Jean Metzinger

Jean Metzinger was born in Nantes in 1883. At fifteen he was painting. Achieving local success, he continued his studies and finally settled in Paris, attending various academies until the institutions disappointed or bored him. He felt there was “no relationship between the object that the picture constitutes and the other object it represents.” Metzinger is best known as a Cubist, and was not part of the Neo-Impressionist group, but he was influenced by the Neo- Impressionists and then by the Fauves. Each was occupied by the chemistry of color and attempted to influence the aspect of the pictorial image.

In Les peintres cubists, which Guillaume Appollinaire wrote about in 1911-12 and published in 1913, this ‘scientific’ tendency is rightly traced to Seurat, in whose works firmness of style is rivaled by the almost scientific clarity of conception. It was Metzinger who carried forward this ‘intellectual vision and approached sublimity.’ “His art,” wrote Apollinaire at this time, “always more and more abstract, but always charming, raises and attempts to serve the most difficult and unforeseen problems of aesthetics. Each of his paintings contains a judgment of the universe, and his whole work is like the sky at night, when cleared of clouds, it trembles with lovely lights. There is nothing unrealized in his works; poetry ennobles their slightest details.”

Paysage aux deux cyprès was painted during Metzinger’s Neo-Impressionist phase, which lasted about tow years from 1903 until late in 1905. it was during this time that Metzinger lived in the South of France and came under the direct influence of Edmond Cross and Paul Signac, who were working in St. Tropez. Although the Pointillist technique is employed, Metzinger’s color is definitely Fauve.

From 1908 on he was associated with those painters and sculptors working along the same lines as Picasso and Braque. “In 1912, the ‘Section d’Or’ Exhibition took place in the Galerie La Boètie, Paris, the following artists being represented: Fernand Lèger, Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Juan Gris, Agero, Picabia, Delaunay, Valensi, Lhote, Herbin, Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, Marcoussis, Gleizes, La Fresnaye, Segonzac, Moreau, Marchand, Dumond, and Jaques Villon, promoter and organizer of the exhibition.” It was the first time that all these artists had exhibited together, making it a memorable occasion.

Chronologically speaking, Metzinger is the third Cubist after Picasso and Braque. With Gleizes, in 1912, he published “On Cubism,” the first theoretical work on the movement to be written by painters who were actively engaged in it.

His early interest in Neo-Impressionism was the result of a scientific education, which made him a natural for the geometric problems arising from the pictorial architecture of Picasso and Braque, and his mathematical background served him well in solving many of the Cubist theories.