Paris, France
Jean Metzinger was appointed to teach at the Académie de La Palette, Paris, in 1912.
Paris, France
In 1913 Metzinger served as a professor at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Paris, France
Jean Metzinger was appointed to teach at the Académie de La Palette, Paris, in 1912.
Paris, France
In 1913 Metzinger served as a professor at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Jean Metzinger.
Metzinger was born in Nantes, France, on June 24, 1883, to a prominent military family. Nicolas Metzinger, his great-grandfather, was the Captain in the 1st Horse Artillery Regiment, and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, who had served under Napoleon Bonaparte. He was the son of Eugène François Metzinger and Eugénie Louise Argoud, a music professor. Jean Metzinger had a younger brother Maurice, who became a musician, excelling as a cellist.
Until 1900 Jean Metzinger studied at Académie Cours Cambronne in Nantes, working under the supervision of Hippolyte Touront, who was a well-known portraitist. However he taught an academic, conventional style of painting, while Metzinger was more interested in the current trends in painting.
In 1903 Metzinger sold several of his paintings and moved to Paris to pursue an art career. It was a fantastic time to be a young artist there as the city was alive with ideas and creative types. And at the beginning of the 20th century, Paris became the center of the contemporary art world.
In Paris he exhibited regularly starting from 1903, he took part in the first Salon d'Automne the same year and in a group show with Raoul Dufy, Lejeune and Torent, from 19 January-22 February 1903 at the gallery managed by Berthe Weill, having another show in November 1903. In 1904 the artist presented eight paintings in the Divisionist style at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. In this exhibit Metzinger was directly associated with the artists later known as Fauves: Delaunay, Valtat, Camoin, van Dongen, Friesz, Manguin, Dufy, Marquet, Matisse, and others. Jean Metzinger exhibited at Berthe Weill's gallery in 1905 and again in 1907 with Robert Delaunay.
Early in his career, Metzinger examined several art styles including pointillism, with its many dots of colour and Fauvism. It featured bright slashes of aggressive colour. Metzinger exhibited regularly in various galleries around Paris, meeting other artists. Among the most influential meetings were those with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Around 1907, Picasso and Braque invented the style that came to be called Cubism. It abandoned depictions of objects and scenes with the illusion of three-dimensional space. Instead, Cubism fractured them into multiple simultaneous views.
By 1909 Jean Metzinger started to create his paintings in this style as well. Metzinger devotedly embraced Cubism. He soon got acquainted with such artists as Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes, who worked in a similar style. They, along with other Cubists, started to meet informally at a fellow artist's studio outside Paris. Concurrently, Metzinger began writing about Cubism. For example, in 1910 his article in Pan magazine represented the first attempt to describe Cubism.
In 1911 the adherents of Cubism exhibited a roomful of work at the Salon des Independants. The result was a public scandal and the room in which the work was displayed, Room 41, became notorious. People didn't have a clue what to make of the strange images with broken forms and only a few recognizable elements.
However, the Cubists regarded the Salon des Independants as a huge success. In the long run, they established a more official group, which was called the Section d'Or (Golden Section). Their goal was to promote and spread Cubism. The followers of the Section d'Or also interpreted Cubism a bit more loosely than Picasso and Braques did, working in brighter colour and larger scale.
In 1912, this group had its one and only exhibition, the Salon de la Section d'Or, Spain, with Metzinger being the leading figure. It consisted of more than 200 Cubist artworks and was one of the most significant contemporary art exhibitions of its time. The works of Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Henri Le Fauconnier, Marie Laurencin, and August Agero were presented. Meanwhile, Jean Metzinger was appointed to teach at the Académie de La Palette, Paris, in 1912. Among his numerous students were Aristarkh Lentulov, Serge Charchoune, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Jessica Dismorr, Varvara Stepanova, Vera Efimovna Pestel and Lyubov Popova.
In 1913 Jean Metzinger's paintings were again displayed at the Salon d'Automne, and he continued to exhibit in the major salons of Paris thereafter. That same year he participated in an exhibition at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin and had a show at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris with Gleizes and Léger. In 1913 he served as a professor at the Académie Arenius and Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1916 Metzinger presented his works along with Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, and Gleizes at the Montross Gallery in New York.
After army service during the First World War, Metzinger returned in 1919 to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. His exhibition at l'Effort Moderne at the beginning of 1921 was exclusively of landscapes. In 1923 Jean Metzinger moved away from Cubism towards realism, while still retaining elements of his earlier Cubist style. After 1930, until his death in 1956, the painter turned towards a more classical or decorative approach of painting with some elements of Surrealism. Among his solo exhibitions were those at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1930, the Hanover Gallery in London in 1932, etc.
Jean Metzinger was commissioned to create a large mural, Mystique of Travel, which he did for the Salle de Cinema in the railway pavilion of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris 1937, the Arts Club of Chicago in 1953, and the International Galleries, Chicago, 1964. Since 1943 he resided in Paris where he was given a teaching position at the Académie Frochot, which he held from 1950 until 1953.
Jean Metzinger was a significant member of the Cubist movement. He is highly respected to this day for his important contributions to Cubism. He was best known for Cubist paintings such as Le goûter (Tea Time) (1911)
During 1985-1986 a retrospective of Metzinger's works entitled Jean Metzinger in Retrospect was held at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and then traveled to Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery University of Texas at Austin, the David Alfred Smart Gallery University of Chicago, and Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In 2007 Jean Metzinger's painting entitled Paysage (1916-1917) was sold for $2,393,000 million at Christie's, New York, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale.
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Du "Cubisme" by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, the Musée de La Poste in Paris presented a show entitled "Gleizes - Metzinger. Du cubisme et après", which was held from 9 May to 22 September 2012. This was the first major exhibition of works created by Metzinger in Europe since his death in 1956, and also the first time that a museum organized an exhibit showcasing both Metzinger and Gleizes together.
Numerous exhibitions document the painter's national and international success. His works can be found in private and public collections and institutions around the world. Today, many of his artworks are presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, etc.
Bathers: Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape
Nu aux Hortensias
Saint-Tropez
La Plume Jaune
Jeune Femme à la Mandoline
Les Arlequins
Dancer in a café
Le Chemin a travers les champs
Nu à la cheminée
Femme Debout
The Village
The Seashore
Nautical Still Life
Globe and Banjo
Still Life, Playing Cards, Coffee Cup and Apples
Matin au Parc Montsouris
La Tricoteuse
Les Baigneuses
L'Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird)
Femme assise au bouquet de feuillage
Woman with a Fan
Nu Couché (Reclining Figure)
Couchée de Soleil No. 1
Landscape
Fruit and a Jug on a Table
Bacchante
FEMME À LA FENÊTRE, MATERNITÉ
Paysage aux deux Cyprés
Petit port, pecheurs et bateaux au quai
La Roulette
Paysage colore aux oiseaux aquatique
La Femme au Cheval
Salomé
Paysage Tropical
Le Bal Masqué, Carnaval à Venise
Landscape with Fountain
A Peacock
Paysage pointilliste
At the Cycle-Race Track
Femme assise, en robe bleue
Landscape (Couchée de soleil no. 1)
Still Life With Pumpkin and Bottle of Rum
Woman with a Coffee Pot
Parc Monceau
La Femme à l'Éventail (Woman with Fan)
Nature morte
La Violoniste
Woman with a mandolin
Landscape
Composition allégorique
Clown au banjo
Nude in Front of a Mirror
Paysage Neo-Impressionniste
Les flamants
Fleur rose dans un vase
Le Chateau de Clisson
Femme au Chapeau
Nu (Nude)
Jeune Femme Pensive aux Roses Rouges
Yachting
Nu au Soleil (Nude in the Sun)
Jeune fille à la partition
Les Ibis
Embarkation of Harlequin (Arlequin)
Femme au chapeau rose et collier de perles
Still Life: Playing Cards, Coffee Cup and Apples
Nature Morte
Landscape
Paysage
Table by a window
Le goûter (Tea Time)
Clairiere
Paysage à l'arbre rond (Landscape with a round tree)
Le Flamant rose et le voilier
Le Bal masqué, La Comédie Italienne
La Baigneuse, (Nu)
L'Isthme de Corinthe
Pitcher, hen house
Portrait of Albert Gleizes
Village, Church and Two Characters
Still Life
Femme à la dentelle
Metzinger recognized the importance of mathematics in art, through a radical geometrization of form as a primary architectural basis for the composition. He wrote criticism, poetry, and prose that passionately argued against traditional approaches in art and the need for portraying multiple perspectives to better understand reality and time in a static picture.
Quotations:
"The visible world only becomes the real world by the operation of thought."
"So, music does not attempt to imitate Nature’s sounds, but it does interpret and embody emotions awakened by Nature through a convention of its own, in a way to be aesthetically pleasing. In some such way, we, taking out hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiment."
Quotes from others about the person
Guillaume Apollinaire: "In drawing, in composition, in the judiciousness of contrasted forms, Metzinger's works have a style which sets them apart from, and perhaps even above most of the works of his contemporaries... It was then that Metzinger, joining Picasso and Braque, founded the Cubist City... There is nothing unrealized in the art of Metzinger, nothing which is not the fruit of a rigorous logic. A painting by Metzinger always contains its own explanation... it is certainly the result of great hindmindedness and is something unique it seems to me, in the history of art."
Guillaume Apollinaire: "The new structures he [Metzinger] is composing are stripped of everything that was known before him... Each of his paintings contains a judgement of the universe, and his work is like the sky at night: when, cleared of the clouds, it trembles with lovely lights. There is nothing unrealized in Metzinger's works: poetry ennobles their slightest details."
Christopher Green: "Yet, style, in the sense of his [Metzinger's] own special way of handling form and color, remained for Metzinger the determining factor, something imposed on his subjects to give them their special pictorial character. His sweet, rich colour between 1921 and 1924 was unashamedly artificial, and is itself symptomatic of the fact that his return to lucid representation did not mean a return to nature approached naturalistically..."
Lucy Flint: "Metzinger, a sensitive and intelligent theoretician of Cubism, sought to communicate the principles of this movement through his paintings as well as his writings."
Jean Metzinger married Lucie Soubiron in Paris on December 30, 1908. Later he was romantically involved with a young Greek woman, Suzanne Phocas. The two were married in 1929.
