Jean Metzinger 1883-1956
32 avenue Marceau 75008 Paris | +33 (0)1 42 61 42 10 | +33 (0)6 07 88 75 84 | [email protected] | galeriearyjan.com Jean Metzinger 1883-1956
Biography
Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger (June 24, 1883 - November 3, 1956) was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes, developed the theoretical foundations of 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. 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 principal 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.
Oil on canvas depicting a young woman in a meditation position in a tropical landscape composed with reeds, a bird, water and mountains in the background. This work shows the different sources of inspiration from which Jean Metzinger develops his own 'kitchen' that can be regarded as a synthesis of three major artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, here the artist combines divisive technique, to which he gives a very personal interpretation by the use of large rectangular keys juxtaposed with a palette of pure colors, which can be obviously described as 'fauve'. To this technique is combined an iconography which symbolic dimension is reminiscent in many respects, of the symbolist language of the late nineteenth century: the attitude of meditation of the central figure, the lotus placed in the foreground of the composition, bird - a phoenix? - are Buddhist symbols of fullness, of ecstasy and reincarnation.
Museums CHICAGO: Art Institute of Chicago NEW YORK: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum PARIS: Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris VENICE: Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Bibliography Jean Metzinger, Divisionism, Cubism and Post-Cubism Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme, Eugène Figuière Editeurs, Collection " Tous les Arts ", Paris, 1912
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