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Lot Essay
Bozena Nikiel has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
Metzinger is in long and distinguished line of painters who featured the circus in their oeuvre, including Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Fernand Léger. The smooth delineation of contours and volumetric shading of rounded forms is clearly indebted to his Purist aesthetic of the 1920s.
Painted during the années folles, the effervescence of the post-war period translated especially through leisure and entertainment. The music-hall shows, operettas, theater, circus and cinema all became popular pastimes for the burgeoning middle class. Metzinger captures this moment in Cirque where he situates the viewer close to the scene as the performance unfolds before our eyes. In the center of the ring a beautiful female performer wears a golden crown and costume while daringly balancing on a trotting white horse. She is perhaps like the Greek hero Bellerophon, who, mounted on the winged-steed Pegasus, vanquished the chimera, symbolizing the triumph of good over evil. In the far left a clown prepares for his next routine, grabbing hold of a yellow sash and pulling it tightly.
Metzinger's tendency towards legible forms was cemented in the 1920s by a shift from Cubism to Purism in his art. Though not formally involved in the circle of artists around Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, Metzinger did contribute to Ozenfant's review L'Elan. By 1925, he had also adopted much brighter colors and his works of the period clearly evince the influence of Fernand Léger in the preference for urban and still life scenes.
Another example from this series is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Metzinger is in long and distinguished line of painters who featured the circus in their oeuvre, including Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Fernand Léger. The smooth delineation of contours and volumetric shading of rounded forms is clearly indebted to his Purist aesthetic of the 1920s.
Painted during the années folles, the effervescence of the post-war period translated especially through leisure and entertainment. The music-hall shows, operettas, theater, circus and cinema all became popular pastimes for the burgeoning middle class. Metzinger captures this moment in Cirque where he situates the viewer close to the scene as the performance unfolds before our eyes. In the center of the ring a beautiful female performer wears a golden crown and costume while daringly balancing on a trotting white horse. She is perhaps like the Greek hero Bellerophon, who, mounted on the winged-steed Pegasus, vanquished the chimera, symbolizing the triumph of good over evil. In the far left a clown prepares for his next routine, grabbing hold of a yellow sash and pulling it tightly.
Metzinger's tendency towards legible forms was cemented in the 1920s by a shift from Cubism to Purism in his art. Though not formally involved in the circle of artists around Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, Metzinger did contribute to Ozenfant's review L'Elan. By 1925, he had also adopted much brighter colors and his works of the period clearly evince the influence of Fernand Léger in the preference for urban and still life scenes.
Another example from this series is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.