Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes was a French artist, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists, he was a member of Der Sturm, his many theoretical writings were most appreciated in Germany, where at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, played an important role in making America aware of modern art, he was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, both a founder and participant in the Abbaye de Créteil. Gleizes exhibited at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing, e.g. La Peinture et ses lois, Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire and Homocentrisme. Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop.
He was the nephew of Léon Comerre, a successful portrait painter who won the 1875 Prix de Rome. The young Albert Gleizes did not like school and skipped classes to idle away the time writing poetry and wandering through the nearby Montmartre cemetery. After completing his secondary schooling, Gleizes spent four years in the 72nd Infantry Regiment of the French army began pursuing a career as a painter. Gleizes began to paint self-taught around 1901 in the Impressionist tradition, his first landscapes from around Courbevoie appear inspired by Alfred Sisley or Camille Pissarro. Although related to Pissarro in technique, Gleizes' particular view-points as well as the composition and conception of early works represent a clear departure from the style of late Impressionism; the density with which these works are painted and their solid framework suggest affinities with Divisionism which were noted by early critics. Gleizes was only twenty-one years of age when his work titled La Seine à Asnières was exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902.
The following year Gleizes exhibited two paintings at the Salon d'Automne. In 1905 Gleizes was among the founders of l'Association Ernest-Renan, a union of students opposed to military propaganda. Gleizes was in charge of the Section littéraire et artistique, organizing theater productions and poetry readings. At the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Gleizes exhibited Jour de marché en banlieue. Tending towards 1907 his work evolved into a Post-Impressionist style with strong Naturalist and Symbolist components. Gleizes and others decide to create an association fraternelle d'artistes and rent a large house in Créteil; the Abbaye de Créteil was a self-supporting community of artists that aimed to develop their art free of any commercial concerns. For nearly a year, Gleizes along with other painters, poets and writers, gathered to create. A lack of income forced them to give up their cherished Abbaye de Créteil in early 1908 and Gleizes moved to 7 rue du Delta near Montmartre, with artists Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Doucet, Maurice Drouart and Geo Printemps.
In 1908 Gleizes exhibited at the Toison d'Or in Moscow. The same year, showing a great interest in color and reflecting the transient influence of Fauvism, the work of Gleizes became more synthetic with a proto-Cubist component. Gleizes' Fauve-like period was brief, lasting several months, when his paint was thickest and color brightest, his concern for structural rhythms and simplification was dominant, his geometric simplifications at this time were more akin to Pont-Aven School and Les Nabis principles than to Paul Cézanne. His landscapes of 1909 are characterized by the reducing of forms of nature to primary shapes. During the summer of the same year his style became linear and stripped, broken down into multiple forms and facets with attenuated colors, close to that of the painter Henri Le Fauconnier. In 1910 a group began to form which included Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay, they met at Henri le Fauconnier's studio on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, near the Boulevard de Montparnasse.
These soirées would included writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Roger Allard, René Arcos, Paul Fort, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Alexandre Mercereau, Jules Romains and André Salmon. Together with other young painters, the group wanted to emphasise a research into form, in opposition to the Neo-Impressionist emphasis on color. From 1910 onwards, Albert Gleizes was directly involved with Cubism, both as an artist and principle theorist of the movement. Gleizes' evolvement in Cubism saw him exhibit at the twenty-sixth Salon des Indépendants in 1910, he showed his Portrait de René Arcos and L'Arbre, two paintings in which the emphasis on simplified form had begun to overwhelm the representational interest of the paintings. The same tendency is evident in Jean Metzinger's Portrait of Apollinaire in the same Salon; when Louis Vauxcelles wrote his initial review of the Salon he made a passing and imprecise reference to Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Henri le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes."Guillaume Apollinaire, in his account of the same salon at the Grand Palais remarked "with joy" that the general sense of the exhibition signifies "La déroute de l'impressionnisme," in reference to the works of a conspi
Section d'Or
The Section d'Or known as Groupe de Puteaux, was a collective of painters, sculptors and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism. Based in the Parisian suburbs, the group held regular meetings at the home of the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux and at the studio of Albert Gleizes in Courbevoie. Active from 1911 to around 1914, members of the collective came to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911; this showing by Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Marie Laurencin, created a scandal that brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the first time. The Salon de la Section d'Or, held October 1912—the largest and most important public showing of Cubist works prior to World War I—exposed Cubism to a wider audience still. After the war, with support given by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, Cubism returned to the front line of Parisian artistic activity. Various elements of the Groupe de Puteaux would mount two more large-scale Section d'Or exhibitions, in 1920 and in 1925, with the goal of revealing the complete process of transformation and renewal that had transpired since the onset of Cubism.
The group seems to have adopted the name "Section d'Or" as both an homage to the mathematical harmony associated with Georges Seurat, to distinguish themselves from the narrower style of Cubism developed in parallel by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the Montmartre quarter of Paris. In addition, the name was to highlight that Cubism, rather than being an isolated art-form, represented the continuation of a grand tradition: indeed, the golden ratio, or golden section had fascinated Western intellectuals of diverse interests for at least 2,400 years; the Puteaux Group organized their first exhibition under the name Salon de la Section d'Or at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris, October 1912. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published a major defense of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement, entitled Du "Cubisme". Following the 1911 Salon exhibitions the group formed by Le Fauconnier, Gleizes, Léger and R. Delaunay expanded to include several other artists.
František Kupka had lived in Puteaux for several years in the same complex as Jacques Villon. Francis Picabia was introduced to the circle by Guillaume Apollinaire with whom he had become friendly. Most was the contact established with Metzinger and the Duchamp brothers, who exhibited under the names of Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp and Duchamp-Villon; the opening address was given by Apollinaire. The participation of many of these artists in the formation of Les Artistes de Passy in October 1912 was an attempt to transform the Passy district of Paris into yet another art-centre; the idea of the Section d'Or originated in the course of conversations between Gleizes and Jacques Villon. The group's title was suggested by Villon, after reading a 1910 translation of Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura by Joséphin Péladan. Peladan attached great mystical significance to the golden section, other similar geometric configurations. For Villon, this symbolized his belief in order and the significance of mathematical proportions, because it reflected patterns and relationships occurring in nature.
Jean Metzinger and the Duchamp brothers were passionately interested in mathematics. Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris and Marcel Duchamp at this time were associates of Maurice Princet, an amateur mathematician credited for introducing profound and rational scientific arguments into Cubist discussions; the name La Section d'Or represented a continuity with past traditions and current trends in related fields, while leaving open future developments in the arts. Art historian Daniel Robbins argued that in addition to referencing the mathematical golden section, the term associated with the Salon Cubists refers to the name of the earlier Bandeaux d'Or group, with which Albert Gleizes and other former members of the Abbaye de Créteil had been involved; the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or was arguably the most important pre-World War. In the previous year the Cubists and a large number of their associates had exhibited at the Galerie de l'Art Contemporain under the auspices of the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne.
This exhibition had received some attention in the press, though due to the diversity of the works presented it had been referred to as an exposition des fauves et cubistes. The Salon de la Section d'Or, was accepted as being Cubist in nature. Over 200 works were displayed, the fact that many of the artists showed artworks representative of their development from 1909 to 1912 gave the exhibition the allure of a Cubist retrospective. Though the Salle 41 Cubists had been surprised by the impassioned reactions generated by the 1911 Salon des Indépendants showing, they appear to have been eager to attract as much attention as possible with the Salon de la Section d'Or; the inauguration was held from nine until midnight, for which the onl
John Quinn (collector)
John Quinn was an Irish-American cognoscente of the art world. Quinn was an important patron of chief figures in literary Modernism. In the 1920s he owned the largest single collection of modern European paintings in the world, he fought key legal battles that opened American culture to 20th century art movements, including his Congressional appeals to overturn the Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act. He staged the first great exhibit of European modern art in America at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York, in 1913. Quinn was born in Tiffin, Ohio to an Irish baker and grocer, James W. Quinn, his wife, Mary, he grew up in nearby Fostoria, where his parents relocated in 1871. His paternal grandparents James and Mary Quinn, natives of County Limerick settled in Tiffin in 1851, where the grandfather was a blacksmith. After graduating from the University of Michigan and Georgetown University Law School, followed by a degree in international relations from Harvard University, Quinn became a successful New York lawyer, getting involved in New York’s Tammany Hall politics, but when his candidate did not get the nomination at the 1912 Democratic National Convention he became disgusted with the whole system and became an art patron, art collector, collector of manuscripts.
His French adviser for Post-Impressionist art was Henri-Pierre Roche, who wrote the novel Jules et Jim. Quinn and Roche worked together to develop the famous 1913 Armory Show. Quinn was a principal supporter and purchaser of manuscripts of novelist Joseph Conrad during his lifetime, he met Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1902, became a major supporter, helping him found the Abbey Theatre. In the 1920s Quinn was a legal defender of the novel Ulysses by James Joyce, defended The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, he was a friend of American poet Ezra Pound. According to author Richard Spence, Quinn was a supporter of the Irish nationalist cause and associated with figures such as John Devoy and Roger Casement, although he had worked for British Intelligence services before and after World War I. In this role he acted as case officer for, among others, Aleister Crowley, an agent provocateur posing as an Irish nationalist in order to infiltrate anti-British groups of Irish and Germans in the United States. In 1913 he convinced the United States Congress to overturn the 1909 Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act, which retained the duty on foreign works of art less than 20 years old, discouraging Americans from collecting modern European art.
A huge and controversial event, the 1913 Armory Show in New York City included examples of Symbolism, Post-Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Cubism. Quinn opened the exhibition with the words:... it was time the American people had an opportunity to see and judge for themselves concerning the work of the Europeans who are creating a new art. In 1913 Quinn represented Margaret Kieley in a $2,000,000 legal contest over the Last Will and Testament of her husband Timothy J. Kieley's estate. Margaret prevailed because her husband's nephews and nieces could not produce vital witnesses and defaulted. In the early 1920s Quinn represented Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap for their publication in The Little Review of serial portions of James Joyce's Ulysses, which the U. S. Post Office had found "obscene". Quinn died at age 54 of intestinal cancer, was buried by his family in Fostoria, Ohio. Leaving no heirs, he willed that his art collection be auctioned off and dispersed among museums and collectors around the world.
In 1927, an exhibition and sale of Quinn's art collection took place in New York City. The event included works by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Robert Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Gino Severini, Marie Laurencin, Constantin Brâncuși, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, in addition to American artists Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, Marsden Hartley, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Max Weber; the sale was conducted by Hiram H. Parke at the American Art Galleries. A catalog was published for the occasion by the American Art Association. John Quinn, The Irish Home-rule Convention, An American Opinion, The Macmillan company, 1917 William M. Murphy. Prodigal Father: the Life of John Butler Yeats Richard and Janis Londraville. Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle of Friends Janis and Richard Londraville, eds. John Quinn: Selected Irish Writers from his Library Benjamin Lawrence Reid The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends John Quinn papers, 1901-1926, held by the Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library John Quinn, 1870-1925: collection of paintings, water colors and sculpture, Pidgeon Hill Press, 1926 Judith Zilczer, John Quinn and Modern Art Collectors in America, 1913-1924, The American Art Journal, Vol. 14, No.
1, Kennedy Galleries, Inc. pp. 56-71 The Library of John Quinn, complete catalogue of the library of John Quinn: sold by auction in five parts, New York: Anderson Galleries
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, chess player, writer whose work is associated with Cubism and conceptual art. He was not directly associated with Dada groups. Duchamp is regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art, he had a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind. Marcel Duchamp was born at Blainville-Crevon in Normandy and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities; the art of painter and engraver Émile Frédéric Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, the family liked to play chess, read books and make music together.
Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp's seven children, one died as an infant and four became successful artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of: Jacques Villon, printmaker Raymond Duchamp-Villon, sculptor Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, painter; as a child, with his two elder brothers away from home at school in Rouen, Duchamp was closer to his sister Suzanne, a willing accomplice in games and activities conjured by his fertile imagination. At eight years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers' footsteps when he left home and began schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, in Rouen. Two other students in his class became well-known artists and lasting friends: Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont. For the next eight years, he was locked into an educational regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not an outstanding student, his best subject was mathematics and he won two mathematics prizes at the school, he won a prize for drawing in 1903, at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize, validating his recent decision to become an artist.
He learned academic drawing from a teacher who unsuccessfully attempted to "protect" his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamp's true artistic mentor at the time was his brother Jacques Villon, whose fluid and incisive style he sought to imitate. At 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting his sister Suzanne in various poses and activities; that summer he painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils. Duchamp's early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles, he experimented with classical subjects. When he was asked about what had influenced him at the time, Duchamp cited the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whose approach to art was not outwardly anti-academic, but individual, he studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, but preferred playing billiards to attending classes. During this time Duchamp sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use visual puns, or both.
Such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life. In 1905, he began his compulsory military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment, working for a printer in Rouen. There he learned typography and printing processes—skills he would use in his work. Owing to his eldest brother Jacques' membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamp's work was exhibited in the 1908 Salon d'Automne, the following year in the Salon des Indépendants. Fauves and Paul Cézanne's proto-Cubism influenced his paintings, although the critic Guillaume Apollinaire—who was to become a friend—criticized what he called "Duchamp's ugly nudes". Duchamp became lifelong friends with exuberant artist Francis Picabia after meeting him at the 1911 Salon d'Automne, Picabia proceeded to introduce him to a lifestyle of fast cars and "high" living. In 1911, at Jacques' home in Puteaux, the brothers hosted a regular discussion group with Cubist artists including Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, Alexander Archipenko.
Poets and writers participated. The group came to be known as the Section d'Or. Uninterested in the Cubists' seriousness, or in their focus on visual matters, Duchamp did not join in discussions of Cubist theory and gained a reputation of being shy. However, that same year he painted in a Cubist style and added an impression of motion by using repetitive imagery. During this period Duchamp's fascination with transition, change and distance became manifest, as many artists of the time, he was intrigued with the concept of depicting the fourth dimension in art, his painting Sad Young Man on a Train embodies this concern: First, there's the idea of the movement of the train, that of the sad young man, in a corridor and, moving about. There is the distortion of the young man—I had called this elementary parallelism, it was a formal decomposition. The object is stretched out, as if elastic; the lines follow each other in parallels, while changing subtly to form the movement, or the form of the young man in question
Metz Cathedral
Cathedral of Saint Stephen of Metz known as Metz Cathedral, is a historic Roman Catholic cathedral in Metz, capital of Lorraine, France. Saint-Étienne de Metz is the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Metz and the seat of the Bishop of Metz Pierre Raffin; the cathedral treasury exhibits the millennium rich collection of the Bishopric of Metz, including paraments and items used for the Eucharist. Saint-Stephen of Metz has one of the highest naves in the world; the cathedral is nicknamed the Good Lord's Lantern, displaying the largest expanse of stained glass in the world with 6,496 m2. Those stained glass windows include works by Gothic and Renaissance master glass makers Hermann von Münster, Theobald of Lixheim, Valentin Bousch and romantic Charles-Laurent Maréchal, tachist Roger Bissière, cubist Jacques Villon, modernist Marc Chagall. Saint-Stephen Cathedral is a Rayonnant Gothic edifice built with the local yellow Jaumont limestone. Like in French Gothic architecture, the building is compact, with slight projection of the transepts and subsidiary chapels.
However, it displays singular, distinctive characteristics in both its ground plan and architecture compared to most of the other cathedrals. Because of topography of Moselle valley in Metz, the common west-east axis of the ground plan could not be applied and the church is oriented north-northeast. Moreover, unlike the French and German Gothic cathedrals having three portals surmounted by a rose window and two large towers, Saint-Stephen of Metz has a single porch at its western facade. One enters laterally in the edifice by another portal placed at the south-western side of the narthex, declining the usual alignment of the entrance with the choir; the nave is supported by flying buttresses and culminates at 41.41 metres high, making one of the highest naves in the world. The height of the nave is contrasted by the low height of the aisles with 14.3 metres high, reinforcing the sensation of tallness of the nave. This feature permitted the architects to create tall expanses of stained glass.
Through its history, Saint-Stephen Cathedral was subjected to architectural and ornamental modifications with successive additions of Neoclassical and Neogothic elements. The edification of Saint-Stephen of Metz took place on an Ancient site from the 5th century consecrated to Saint Stephen protomartyr. According to Gregory of Tours, the shrine of Saint Stephen was the sole structure spared during the sack of 451 by Attila's Huns; the construction of the Gothic cathedral began in 1220 within the walls of an Ottonian basilica dating from the 10th century. The integration into the cathedral's ground plan of a Gothic chapel from the 12th century at the western end resulted in the absence of a main western portal; the work was completed around 1520 and the new cathedral was consecrated on 11 April 1552. In 1755, French architect Jacques-François Blondel was awarded by the Royal Academy of Architecture to build a Neoclassical portal at the West end of the cathedral, he disengaged the cathedral's facade by razing an adjacent cloister and three attached churches and achieved the westwork in 1764.
In 1877, the Saint-Stephen of Metz was damaged after a conflagration due to fireworks. After this incident, it was decided the refurbishment of the cathedral and its adornments within a Neogothic style; the western facade was rebuilt between 1898 and 1903. 984–c.1040 Construction of an Ottonian basilica on an ancient shrine dedicated to Saint Stephen c.1180–1207 Construction of a chapel in Early Gothic style on the west side of the basilica 1220 Beginning of the construction of the Gothic cathedral within the foundations of the Ottonian basilica, construction of the aisles 1265–1285 Construction of the triforia and the two bell towers 1285–c.1290 Elevation of the westwork within the foundations of a Gothic chapel from the 12th century 1290s Construction of the vaults of the nave and the supporting flying buttresses c.1300–1330s Construction of the Lady Chapel 1380 Junction between the former Gothic chapel and the nave 1384 Creation of the stained glass tympanum of the west facade and the rose window by master glass maker Hermann von Münster 1478–1483 Elevation of the spire 1486–1490s Construction of the northern transept, 1504 Creation of the stained glass tympanum of the northern transept by master glass maker Theobald of Lixheim c.1490–1500s Construction of the Gothics choir and East end 1504–1520s Construction of the southern transept, 1518-1539 Stained glass by master glass maker Valentin Bousch, including the tympanum on the southern transept.
1761–1764 Neoclassical refurbishment conducted by Jacques-François Blondel c.1850–1880s Destruction of the ornaments of Jacques-François Blondel 1889–1903 Construction of a Neogothic portal on the west front 1958–1960 Stained glass windows of Marc Chagall The following picture presents the ground plan of Saint-Stephen of Metz and the position of the architectural elements: The stained glass windows, which together constitute the largest expanse of ancient stained glass in a single building, were made by the master craftsmen Hermann von Münster in the fourteenth century, Valentin Bousch in the sixteenth. In the twentieth century the artist Marc Chagall created three stained glass windows for the cathedral between 1958 and 1968. Roger Bissière and Jacques Villon provided designs for further windows, including the complete chapel of the Holy Sacrament. List of highest church naves List of tallest churches Photos Denis Krieger, extensive collection of stained glass photos on Flickr
Jean Metzinger
Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, writer and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism. 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. 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. 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, above all because of his artistic personality. 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, the principles upon which an non-representational art could be built, led to La Peinture et ses lois, 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 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. In terms of the separation of culture and life, this period emerges as the most important in the history of Modernism. For Metzinger, the classical vision had been an incomplete representation of real things, based on an incomplete set of laws and theorems, he believed the world was dynamic and changing in time, that it appeared different depending on the point of view of the observer. Each of these viewpoints were valid according to underlying symmetries inherent in nature. For inspiration, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist and one of the principle founders of quantum mechanics, hung in his office a large painting by Metzinger, La Femme au Cheval, a conspicuous early example of "mobile perspective" implementation. Jean Metzinger came from a prominent military family.
His great-grandfather, Nicolas Metzinger, Captain in the 1st Horse Artillery Regiment, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, had served under Napoleon Bonaparte. A street in the Sixième arrondissement of Nantes was named after Jean's grandfather, Charles Henri Metzinger. Following the early death of his father, Eugène François Metzinger, Jean pursued interests in mathematics and painting, though his mother, a music professor by the name of Eugénie Louise Argoud, had ambitions of his becoming a medical doctor. Jean's younger brother Maurice would become a musician. By 1900 Jean was a student at Académie Cours Cambronne in Nantes, working under Hippolyte Touront, a well-known portrait painter who taught an academic, conventional style of painting. Metzinger, was interested in the current trends in painting. Metzinger sent three paintings to the Salon des Indépendants in 1903, subsequently moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale. From the age of 20, Metzinger supported himself as a professional painter.
He exhibited in Paris from 1903, participating in the first Salon d'Automne the same year and taking part in a group show with Raoul Dufy and Torent, from 19 January-22 February 1903 at the gallery run by Berthe Weill, with another show November 1903. Metzinger exhibited at Berthe Weill's gallery 23 November-21 December 1905 and again 14 January-10 February 1907, with Robert Delaunay, in 1908 with André Derain, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso, 28 April-28 May 1910 with Derain, Georges Rouault and Kees van Dongen, he would show four more times at Weill's gallery, 17 January-1 February 1913, March 1913, June 1914 and February 1921. It is at Berthe Weill's. Berthe Weill was the first Parisian art dealer to sell works of Picasso. Along with Picasso and Metzinger, she helped discover Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Utrillo. In 1904 Metzinger exhibited six paintings in the Divisionist style at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. In 1905 Metzinger exhibited eight paintings at Salon des Indépendants.
In this exhibition Metzinger is directly asso
Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, inspired related movements in music and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century; the term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s. The movement was pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, joined by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger. One primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works 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. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from a single viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.
In France, offshoots of Cubism developed, including Orphism, Abstract art and Purism. The impact of Cubism was wide-ranging. In other countries Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, De Stijl and Art Deco developed in response to Cubism. Early Futurist paintings hold in common with Cubism the fusing of the past and the present, the representation of different views of the subject pictured at the same time called multiple perspective, simultaneity or multiplicity, while Constructivism was influenced by Picasso's technique of constructing sculpture from separate elements. Other common threads between these disparate movements include the faceting or simplification of geometric forms, the association of mechanization and modern life. Historians have divided the history of Cubism into phases. In one scheme, the first phase of Cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, a phrase coined by Juan Gris a posteriori, was both radical and influential as a short but significant art movement between 1910 and 1912 in France.
A second phase, Synthetic Cubism, remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, The Cubist Epoch. According to Cooper there was "Early Cubism", when the movement was developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque. Douglas Cooper's restrictive use of these terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Gris and Léger implied an intentional value judgement. Cubism burgeoned between 1907 and 1911. Pablo Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has been considered a proto-Cubist work. In 1908, in his review of Georges Braque's exhibition at Kahnweiler's gallery, the critic Louis Vauxcelles called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes". Vauxcelles recounted how Matisse told him at the time, "Braque has just sent in a painting made of little cubes"; the critic Charles Morice spoke of Braque's little cubes.
The motif of the viaduct at l'Estaque had inspired Braque to produce three paintings marked by the simplification of form and deconstruction of perspective. Georges Braque's 1908 Houses at L’Estaque prompted Vauxcelles, in Gil Blas, 25 March 1909, to refer to bizarreries cubiques. Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, as the first Cubist paintings; the first organized group exhibition by Cubists took place at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1911 in a room called'Salle 41'. By 1911 Picasso was recognized as the inventor of Cubism, while Braque's importance and precedence was argued with respect to his treatment of space and mass in the L’Estaque landscapes, but "this view of Cubism is associated with a distinctly restrictive definition of which artists are properly to be called Cubists," wrote the art historian Christopher Green: "Marginalizing the contribution of the artists who exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911 "The assertion that the Cubist depiction of space, mass and volume supports the flatness of the canvas was made by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as early as 1920, but it was subject to criticism in the 1950s and 1960s by Clement Greenberg.
Contemporary views of Cubism are complex, formed to some extent in response to the "Salle 41" Cubists, whose methods were too distinct from those of Picasso and Braque to be considered secondary to them. Alternative interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed. Wider views of Cubism include artists who were associated with the "Salle 41" artists, e.g. Francis Picabia.
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