 Legacy editIn the words of S E Johnson an in depth analysis of Metzinger s Pre Cubist period his first artistic peak can only class that painter in spite of his youth as being already one of the leading artistic personalities in that period directly preceding Cubism In an attempt to understand the importance of Jean Metzinger in Modern Art we could limit ourselves to three considerations Firstly there is the often overlooked importance of Metzinger s Divisionist Period of 1900 1908 Secondly there is the role of Metzinger in the founding of the Cubist School Thirdly there is the consideration of Metzinger s whole Cubist Period from 1909 to 1930 In taking into account these various factors we can understand why Metzinger must be included among that small group of artists who have taken a part in the shaping of Art History in the first half of the Twentieth Century 53 Gallery editSee also List of works by Jean Metzinger nbsp Jean Metzinger c 1905 06 Nu dans un paysage oil on canvas 73 x 54 cm 2nd Daniel Henry Kahnweiler Sale of Sequestered Art Hotel Drouot Paris 17 18 November 1921 reproduced n 162 nbsp Jean Metzinger c 1906 Femme au Chapeau Woman with a Hat oil on canvas 44 8 x 36 8 cm Korban Art Foundation nbsp Jean Metzinger 1910 11 Nu Nu debout oil on carton 52 x 35 cm Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Reproduced in Du Cubisme 1912 nbsp Jean Metzinger c 1911 Nature morte Compotier et cruche decoree de cerfs oil on canvas 93 5 by 66 5 cm published in Nya Konstgalleriet Flamman Stockholm 1917 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1911 12 Le Port The Harbor Exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Independants Paris Reproduced in Du Cubisme by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes 1912 Paris and Les Peintres Cubistes Guillaume Apollinaire 1913 Dimensions and current location unknown nbsp Jean Metzinger 1911 12 Man with a Pipe Portrait of an American Smoker oil on canvas 92 7 x 65 4 cm 36 5 x 25 75 in Lawrence University Appleton Wisconsin Reproduced on the catalogue cover of Exhibition of Cubist and Futurist Pictures Boggs amp Buhl Department Store Pittsburgh July 1913 nbsp Jean Metzinger c 1912 Paysage Landscape Reproduced in Du Cubisme 1912 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1912 At the Cycle Race Track Au Velodrome oil and sand on canvas 130 4 x 97 1 cm 51 4 x 38 25 in The Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice nbsp Jean Metzinger 1912 Landscape Marine Composition Cubiste oil on canvas 51 4 x 68 6 cm Fogg Art Museum Harvard University Published in Herwarth Walden Einblick in Kunst Expressionismus Futurismus Kubismus 1917 Der Sturm 1912 1917 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1912 Paysage Landscape oil on canvas 59 2 x 73 cm published in Der Sturm 5 January 1921 Art Institute of Chicago nbsp Jean Metzinger 1913 Etude pour L Oiseau bleu Study for The Blue Bird watercolor graphite and ink on paper 37 x 29 5 cm Centre Pompidou Musee National d Art Moderne Paris nbsp Jean Metzinger c 1915 L infirmiere The Nurse work on paper dimensions and whereabouts unknown Published in l Elan Number 9 12 February 1916 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1916 1918 Fruit and a Jug on a Table oil and sand on canvas 115 9 x 81 cm Museum of Fine Arts Boston Published in Paul Erich Kuppers Der Kubismus ein kunstlerisches Formproblem unserer Zeit 1920Press articles edit nbsp Jean Metzinger April 1916 Femme au miroir Femme a sa toilette Lady at her Dressing Table The Sun New York Sunday 28 April 1918 nbsp Paintings by Albert Gleizes 1910 11 Paysage Landscape Juan Gris drawing Jean Metzinger c 1911 Nature morte Compotier et cruche decoree de cerfs Published on the front page of El Correo Catalan 25 April 1912 nbsp center Jean Metzinger c 1913 Le Fumeur Man with Pipe Carnegie Museum of Art Pittsburgh left Alexander Archipenko 1914 Danseuse du Medrano Medrano II right Archipenko 1913 Pierrot carrousel Solomon R Guggenheim Museum New York Published in Le Petit Comtois 13 March 1914 nbsp Paintings by Fernand Leger 1912 La Femme en Bleu Woman in Blue Kunstmuseum Basel Jean Metzinger 1912 Dancer in a cafe Albright Knox Art Gallery and sculpture by Alexander Archipenko 1912 La Vie Familiale Family Life destroyed Published in Les Annales politiques et litteraires n 1529 13 October 1912 nbsp Paintings by Henri Le Fauconnier 1910 11 L Abondance Haags Gemeentemuseum Jean Metzinger 1911 Le gouter Tea Time Philadelphia Museum of Art Robert Delaunay 1910 11 La Tour Eiffel Published in La Veu de Catalunya 1 February 1912 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1910 11 Paysage whereabouts unknown Gino Severini 1911 La danseuse obsedante Albert Gleizes 1912 l Homme au Balcon Man on a Balcony Portrait of Dr Theo Morinaud Published in Les Annales politiques et litteraires Sommaire du n 1536 decembre 1912 nbsp Jean Metzinger c 1911 Nature morte Compotier et cruche decoree de cerfs Juan Gris 1911 Study for Man in a Cafe Marie Laurencin c 1911 Testa ab plechs August Agero sculpture Bust Juan Gris 1912 Guitar and Glasses or Banjo and Glasses Published in Veu de Catalunya 25 April 1912 nbsp Jean Metzinger 1911 Le gouter Tea Time Philadelphia Museum of Art Published in Le Journal 30 September 1911 nbsp Paintings by Juan Gris Bodegon August Agero sculpture Jean Metzinger 1910 11 Deux Nus Two Nudes Gothenburg Museum of Art Marie Laurencin acrylic Albert Gleizes 1911 Paysage Landscape Published in La Publicidad 26 April 1912 nbsp The Cubists Dominate Paris Fall Salon The New York Times October 8 1911 Reproduced are Picasso s 1908 Seated Woman Meditation Picasso in his studio Metzinger s Baigneuses 1908 09 works by Derain Matisse Friesz Herbin and a photo of Braque nbsp Page from the periodical Fantasio 15 October 1911 featuring Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes 1911 and Le gouter Tea Time by Jean Metzinger 1911 Catalogue raisonne editThe Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonne or critical catalogue researched and written by art historian Alexander Mittelmann published by the nonprofit association Defense et promotion de l œuvre de l artiste Jean Metzinger assembles and classifies the complete works of the artist paintings works on paper It comprises historiography documentation and inventory with bibliographic iconographic commentary technical and chronological analysis of Metzinger s life and work In addition to the catalogue raisonne the forthcoming Jean Metzinger Monograph is set to be released in three volumes the first in depth study on the artist 84 85 86 Commemoration editIn celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Du Cubisme by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes the Musee de La Poste in Paris presents a show entitled Gleizes Metzinger Du cubisme et apres from 9 May to 22 September 2012 Over 80 paintings and drawings along with documents films and 15 works by other members of the Section d Or group Villon Duchamp Villon Kupka Le Fauconnier Lhote La Fresnaye Survage Herbin Marcoussis Archipenko are included in the show A catalogue in French and English accompanies the event A French postage stamp is issued representing works by Metzinger L Oiseau bleu 1912 13 and Gleizes Le Chant de Guerre 1915 This is the first major exhibition of works by Metzinger in Europe since his death in 1956 and it is the first time that a museum has organized an exhibit showcasing both Metzinger and Gleizes together 87 88 Art market editOn 6 November 2007 Metzinger s Paysage c 1916 17 oil on canvas 81 2 x 99 3 cm sold for US 2 393 million at Christie s New York Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale 89 90 On 4 February 2020 the painting Le cycliste 1912 by Metzinger sold at Sotheby s London for 3 015 US 3 926 million 91 The sale represents a world record auction price for the artist The oil on canvas with sand measuring 100 x 81 cm was purchased by a private American collector 92 Partial list of works editMain article List of works by Jean Metzinger Rose Flower in a Vase 1902 The Clearing Clairiere c 1903 Landscape Paysage 1904 Ackland Art Museum University of North Carolina The Low Tide La Maree Basse c 1904 Le Chemin a travers les champs c 1904 The Sea Shore Bord de mer Le Mur Rose 1904 05 Indianapolis Museum of Art La Tour de Batz au coucher du soleil 1904 05 Le Chateau de Clisson 1904 05 Musee des Beaux Arts de Nantes Jeune Fille au Fauteuil Femme nue au chignon assise 1905 Neo Impressionist Landscape Paysage Neo Impressionniste 1905 Musee d art moderne de Troyes Two Nudes in a Garden Deux nus dans un jardin 1905 06 University of Iowa Museum of Art Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape Baigneuses Deux nus dans un jardin exotique 1905 06 Thyssen Bornemisza Museum Madrid Coucher de Soleil No 1 Landscape c 1906 Kroller Muller Museum La danse Bacchante c 1906 Kroller Muller Museum Parc Montsouris Morning Matin au Parc Montsouris 1906 Nude Nu 1906 Norton Museum of Art Paysage colore aux oiseaux exotiques 1906 Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Portrait of Delaunay Portrait de Delaunay 1906 Woman with a Hat Femme au Chapeau 1906 Korban Art Foundation Tropical Landscape Paysage Tropical 1906 07 Paysage colore aux oiseaux aquatiques 1907 Bathers Baigneuses c 1908 Nude Nu a la cheminee 1910 Portrait of Apollinaire Portrait d Apollinaire 1910 Two Nudes Deux nus 1910 11 Gothenburg Museum of Art Standing Nude Nu debout 1910 11 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Portrait of Madame Metzinger 1911 Philadelphia Museum of Art Le gouter Tea Time 1911 Philadelphia Museum of Art Man with a Pipe Portrait of an American Smoker 1911 12 Woman with a horse La Femme au Cheval 1911 12 Statens Museum for Kunst Sailboats Scene du port c 1912 Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art Landscape Paysage 1912 Art Institute of Chicago Portrait 1912 Fogg Museum Harvard University Landscape Marine Composition Cubiste 1912 Fogg Museum Harvard University Dancer in a cafe Danseuse au cafe 1912 Albright Knox Art Gallery Femme a l Eventail Woman with a Fan 1912 Solomon R Guggenheim Museum La Plume Jaune The Yellow Feather 1912 At the Cycle Race Track Au Velodrome Le cycliste 1912 Peggy Guggenheim Collection The Bathers Les Baigneuses 1912 13 Philadelphia Museum of Art The Blue Bird L Oiseau bleu 1913 Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Portrait of Madame Metzinger 1913 Los Angeles County Museum of Art En Canot Femme au Canot et a l Ombrelle Im Boot 1913 Missing or destroyed Woman with a Fan Femme a l Eventail 1913 Art Institute of Chicago Study for The Smoker La fumeuse 1913 14 Museum of Modern Art Soldier at a Game of Chess Soldat jouant aux echecs 1914 15 Smart Museum of Art Femme a la dentelle 1916 Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Fruit and a Jug on a Table 1916 Museum of Fine Arts Boston Table by a window 1917 Metropolitan Museum of Art Still Life 1918 Art Institute of Chicago Femme face et profil Femme au verre 1919 Musee National d Art Moderne Paris Woman with a Coffee Pot La Femme a la cafetiere 1919 Tate Gallery Still Life Nature morte 1919 Bilbao Fine Arts Museum La Tricoteuse 1919 Musee National d Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou Paris City Landscape 1919 20 University of Iowa Museum of Art Still Life Nature morte 1921 Minneapolis Institute of Arts Le Bal masque Carnaval a Venise 1922 Embarkation of Harlequin Arlequin 1922 23 Le Bal masque La Comedie Italienne 1924 Young woman with a guitar Femme a la guitare 1924 Kroller Muller Museum Salome 1924 private collection Equestrienne 1924 Kroller Muller Museum Composition allegorique 1928 29 Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Nautical still life 1930 National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne Globe and Banjo 1930 Art Institute of Chicago Nu au Soleil 1935 Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris The Bather Nude La Baigneuse Nu 1936 37 Yachting 1937 Reclining Nude Nu allonge 1945 50 The Green Dress La robe verte c 1950 Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de ParisPublications editNote sur la peinture Pan Paris n 10 October November 1910 Cubisme et tradition Paris Journal 16 August 1911 Alexandre Mercereau Vers et prose 27 October November 1911 122 129 Du Cubisme written with Albert Gleizes Edition Figuiere Paris 1912 First English edition Cubism Unwin London 1913 Art et esthetique Lettres Parisiennes le Salon des Independants suppl au n 9 April 1920 6 7 Reponse a notre enquete Ou va la peinture moderne written with Fernand Leger Bulletin de l Effort moderne February 1924 5 6 Bulletin de l Effort moderne June 1924 No 6 L Evolution du coloris Bulletin de l Effort moderne Paris 1925 Enquete du bulletin Bulletin de l Effort moderne October 1925 14 15 Metzinger Chabaud Chagall Gruber et Andre Mouchard repondent a l enquete des Beaux Arts sur le metric Beaux Arts 2 October 1936 1 Un souper chez G Apollinaire Apollinaire Paris 1946 Ecluses 27 poems by Jean Metzinger Preface by Henri Charpentier Paris G L Arlaud 1947 1912 1946 Afterword to reprint of Du Cubisme by A Gleizes and J Metzinger pp 75 79 Paris Compagnie francaise des Arts Graphiques 1947 Le Cubisme apporta a Gleizes le moyen d ecrire l espace Arts spectacles no 418 3 9 July 1953 Structures de peinture Structure de l esprit Hommage a Albert Gleizes with essays statements and fragments of works by Gleizes Metzinger Andre Beaudin Gino Severini et al Lyons Atelier de la Rose 1954 Suzanne Phocas Paris Galerie de l Institut February 1955 Le Cubisme etait ne Souvenirs Chambery Editions Presence 1972Museum collections editThe Metropolitan Museum of Art New York New York US Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia Pennsylvania US Kroller Muller Museum Otterlo Netherlands Museum of Fine Arts Boston Archived 2016 03 04 at the Wayback Machine Massachusetts US Centre Pompidou Musee National d Art Moderne Paris France archived Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Paris France Art Institute of Chicago Chicago Illinois US Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice Italy archived Museum of Modern Art New York New York US Dallas Museum of Art Dallas Texas US National Galleries Scotland Harvard University Art Museums Cambridge Massachusetts Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University Ithaca New York Minneapolis Institute of Arts Minneapolis Minnesota National Gallery of Victoria Victoria Australia Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago Chicago Illinois US archived Tate Gallery London UK University of Iowa Museum of Art Iowa City Iowa US Art Museum of West Virginia University Morgantown West Virginia USReferences edit Andre Salmon La Jeune Peinture francaise Histoire anecdotique du cubisme Anecdotal History of Cubism Paris Albert Messein 1912 Collection des Trente Salmon Andre 1968 Anecdotal History of Cubism University of California Press ISBN 9780520014503 quoted in Chipp Herschel Browning et al 1968 Theories of Modern Art A Source Book by Artists and Critics University of California Press p 205 ISBN 0 520 01450 2 Salmon Andre 2005 Andre Salmon on French Modern Art Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 85658 2 Apollinaire Guillaume 1913 The Cubist Painters Translated by Peter F Read also accompanying commentary 2004 ed University of California Press ISBN 9780520243545 a b c Jean Metzinger October November 1910 Note sur la peinture Pan 60 a b Daniel Robbins Jean Metzinger At the Center of Cubism 1985 Jean Metzinger in Retrospect The University of Iowa Museum of Art p 22 Green Christopher 2009 Late Cubism MoMA com Grove Art Online Oxford University Press Abraham Pais Niels Bohr s Times In Physics Philosophy and Polity Clarendon Press 1991 p 335 ISBN 0198520492 Miller A 2002 Einstein Picasso space time and the beauty that causes havoc Basic Books New York 2001 pp 166 169 256 258 Royal Ancestry file Jean Metzinger family members Archived from the original on 2014 08 26 Leonore culture gouv fr database Nicolas Metzinger Page Notices sur les rues de Nantes 1906 djvu 217 Wikisource fr wikisource org a b c d e f Jean Metzinger 1883 1956 exposition Nantes Ecole des beaux arts Atelier sur l herbe 4 au 26 janvier 1985 Jean Metzinger Le Cubisme etait ne Souvenirs Chambery Editions Presence 1972 Salon d automne Societe du Salon d automne Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture sculpture dessin gravure architecture et art decoratif Exposes au Petit Palais des Champs Elysees 1903 Le Morvan Marianne 2011 Berthe Weill 1865 1951 La petite galeriste des grands artistes L Ecarlate ISBN 978 2 296 56097 0 a b Mendelsohn Ezra 18 May 1994 Should We Take Notice of Berthe Weill Reflections on the Domain of Jewish History Jewish Social Studies 1 1 22 39 JSTOR 4467433 Salon d automne Societe du Salon d automne Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture sculpture dessin gravure architecture et art decoratif Exposes au Grand Palais des Champs Elysees 1904 a b c d e f g h i Robbins Daniel 1985 Jean Metzinger At the Center of Cubism Jean Metzinger in Retrospect The University of Iowa Museum of Art J Paul Getty Trust University of Washington Press pp 9 23 Carmen Thyssen Bornemisza collection Jean Metzinger Banistas Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape Thyssen Bornemisza Museum Jean Metzinger Bathers Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape Societe des artistes independants catalogue de la 21eme exposition 1905 libmma contentdm oclc org The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries a b c Clement Russell T 1994 Les Fauves A sourcebook via archive org Societe des artistes independants catalogue de la 22eme exposition 1906 libmma contentdm oclc org Rare Books in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries Salon d automne Societe du Salon d automne Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture sculpture dessin gravure architecture et art decoratif Exposes au Grand Palais des Champs Elysees 1907 Guillaume Apollinaire La Poesie symboliste L Apres midi des poetes la Phalange nouvelle p 131 242 Paris 1908 Musee d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Paris 1937 L Art Independant ex cat ISBN 2 85346 044 4 Paris Musees 1987 p 188 Mittelmann Alex 2012 Jean Metzinger Divisionism Cubism Neoclassicism and Post Cubism Alex Mittelmann History of Art Jean Metzinger all art org a b c d e f Herbert Robert 1968 Neo Impressionism New York The Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation Salon d automne Societe du Salon d automne Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture sculpture dessin gravure architecture et art decoratif Exposes au Grand Palais des Champs Elysees 1906 Robert Delaunay Portrait de M Jean Metzinger no 420 Jean Metzinger Portrait de M Robert D no 1191 Vente de biens allemands ayant fait l objet d une mesure de Sequestre de Guerre Collection Uhde Paris The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries 30 May 1921 Jean Metzinger Rijksmuseum Kroller Muller Otterlo Rijksmuseum Kroller Muller Otterlo Archived from the original on 9 July 2012 Jean Metzinger circa 1907 quoted by Georges Desvallieres in La Grande Revue vol 124 1907 Louis Chassevent Les Artistes independants 1906 quoted in Daniel Robbins preface to the catalogue Albert Gleizes Paris MNAM 1964 65 p 20 a b c Burgess Gelett May 1910 The Wild Men of Paris The Architectural Record a b Joann Moser Jean Metzinger in Retrospect Pre Cubist works 1904 1909 The University of Iowa Museum of Art J Paul Getty Trust University of Washington Press 1985 pp 34 42 Bovy Adrien 27 March 1909 La Chronique des arts et de la curiosite supplement a la Gazette des beaux arts La Chronique des Arts Petites Expositions Union central des Arts decoratifs Gallica Bibliotheque nationale de France p 102 Vauxcelles Louis 18 March 1910 A travers les salons promenades aux Independants Gil Blas Albert Gleizes Chronology of his life 1881 1953 peterbrooke org uk Salon d Automne Kubisme info 1911 Albert Gleizes Jean Metzinger Du Cubisme Eugene Figuiere Editeurs Collection Tous les Arts Paris 1912 publie en anglais et en russe en 1913 nouvelle edition en 1947 Chipp Herschel Browning 18 May 1968 Theories of Modern Art A Source Book by Artists and Critics University of California Press p 210 via Internet Archive to discern a form is to verify a pre existing idea Southgate M Therese 17 March 2011 The Art of JAMA Covers and Essays from The Journal of the American Medical Association OUP USA ISBN 9780199753833 via Google Books Rolland Romain January 1913 Au Salon d automne Chronique Parisienne Geneve Bibliotheque universelle et Revue suisse Tome LXIX No 205 Bureau de la Bibliotheque universelle 177 Hess Carol A 2001 Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain 1898 1936 University of Chicago Press p 76 ISBN 0226330389 Vidal Merce 1996 L exposicio d Art Cubista de les Galeries Dalmau 1912 Edicions Universitat Barcelona ISBN 8447513831 Pamies Elisenda Andres 2012 13 Les Galeries Dalmau un projecte de modernitat a la ciutat de Barcelona PDF Facultat d Humanitats Universitat Pompeu Fabra Robinson William H Falgas Jordi Lord Carmen Belen 2006 Barcelona and Modernity Picasso Gaudi Miro Dali Cleveland Museum of Art Metropolitan Museum of Art New York Yale University Press ISBN 0300121067 Apollinaire Les Peintres Cubistes Paris 1912 Guillaume Apollinaire Anecdotiques Jean Metzinger Portrait of Apollinaire 16 October 1911 p 44 gallica bnf fr Bibliotheque nationale de France a b S E Johnson 1964 Metzinger Pre Cubist and Cubist Works 1900 1930 International Galleries Chicago La Tombola artistique au profit des artistes polonais victimes de la guerre 28 decembre 1915 au 15 janvier 1916 Galerie Bernheim Jeune 25 boulevard de la Madeleine L Elan 8 January 1916 via bluemountain princeton edu a b c Maurice Raynal 1934 Jean Metzinger Modern French Painters New York Tudor Publishing Co p 125 ISBN 978 0405007354 Christopher Green Cubism and its Enemies Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art 1916 1928 Yale University Press New Haven and London 1987 pp 13 47 215 Christopher Green Cubism and its Enemies Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art 1916 1928 Yale University Press New Haven and London 1987 pp 52 53 166 See also Jean Metzinger Tristesse d Automne Montparnasse 1 December 1922 p 2 Leonce Rosenberg Cubisme et empirisme 1920 1926 in E M no 31 January 1927 Mittelmann Alex 2011 State of the Modern Art World The Essence of Cubism and its Evolution in Time Linda Henderson 1983 The Fourth Dimension and NonEuclidean geometry in Modern Art Cottington David 1998 Cubism in the Shadow of War The Avant Garde and Politics in Paris 1905 1914 Yale University Press Jean Metzinger Danseuse au cafe Dancer in a Cafe 1912 albrightknox org Albright Knox Art Gallery Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger Du Cubisme from Peter Brooke Ampuis Autumn 1990 English translation Brecon Spring 1991 Brooke Peter Two Philosopher Painters Albert Gleizes and Kasimir Malevich via peterbrooke org uk Freie Universitat Berlin Beschlagnahmeinventar Entartete Kunst Degenerate Art Database emuseum campus fu berlin de Louis Vauxcelles December 29 1918 Le Carnet des ateliers La Pere du cubisme Le Carnet de la semaine 11 in Henderson Linda Dalrymple 1983 The Fourth Dimension and Non Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art Princeton University Press p 72 Exhibit catalog for Salon de La Section d Or 1912 Jean Metzinger La Femme au cheval p 11 no 116 Walter Pach papers Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Creativity special One culture Arthur I Miller arthurimiller com 20 February 2008 Miller A 2002 Einstein Picasso space time and the beauty that causes havoc New York Basic Books Bohr Niels 1929 Wirkungsquantum und Naturbeschreibung The Quantum of Action and Description of Nature Die Naturwissenschaften in German 17 17 483 486 Bibcode 1929NW 17 483B doi 10 1007 BF01505680 S2CID 1373885 Gayana Jurkevic 2000 In pursuit of the natural sign Azorin and the poetics of Ekphrasis pp 200 213 a b Jean Metzinger waterhousedodd com Waterhouse amp Dodd Fine Art Archived from the original on 2012 04 08 Retrieved 2012 02 19 Jean Metzinger rkd nl RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History Cooke Ian Anthony 2015 Art related Encounters and Interactions Contact and Exchange between New Zealand and the United States 1955 to 1974 PDF researchspace auckland ac nz University of Auckland Research Repository p 31 a b c Marketing Modern Art in America From the Armory Show to the Department Store American Studies at the University of Virginia a b c McCarthy Laurette E Pach Walter 2011 Walter Pach 1883 1958 The Armory Show and the Untold Story of Modern Art in America Penn State Press ISBN 978 0271037400 via Google Books Gleizes Albert Bourgeois Galleries 1919 Annual exhibition of modern art electronic resource arranged by a group of European and American artists in New York 3 May to 24 May 1919 at the Bourgeois Galleries New York Bourgeois Galleries via Internet Archive Society of Independent Artists New York 1917 First Annual Exhibition of Modern Art electronic resource no jury no prizes New York The Society via Internet Archive Echos Devant les Cimaise Le Petit Journal Paris 28 January 1921 p 2 via theeuropeanlibrary org a b Jean Metzinger Guggenheim org New York The Statue of Liberty amp Ellis Island libertyellisfoundation org Flint Gohlke Lucy Messer Thomas M 1983 Handbook the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation Abrams via archive org Jean Metzinger Biography Infos Art Market jean metzinger com Mittelmann Alexander Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonne Defense et promotion de l œuvre de l artiste Jean Metzinger Retrieved 2 June 2022 Mittelmann Alexander February 2019 Jean Metzinger Critical Catalogue and Monograph Jean Metzinger Joueuses de cartes Sotheby s New York Lot Notes 29 July 2020 sothebys com Gleizes Metzinger Du cubisme et apres J 20 ladressemuseedelaposte fr Archived from the original on 2019 08 20 Retrieved 2015 04 18 Musee de La Poste Paris France Gleizes Metzinger Du Cubisme et apres 9 May 22 September 2012 Exposition in commemoration of 100th anniversary of the publication of Du Cubisme Archived 10 July 2012 at the Wayback Machine Jean Metzinger Paysage c 1916 17 oil on canvas 81 2 x 99 3 cm christies com sold for US 2 393 million at Christie s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale Lot 50 Sale 1900 Rockefeller Plaza New York Tuesday 6 November 2007 Artist records Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale November 6 2007 PDF christies com Jean Metzinger 1912 Le Cycliste oil on canvas with sand 100 x 81 cm Sotheby s London Impressionist Modern amp Surrealist Art Evening Sale 4 February 2020 estimated 1 5 2 million sold 3 015 000 GBP sothebys com Gleadell Colin February 4 2020 Sotheby s London Sale Artnet com External links editJean Metzinger at Wikipedia s sister projects nbsp Media from Commons nbsp Quotations from Wikiquote Jean Metzinger Divisionism Cubism Neoclassicism and Post Cubism Ministere de la Culture Plateforme Ouverte du Patrimoine POP 144 works from the Collection of Leonce Rosenberg Agence Photographique de la Reunion des musees nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs Elysees Images d art Les œuvres des musees Francais Jean Metzinger New York Art Resources Consortium NYARC Site du ministere de la culture et de la communication Blue Mountain Project Historic Avant Garde Periodicals for Digital Research Princeton University Library The Modernist Journals Project Brown University and The University of Tulsa Alexander Mittelmann Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonne and Monograph Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Jean Metzinger amp oldid 1217867091, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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