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拍品專文
At the 1906 Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais in Paris, the proto-Cubist painter Metzinger exhibited a portrait of his close friend, the artist Robert Delaunay. Together, Metzinger and Delaunay dabbled in various Post-Impressionist styles of painting. The present painting, in particular, drew upon Divisionist color theory and the nascent Fauvism, the wild and seemingly irrational application of kaleidoscopic colors to traditional subjects, like landscapes or human likenesses. Metzinger's Portrait de Robert Delaunay—along with his large-scale rendering of pink flamingos in a tropical setting, Les Flamandes—are both listed in the 1906 Salon d'Automne exhibition catalogue as belonging to Delaunay himself.
In his portrait, the twenty-one-year-old Delaunay is the epitome of stylish, modern masculinity in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. He casually leans forward with a cool expression, wearing a smart blue suit, an amethyst-purple tie, and a jaunty gray fedora trimmed with ribbon. Metzinger further accessorized his subject with a wooden cane and a checkered handkerchief in the pocket of his suit jacket—a playful nod toward the pattern of squares and rectangles that Metzinger used to apply paint to the entire surface of the canvas. Metzinger also experimented with this technique in another picture dating to 1906, La Danse (Bacchante), which he exhibited the following year at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants in Paris and now belongs to the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum. As in Delaunay's own portrait of Metzinger (featured in the present sale), Metzinger employed some startlingly anti-naturalistic color choices in his portrait of Delaunay. The shadows under Delaunay's eyes are fuchsia and lavender, and his eyebrows and the stubble on his chin are lime green, for example.
Delaunay and Metzinger were both fascinated by the work of Pointillists and Divisionists, as well as would-be Fauvists; they employed similarly shocking colors in their canvases of this period. Yet, as early twentieth-century art critics observed, Metzinger's painted surface did not resemble the fussy dots, irregular dabs or loose, expressive brushstrokes of his contemporaries. As the art critic Louis Chassevent wrote in 1906, "M. Metzinger is a mosaicist like M. Signac but he brings more precision to the cutting of his cubes of color which appear to have been fabricated by machine" (Quelques petits salons, Paris, 1908, p. 32). As Alexander Mittelmann has observed, Metzinger's "cubes" of shocking color anticipated, and paved the way for, the more monochromatic constructions of Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso just a few years later. Metzinger's Portrait de Robert Delaunay thus represents a pivotal moment for the history of modern art, as well as a testament to the productive personal friendship between two of its most consequential artists.
In his portrait, the twenty-one-year-old Delaunay is the epitome of stylish, modern masculinity in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. He casually leans forward with a cool expression, wearing a smart blue suit, an amethyst-purple tie, and a jaunty gray fedora trimmed with ribbon. Metzinger further accessorized his subject with a wooden cane and a checkered handkerchief in the pocket of his suit jacket—a playful nod toward the pattern of squares and rectangles that Metzinger used to apply paint to the entire surface of the canvas. Metzinger also experimented with this technique in another picture dating to 1906, La Danse (Bacchante), which he exhibited the following year at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants in Paris and now belongs to the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum. As in Delaunay's own portrait of Metzinger (featured in the present sale), Metzinger employed some startlingly anti-naturalistic color choices in his portrait of Delaunay. The shadows under Delaunay's eyes are fuchsia and lavender, and his eyebrows and the stubble on his chin are lime green, for example.
Delaunay and Metzinger were both fascinated by the work of Pointillists and Divisionists, as well as would-be Fauvists; they employed similarly shocking colors in their canvases of this period. Yet, as early twentieth-century art critics observed, Metzinger's painted surface did not resemble the fussy dots, irregular dabs or loose, expressive brushstrokes of his contemporaries. As the art critic Louis Chassevent wrote in 1906, "M. Metzinger is a mosaicist like M. Signac but he brings more precision to the cutting of his cubes of color which appear to have been fabricated by machine" (Quelques petits salons, Paris, 1908, p. 32). As Alexander Mittelmann has observed, Metzinger's "cubes" of shocking color anticipated, and paved the way for, the more monochromatic constructions of Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso just a few years later. Metzinger's Portrait de Robert Delaunay thus represents a pivotal moment for the history of modern art, as well as a testament to the productive personal friendship between two of its most consequential artists.