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Lot Essay
At the 1911 Salon des Indépendants in Paris, an innovative group of young artists, including Jean Metzinger, showed their work together. Their radical paintings, which resembled broken shards of glass, caused a stir amongst art critics and the public. That scandal popularized the term used to describe their work: Cubism. In an essay published that year, Albert Gleizes hailed Metzinger in particular as the "Emperor of Cubism" and went on to describe the historical significance of his work: "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" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1985, p. 44). Metzinger's Dame au décolleté (Madame Metzinger), painted circa 1910-1912, reflects the artist's ongoing experiments with this new avant-garde style.
Metzinger pictured his wife, Lucie Soubiron, at bust-length, posed against the base of a neoclassical column—all typical elements of European portraiture. Yet the picture is otherwise thoroughly modern. It was as if Metzinger photographed his wife, tore the photo into jagged pieces and then rearranged them on a flat surface, leaving the edges of those fragments visible. The color palette, though strikingly naturalistic, features gradients of green, brown and flesh tones. Those subtle hints of light and shadow create the illusion of a moving three-dimensional shape, compressed upon the two-dimensional canvas. For Metzinger and Gleizes—who published their defining text, Du Cubisme, in 1912—this dynamic was essential to their art:
"To establish pictorial space, we must have recourse to tactile and motor sensations, indeed to all our faculties. It is our whole personality which, contracting or expanding, transforms the plane of the picture… The forms which are situated within this space spring from a dynamism which we profess to dominate… Form appears endowed with properties identical to those of color. It is tempered or augmented by contact with another form, it is destroyed or it flowers, it is multiplied or it disappears" (quoted and translated in R.L. Herbert, ed., Modern Artists on Art, New York, 1986, p. 8).
This striking portrait from the dawn of the Cubist era was included in the major retrospective exhibition of Metzinger's work at the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 1985. Also included in that exhibition was a much smaller, more conservative and less fully finished version of this painting that belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Compared to the present work, the Philadelphia version measures less than half the size, and features a more modest neckline that obscures Madame Metzinger's décolletage. A related pen, ink and pencil drawing now belongs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Japanese artist Ishii Hakutei sketched the present painting during his visit to the Salon des Indépendants at the Quai d’Orsay in 1911, where it was exhibited. Upon his return to Japan, he published his rendering of the portrait in the local newspaper Tokyo Asabi on 29 July 1911, with the accompanying text: "When it comes to Metzinger’s works, he expresses everything by using clusters of triangles, I hardly understand it. It is not that he expresses "dimensions" with straight lines, but they just look like crystals." (cited in H. Čapková, “The Japanese Cubist Body - mapping modern experience in the pre-WWII Japanese artistic network” in Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 2014, vol 47, no. 2, p. 123.)
Hakutei’s writings became instrumental in bringing awareness and appreciation of Cubism to the Japanese public, as he was so enthralled by his own discovery of the movement that in 1913 he translated Du Cubisme, by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.
We thank Alexander Mittelmann for his help cataloguing this work.
Metzinger pictured his wife, Lucie Soubiron, at bust-length, posed against the base of a neoclassical column—all typical elements of European portraiture. Yet the picture is otherwise thoroughly modern. It was as if Metzinger photographed his wife, tore the photo into jagged pieces and then rearranged them on a flat surface, leaving the edges of those fragments visible. The color palette, though strikingly naturalistic, features gradients of green, brown and flesh tones. Those subtle hints of light and shadow create the illusion of a moving three-dimensional shape, compressed upon the two-dimensional canvas. For Metzinger and Gleizes—who published their defining text, Du Cubisme, in 1912—this dynamic was essential to their art:
"To establish pictorial space, we must have recourse to tactile and motor sensations, indeed to all our faculties. It is our whole personality which, contracting or expanding, transforms the plane of the picture… The forms which are situated within this space spring from a dynamism which we profess to dominate… Form appears endowed with properties identical to those of color. It is tempered or augmented by contact with another form, it is destroyed or it flowers, it is multiplied or it disappears" (quoted and translated in R.L. Herbert, ed., Modern Artists on Art, New York, 1986, p. 8).
This striking portrait from the dawn of the Cubist era was included in the major retrospective exhibition of Metzinger's work at the University of Iowa Museum of Art in 1985. Also included in that exhibition was a much smaller, more conservative and less fully finished version of this painting that belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Compared to the present work, the Philadelphia version measures less than half the size, and features a more modest neckline that obscures Madame Metzinger's décolletage. A related pen, ink and pencil drawing now belongs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Japanese artist Ishii Hakutei sketched the present painting during his visit to the Salon des Indépendants at the Quai d’Orsay in 1911, where it was exhibited. Upon his return to Japan, he published his rendering of the portrait in the local newspaper Tokyo Asabi on 29 July 1911, with the accompanying text: "When it comes to Metzinger’s works, he expresses everything by using clusters of triangles, I hardly understand it. It is not that he expresses "dimensions" with straight lines, but they just look like crystals." (cited in H. Čapková, “The Japanese Cubist Body - mapping modern experience in the pre-WWII Japanese artistic network” in Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 2014, vol 47, no. 2, p. 123.)
Hakutei’s writings became instrumental in bringing awareness and appreciation of Cubism to the Japanese public, as he was so enthralled by his own discovery of the movement that in 1913 he translated Du Cubisme, by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.
We thank Alexander Mittelmann for his help cataloguing this work.