Modern Art & Design presents Jean Metzinger | November 18–19
The year 1912 marked a milestone in the history of French Cubism. It was the year of the first groundbreaking exhibition, which brought together Cubist artists and presented their work to the public for the first time.
It was also the year in which the French Cubist school decided to form the group La Section d’Or (The Golden Section) in order to exhibit their work together. In the same year, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes published Du Cubisme, the first and most comprehensive account of this revolutionary new approach to the representation of the world.
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Many of these new ideas emerged during the weekly discussions held at Jacques Villon’s home in a suburb of Paris. Metzinger and Gleizes were joined by the Duchamp brothers, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier, Gris, Léger, Picasso and Archipenko, among others. Mathematics and geometry played a central role in these discussions, and it was Metzinger who first drew attention to the stylistic affinities between the paintings of Picasso, Braque and Delaunay. The Cubist exhibition, comprising 180 works by 31 artists, was held at Galerie La Boétie in October 1912. It was a success, and Cubism came to be recognised as a new avant-garde movement. Metzinger deserves considerable credit for this achievement, not only for his contribution as an artist and practising Cubist, but also as a writer who sought to explain to an as yet uninitiated public how these new ideas might be understood.
The following year, Apollinaire wrote that Metzinger’s ‘art, which is becoming increasingly abstract yet always remains delightful, brings to the fore and seeks to resolve the most difficult and unforeseen problems of aesthetics’. (D. Robbins, Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, in Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, exhibition catalogue, Iowa City, 1985, p. 44.)
The German art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who played a crucial role in the careers of many of these artists, initially lent his support to the Cubist painters. Léonce Rosenberg did likewise. Having inherited a gallery and a modest fortune, Rosenberg decided in 1915 to open Galerie L’Effort Moderne on the rue de la Baume in Paris. Shortly after its opening, he began working with Metzinger, Gleizes, Hayden, Herbin and other avant-garde artists.
During the First World War, Metzinger resisted active military service, despite coming from a military family. Instead, he was sent to the front as a medical orderly, where he witnessed the horrors of war. These experiences deeply affected Metzinger, who was an outspoken pacifist. Having come to terms with his wartime experiences, he sought new directions in his artistic development, as did many of his fellow artists and friends. In a letter to Gleizes dated 4 July 1916, he explains:
This newly discovered fourth dimension marked a significant shift in Metzinger’s approach to painting. In 1919, Rosenberg presented a solo exhibition of his work as part of a series of exhibitions intended to demonstrate that Cubism remained very much alive, despite four years of war.
Since the Renaissance, the Cubist movement has challenged the most deeply rooted conventions of space and perspective in Western art. Cubism is undoubtedly one of the most significant artistic movements of the twentieth century, having had a profound influence on subsequent generations of artists.
Nature morte (Poissons, bouteille de Bordeaux, la baguette) is a masterfully executed still-life composition, poised between expanses of vivid colour, sharply defined dark contours and areas of shadow. The crisply delineated outlines and the modelling of the rounded forms through shading accentuate each object, whose dramatic silhouettes emerge through darker shadows on the left and lighter tonalities on the right. These formal characteristics are typical of this period in Metzinger’s artistic development.
Jean Metzinger at Modern Art & Design
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