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Born: 1883
Died: 1956
Summary of Jean Metzinger
A key figure in the Cubist movement, Metzinger earned his place in avant-garde development by the quality of his paintings as well as the breadth of his theoretical essays. He was a member of the so-called Salon Cubists and, together with Albert Gleizes, co-wrote Du Cubisme, the earliest and most important book on Cubism, which made him more famous than Braque or Picasso. Metzinger, in contrast to Gleizes, was more open to formal experimentation, as shown by his work, which incorporates aspects of Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism, and even Surrealism. In his latter years, he abandoned theoretical work in favour of poetry after juggling his creative and intellectual production with a number of important teaching positions.
They had set the bar high for Cubism by refusing to let the “frivolity” of colour or movement get in the way of their goal of creating art with many perspectives. (Along with the other Salon Cubists) Metzinger was considerably more receptive to the potential of colour as an instrument for depicting visual energy in his work. His efforts, which made Cubism more approachable to a sceptic general audience, contributed to a shift in popular perceptions of avant-garde art and elevated Cubism to a prominent position on the worldwide art scene.
He was a member of the Groupe de Puteaux while he was alive. La Section d’Or, the first major Cubist show, was organised by the group. Du Cubisme by Metzinger and Gleizes, a seminal work on Cubism, served as an important accompaniment to the show. To date, this is the only account of early Cubism published by artists who had a direct impact on the direction contemporary art would take in the following decades.
“mobile perspective” research has made Metzinger a household name. The Danish physician Niels Bohr argued that a viewer must be able to study an item concurrently from different perspectives in order to acquire a full knowledge of it, and his exploration of several facets of a single topic mirrored that. As a result of reading Du Cubisme, Bohr became acquainted with Metzinger’s 1911 picture La Femme au Cheval, which hung on his office wall as a reminder of the fourth dimension in painting (and the functional role the spectator plays in comprehending an artwork).
As a young artist, Metzinger was influenced by Neo-Impressionism, Divisionism, and the fractured brushwork of artists like Cézanne, Seurat, and Gauguin, resulting in his proto-Cubist works. With his “daring” use of colour and stunning mosaic illusions, he set the tone for a lifelong devotion to the notion that art should not be an exact copy of reality but rather a reflection of it.
Biography of Jean Metzinger
Childhood
Jean Metzinger grew up in a prominent military family in New York City. Nicolas Metzinger, Jean’s great-grandfather, served under Napoleon Bonaparte, and a street in Nantes, where Jean grew up, has the name of Charles Henri Metzinger, a French commander who led the French army to victory in Madagascar. Eugène François Metzinger, Jean Metzinger’s father, died young and he chose to follow in his mother’s footsteps as a music professor instead of carrying on the family military tradition. Although Daniel Robbins, a curator and art historian, believes this military upbringing gave Metzinger his “unusually sardonic” personality.
Metzinger was always interested in music, painting, and mathematics as a kid, and this combination would have a major influence on his painting style as an adult. Metzinger began his formal education at the Académie Cours Cambronne in Nantes when he was seventeen years old. Here he studied portrait painting under the tutelage of Hippolyte Touront, a conventional and academically demanding teacher.
Early Life
Metzinger entered the (jury-free) Salon des Indépendants in 1903 with three paintings, all of which sold. He was able to relocate to Paris with the money he had earned. When Metzinger arrived in Paris, he was immediately welcomed by the city’s art community and began showing frequently. It’s true that in 1903, he took part in the inaugural Salon d’Automne (which was a challenge to the “official” Paris Salon as an alternate, if more selected) show. Most of his work during this time period was landscapes and seascapes in France, painted in and around Caen, Brittany, and Calvados.
Metzinger began experimenting with Neo-Impressionism after moving to Paris, following in the footsteps of artists like Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. There was a spike in interest in Neo-Impressionism after huge Paul Signac exhibitions in December 1904, a significant Seurat retrospective at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, and a successful Cross solo show at the Galerie Druet, all in 1905. Berthe Weill, an avant-garde art dealer, became a major supporter of Metzinger after seeing his more daring use of geometry and colour.
Soon, Metzinger’s technique shifted from the finely detailed Divisionist approach to the bigger, freer brushstrokes and simpler shapes associated with the development of Fauvism. Eight works shown at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants proved his Fauvist transition, and he soon made friends with painters like André Derain and Henri Matisse (even assisting the latter in the hanging of the Salon). Having been chosen to the Salon’s hanging committee in 1906, Metzinger subsequently went on to show with the Fauvists in Moscow’s Salon de la Toison d’Or in 1908, further solidifying his growing renown.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, the connections Metzinger established in Paris and the creative experiments he conducted with other avant-gardists characterised his life. For example, in 1906, Metzinger and Robert Delaunay, who gave birth to the Orphism movement with his faceted, vivid compositions and celebration of the Belle Époque, established a strong relationship and painted one other’s portraits. Metzinger’s work was distinguished from that of other Fauves and Neo-Impressionists because of his use of Divisionist colour effects, which were explored in these works.
After meeting Albert Gleizes at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906, Metzinger travelled to his studio in Courbevoie, where he spent some time painting. With Gleizes, who was also experimenting with broken shapes and new viewpoints in painting, this was the beginning of a long relationship that would last for years to come. With Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso, Metzinger exhibited at the Berthe Weill gallery once again in 1907 and once more in 1908. During this time, he met poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom he struck up a close intellectual relationship immediately. Metzinger tied the knot with Lucie Soubiron on December 30, 1909, to cap off a remarkable decade.
Mid Life
The Salon des Indépendants hosted Metzinger’s Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire in 1910. Astonishingly, when the subject saw it, he declared it to be “the first ever Cubist portrait.” “Metzinger has lofty ambitions. The duties he takes on are ones that few masters would be able to escape from, and he does so icily “‘s a good place to start. The portrait of Metzinger, on the other hand, did not meet with universal acclaim at the 1910 Salon. As an example, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles said that Metzinger and his colleagues Gleizes, Léger, Delaunay, and Henri le Fauconnier were “ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes”.
At the Salon d’Automne in late 1910, Gleizes stated that this group “seriously discovered one another and understood what affinities brought us together” Gleizes asserted. They began socialising and exchanging ideas on a regular basis, talking about painters from the past who had inspired them and what they thought was in store for them in paintings going forward. Ingres and David were two of Gleizes’ favourites; Gleizes said on these meetings: “How many conversations took place among us apropos of these great ancestors, how many times we endeavoured to guess at the genesis of their works!” Picasso and Braque’s avant-gardist explorations with numerous perspectives on a same object were discussed in a 1910 essay by Metzinger in the magazine Pan. He wrote it with his friend Gleizes two years before Du Cubisme, one of the most significant art treatises ever published.
The ensemble took part in the infamous Salon des Indépendants Salle 41 in 1911. Although the exhibition took place in just one room (Salle 41), it was the first time a group of Cubist artists had shown together. Because of this, the collective was dubbed the “Salon Cubists” (and did not feature works by Picasso or Braque who were bound by exclusive contracts to the influential art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler). The exhibition made the broader population aware of Cubism and sparked controversy. As noted by the writer Phillip Barcio, the Salon Cubists after the Salle 41 show “Begun officially gathering at Albert Gleizes’ studio in Courbevoie or the Duchamp brothers’ house in Puteaux in the Paris suburbs. Groupe de Puteaux, a French term meaning “Puteaux Group,” is named after this second location where they met. The group discussed in depth what Cubism is and is not during these sessions, as well as its origins and objectives “‘s a good example of this.
“a fully formed conception of their method [and] so to mark the moment they mounted the first ever major Cubist exhibition: La Section d’Or [at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris]” says Barcio. By 1912 Groupe de Puteaux. Du Cubisme, which Barcio calls ” the first – and only – explanation of Cubism written by early Cubist artists themselves” was intended by Gleizes and Metzinger as an addition to La Section d’Or.
In the art world, Du Cubisme would have a significant impact, and it would be translated into several languages, illustrated with black-and-white reproductions by eleven artists – Metzinger, Gleizes, Picasso, Braque, Paul Cézanne, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, André Derain, and Marie Laurencin – all of whom had been influenced by, or had fully embraced, the Cubist philosophy. As a way of portraying the passage of time, movement, and fluidity, the writers described the concepts and methods of exposing a topic from various viewpoints.
However, the authors argued in favour of modern artists’ desire to push the boundaries of art “We all agree that the ultimate goal of painting is to reach as many people as possible, but painting should do so not in the language of the people, but rather in its own language, in order to move, dominate, and direct people rather than to be understood. Religions are the same way. … for the limited freedoms won by Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, and the impressionists, Cubism substitues a limitless liberty for the artist who abstains from any compromises and does not explain himself or say anything “‘s a good place to start.
Metzinger joined the faculty of the Académie de la Palette when Le Fauconnier nominated him to it after the publication of Du Cubisme. Russian avant-gardists Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova were among Metzinger’s Académie pupils. During the following year, Metzinger taught at the Académie Arenius and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière on a part-time basis. He continued to show in Paris’s most prestigious galleries, and in 1913 he took part in the renowned Exhibition of Cubist and Futurist Pictures (also known as The Armory Show), which toured the United States for a year and introduced European modernism to American audiences.
It wasn’t until Apollinaire’s Les Peintres Cubistes: Méditations Esthétiques in 1913 that he penned his own book on Cubism. After Picasso and Braque, Apollinaire referred to Metzinger in the poem as “the third Cubist” Metzinger’s work was characterised by a feeling of purity and “rigorous logic” and by art that goes beyond conventional perception, according to Apollinaire, who classified four kinds of Cubism: scientific, physical, orphic, and instinctual. Metzinger’s paintings, according to Apollinaire, “a painting by Metzinger always contains its own explanation…and is something unique it seems to me, in the history of art”.
Gleizes served in the French army before relocating to New York in 1915, Matisse to the French Riviera, and Le Fauconnier to the Netherlands, all of which created significant disruption to the Paris avant-garde during World War One. However, Metzinger stayed in the army and worked as a hospital orderly, all the while developing his art (as much as he could under the conditions). While the First World War was going on, he still put on shows (albeit seldom). In the spring of 1916, he had a significant show at the Walter Pach-organized Annual Exhibition of Modern Art at the Bourgeois Gallery in New York. As one of the country’s biggest exhibitions of contemporary art, it combined the work of emerging American avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp with works by major European artists like Henri Matisse.
Late Life
Metzinger contributed to the development of a style known as “Crystal Cubism” after the war by French poet and art critic Maurice Raynal. Crystal Cubism was a departure from Metzinger’s previous work in that it included bigger overlapping and intertwining geometric surfaces. The focus was on flat surfaces and overlapping planes in a simplified version of Cubism (also known as classical Cubism, pure Cubism, advanced Cubism, and pure Cubism). As Metzinger put it in a letter to Gleizes dated July 4, 1916: “The geometry of the fourth space has no more secrets for me … everything is number” He spoke on the need of quantifying and condensing form and space in order to make it more understandable. “all lasting art is never anything more than a mathematical expression of the relations that exist between what is inside and what is outside, the self and the world” he informed his close friend, and these principles applied to all of the visual arts as well as painting.
When Léonce Rosenberg, the art dealer representing other Crystal Cubists like Gleizes and Gris and Henri Lauren, agreed to represent Metzinger on the same three-year “exclusive-rights” contract, he did so. With his newly founded Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, Rosenberg established himself as one of Paris’ most prominent and well-known contemporary art dealers. Peter Brooke, an art historian, wrote the following: “After the war, Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de L’Effort Moderne opened a series of shows, continuing the trend of order and devotion to the aesthetically pure. French culture was once again replete with discussion of Cubism’s collective phenomenon, this time in its mature revisionist form. There was a return to order with Crystal Cubism, which was born out of an artist’s observation of his or her relationship to nature rather than from a deeper understanding of reality “‘s a good example of this. In January 1919 and February 1921, Rosenberg arranged a series of solo exhibitions for his painters, including Metzinger’s. Metzinger’s post-war professional success was, however, not reflected in his private life. In 1918, he lost his wife Lucie, and his only child committed suicide not long after.
Metzinger’s three-year contract with Rosenberg was extended to a fifteen-year deal when it expired, giving him more freedom to explore because of the additional financial stability. In fact, in the 1920s, he started to include greater realism into his work, such as representations of still life, urban life, and overt allusions to modern technology. His desire to explore new things led to the inclusion of Surrealist aspects in his work. Despite the difficulty of categorising his work, Metzinger’s use of vibrant colour and preoccupation with geometry, perspective, and dimension remained unwavering throughout his career. Around this period, he also got romantically engaged with French artist Suzanne Phocas. The pair tied the knot in 1929 and remained a source of creative inspiration for one another for decades (Phocas painted Portrait of Metzinger in 1926, and Metzinger painted Suzanne Phocas au sombrero in 1940, for instance).
Metzinger continued to show extensively and often during his latter years. With solo exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries (1930) and the Hanover Gallery (1932), he was able to demonstrate his enduring appeal in the capital city. Along with the group exhibitions in the United States, Metzinger was given a late career retrospective at the Arts Club in Chicago in 1953. He had previously taken part in many group shows. In 1947, he released a book of poems titled Ecluses instead of his usual essays on art philosophy. Metzinger taught at the Académie Frochot in Paris after retiring in 1950, where he continued to create and refine his own work. On November 3rd, 1956, he passed away in Paris.
Roberts argued in an article published with the exhibition book Jean Metzinger in Retrospect presented in 1985 at the University of Iowa Museum that contemporary art history had been cruel to Metzinger because of the overemphasis on Braque and Picasso. Metzinger’s work, according to Robbins, should be analysed in light of his own ideas and methods rather than always being compared to the work of artists outside his immediate group. Richard West, an art historian, concurred, pointing out the conflation of Cubism as a painting technique and an aesthetic philosophy. When it came to Picasso and Braque’s style, he said it was “unwise … to regard every deviation from the style of Picasso and Braque as a ‘misunderstanding'”
Due to his involvement in the Parisian avant-garde art scene and his work with Gleizes on Du Cubisme, Metzinger may be considered one of the founding fathers of Cubism. Erasmus Weddigen, the exhibition’s curator, described Metzinger as “an artist who is central to our understanding of Cubism”. The significance of his participation in the Surrealist movement has been acknowledged and praised both posthumously as well as during his lifetime in newspaper evaluations and Apollinaire’s writings. In addition to his many teaching positions, Metzinger experimented with a variety of art genres, such as Divisionism, Post-Impressionism, and Surrealism, indicating that he was an artist who was always looking for new ways to represent things in space and new methods to challenge the spectator.
Famous Art by Jean Metzinger
Baigneuses: Deux nus dans un paysage exotique
1905
One of the women is facing the spectator, the other has her back to the viewer. The scene is lush and tropical. The painting was completed soon after Metzinger arrived in Paris. The use of colour is Fauvist, while the composition is Divisionist. While the skin and hair of the individuals are painted in natural tones, the background is painted in warm and exotically Fauvist colours, such as reds, blues, greens, and oranges. This painting’s language is built from the painting’s dispersed brushstrokes and impasto, which form a mosaic-like composition. Metzinger calls this painting’s visual language. Mosaics had flattened foregrounds and backgrounds, while Seurat’s paintings have a lot of depth and perspective.
La danse, Baccante
1906
Metzinger creates a mosaic-like image of a classical female nude in a natural environment by using big blocks of opposing but similar-sized colours. As the title implies, the subject matter is classical, and it reflects on both the artist’s love of Ingres and David: They were usually shown naked and dancing since they were Bacchus’ female devotees. Due to the use of cubic brushstrokes and a geometric field devoid of depth, perspective and a front/back split become meaningless in this work.
Deux Nus
1910-1911
The art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler originally used the term Analytical Cubism in his book Der Weg zur Kubismus in 1920. (The Rise of Cubism). Metzinger and Gleizes’s Du Cubisme was published eight years before Kahnweiler’s work but it is often regarded as the first authoritative book on the historical evolution of Cubism since it clearly distinguished between the movement’s Analytical and Synthetic phases. During the Analytic period, which Deux Nus is a part of, the artist broke the subject into several angular layers, and in doing so, got their still lifes and portraits near to a state of complete abstraction in their paintings (the Synthetic Phase is defined rather as a “flat” style based on picture collage that often incorporated fragments of found everyday objects).
Au Vélodrome
1912
This work “a bit of a magpie, and amalgamator of the innovations of Cubism and Futurism” according to Sotheby’s expert Thomas Boyd-Bowman, who called Metzinger “exemplified his adept synthesis of avant-garde principles to vividly evoke the speed and dynamism of the modern age” At the conclusion of the 1912 Paris-Roubaix bicycle race, Au Vélodrome shows the victor, Charles Crupelandt. Crupelandt, riding a black bicycle while wearing a green and black striped cycling shirt, occupies the most of the foreground. The crowds in the backdrop are visible through the cyclist’s figure due to the use of various forms and transparency. There’s a sense of urgency and urgency to get to the finish line in this painting, as shown by the cyclist leaning over the handlebars and another racer’s spinning rear wheel just out of frame to his left. Cubist elements including geometric forms, various planes, and shifting perspectives abound in this work by the artist.
La Femme au Cheval
1911-1912
Metzinger depicts a naked woman from several angles of view in this painting as part of his ongoing investigation into the “mobile perspective” Many of the aesthetic choices associated with Analytic Cubism are present in La Femme au Cheval, including numerous planes, volumetric shapes, and both rectilinear and curved lines. Towards the right of the canvas, we see a lady tending to a horse while a mysterious scene to the left has geometric planes and an unidentified figure. A vase, plants, and flowers may be seen at the figure’s feet. Here, Metzinger prefers a more muted colour scheme, with sensual and earthy tones used to give a feeling of light reflecting off the centre figure, even if bursts of vivid colour can still be seen in the presence of the blue flowers.
Melon et compotier
1916-1918
Metzinger was a pioneer of the Crystal Cubism art movement (given its name by the poet and critic Maurice Raynal). Crystal Cubism has been connected to the “Return to Order” (or “Interwar Classicism”) that followed World War One, despite its emergence during the war years. Crystal Cubism, which was pioneered by Metzinger and Gleizes, also featured “purer” Cubist works by Braque, Picasso, and Juan Gris, and was characterised by simplified geometric planes with a greater use of colour and vibrancy in composition.
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver
- A key figure in the Cubist movement, Metzinger earned his place in avant-garde development by the quality of his paintings as well as the breadth of his theoretical essays.
- He was a member of the so-called Salon Cubists and, together with Albert Gleizes, co-wrote Du Cubisme, the earliest and most important book on Cubism, which made him more famous than Braque or Picasso.
- Metzinger, in contrast to Gleizes, was more open to formal experimentation, as shown by his work, which incorporates aspects of Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism, and even Surrealism.
- In his latter years, he abandoned theoretical work in favour of poetry after juggling his creative and intellectual production with a number of important teaching positions.
- They had set the bar high for Cubism by refusing to let the “frivolity” of colour or movement get in the way of their goal of creating art with many perspectives. (
- Along with the other Salon Cubists) Metzinger was considerably more receptive to the potential of colour as an instrument for depicting visual energy in his work.
- His efforts, which made Cubism more approachable to a sceptic general audience, contributed to a shift in popular perceptions of avant-garde art and elevated Cubism to a prominent position on the worldwide art scene.
- He was a member of the Groupe de Puteaux while he was alive.
- La Section d’Or, the first major Cubist show, was organised by the group.
- Du Cubisme by Metzinger and Gleizes, a seminal work on Cubism, served as an important accompaniment to the show.
- To date, this is the only account of early Cubism published by artists who had a direct impact on the direction contemporary art would take in the following decades.
- “mobile perspective” research has made Metzinger a household name.
- The Danish physician Niels Bohr argued that a viewer must be able to study an item concurrently from different perspectives in order to acquire a full knowledge of it, and his exploration of several facets of a single topic mirrored that.
- As a result of reading Du Cubisme, Bohr became acquainted with Metzinger’s 1911 picture La Femme au Cheval, which hung on his office wall as a reminder of the fourth dimension in painting (and the functional role the spectator plays in comprehending an artwork).As a young artist, Metzinger was influenced by Neo-Impressionism, Divisionism, and the fractured brushwork of artists like Cézanne, Seurat, and Gauguin, resulting in his proto-Cubist works.
- With his “daring” use of colour and stunning mosaic illusions, he set the tone for a lifelong devotion to the notion that art should not be an exact copy of reality but rather a reflection of it.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
