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Lot Essay
Although credit for the invention of Cubism lies unequivocally with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it was Metzinger more than any other painter who took the helm in forming a cubist school of painting and codifying its ideas in writing. In 1911, he organized a group of like-minded artists—Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, and himself—to exhibit together at the Salon des Indépendants, officially launching the cubist movement in Paris. It is quite likely that the present work, Paysage cubiste, was included in this exhibition. The following year, Metzinger was a driving force behind the Section d’Or exhibition at the Galerie la Boétie, the most comprehensive manifestation of Cubism before the war. Along with Gleizes, moreover, Metzinger was the co-author of Du Cubisme (1912), which articulated fully for the first time a philosophical basis for this radically new pictorial language.
Metzinger’s rational, intellectual approach to Cubism informed his painting as well as his organizing, theorizing, and writing. Apollinaire noted in 1913 that Metzinger’s art, “always more and more abstract, but always charming, raises and attempts to solve the most difficult and unforeseen problems of aesthetics” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1985, p. 44).
It is believed that the present work is the one that Gleizes described in the article he published in the September 1911 issue of La revue indépendante:
"[Metzinger] is a painter first, gifted with a rare sensibility, sustained by a will and a logical mind in the service of a subtle intelligence. Some day, the influence his research has had on the evolution of the plastic method, on the renaissance of twentieth-century painting, will have to be recognized…His Femme nue, depicted from various angles and in integral relationship with the setting, the shapes very subtly nested one into another, was more like a masterful demonstration of the total image than an exclusively pictorial creation...But it was Jean Metzinger's duty to show us scientifically, that is, deliberately, the result of his research, and winning over the few literate beholders was enough for him…In Paysage, perfectly balanced and purified of any needless chatter, where the forms of houses and trees converged with those of the terrain and the sky in a whole that was classical in the full sense of the word, where the transposition of objects, soberly depicted, made it easy to read, one could assess the considerable contribution his will has given us" (op. cit.).
Metzinger’s rational, intellectual approach to Cubism informed his painting as well as his organizing, theorizing, and writing. Apollinaire noted in 1913 that Metzinger’s art, “always more and more abstract, but always charming, raises and attempts to solve the most difficult and unforeseen problems of aesthetics” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1985, p. 44).
It is believed that the present work is the one that Gleizes described in the article he published in the September 1911 issue of La revue indépendante:
"[Metzinger] is a painter first, gifted with a rare sensibility, sustained by a will and a logical mind in the service of a subtle intelligence. Some day, the influence his research has had on the evolution of the plastic method, on the renaissance of twentieth-century painting, will have to be recognized…His Femme nue, depicted from various angles and in integral relationship with the setting, the shapes very subtly nested one into another, was more like a masterful demonstration of the total image than an exclusively pictorial creation...But it was Jean Metzinger's duty to show us scientifically, that is, deliberately, the result of his research, and winning over the few literate beholders was enough for him…In Paysage, perfectly balanced and purified of any needless chatter, where the forms of houses and trees converged with those of the terrain and the sky in a whole that was classical in the full sense of the word, where the transposition of objects, soberly depicted, made it easy to read, one could assess the considerable contribution his will has given us" (op. cit.).