Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism.
55 Facts About Jean Metzinger
2.
Between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cezannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.
3.
From 1908 Jean Metzinger experimented with the faceting of form, a style that would soon become known as Cubism.
4.
The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view-points is treated, for the first time, in Jean Metzinger's Note sur la Peinture, published in 1910.
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Jean Metzinger was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists.
6.
Jean Metzinger was at the center of Cubism both because of his participation and identification of the movement when it first emerged, because of his role as intermediary among the Bateau-Lavoir group and the Section d'Or Cubists, and above all because of his artistic personality.
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Jean Metzinger recognized the importance of mathematics in art, through a radical geometrization of form as an underlying architectural basis for his wartime compositions.
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Jean Metzinger believed the world was dynamic and changing in time, that it appeared different depending on the point of view of the observer.
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Jean Metzinger's younger brother Maurice was born on 24 Oct 1885 and became a musician, excelling as a cellist.
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Jean Metzinger was interested in the current trends in painting.
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Jean Metzinger sent three paintings to the Salon des Independants in 1903, and subsequently moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale.
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Jean Metzinger exhibited regularly in Paris from 1903, participating in the first Salon d'Automne the same year and taking part in a group show with Raoul Dufy, Lejeune and Torent, from 19 January-22 February 1903 at the gallery run by Berthe Weill, with another show November 1903.
13.
Jean Metzinger exhibited at Weill's gallery 23 November-21 December 1905 and again 14 January-10 February 1907, with Robert Delaunay, in 1908 with Andre Derain, Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso, and 28 April-28 May 1910 with Derain, Georges Rouault and Kees van Dongen.
14.
Jean Metzinger exhibited again at Weill's gallery, 17 January-1 February 1913, March 1913, June 1914 and February 1921.
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In 1904 Jean Metzinger exhibited six paintings in the Divisionist style at the Salon des Independants and the Salon d'Automne.
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In 1905 Jean Metzinger exhibited eight paintings at Salon des Independants.
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Again with the Fauves and associated artists, Jean Metzinger exhibited at the 1906 Salon d'Automne, Paris.
18.
Jean Metzinger exhibited six works at the 1907 Salon des Independants, followed by the presentation of two works at the 1907 Salon d'Automne.
19.
In 1906 Jean Metzinger met Albert Gleizes at the Salon des Independants, and visited his studio in Courbevoie several days later.
20.
In 1907, at Max Jacob's room, Jean Metzinger met Guillaume Krotowsky, who already signed his works Guillaume Apollinaire.
21.
From 21 December 1908 to 15 January 1909, Jean Metzinger exhibited at the gallery of Wilhelm Uhde, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs with Georges Braque, Sonia Delaunay, Andre Derain, Raoul Dufy, Auguste Herbin, Jules Pascin and Pablo Picasso.
22.
Jean Metzinger exhibited five paintings with Braque, Derain, van Dongen, Friesz, Manguin, Marquet, Matisse, Puy, Valtat and others.
23.
At the 1909 Salon d'Automne Jean Metzinger exhibited alongside Constantin Brancusi, Henri Le Fauconnier and Fernand Leger.
24.
In 1906 Jean Metzinger had acquired enough prestige to be elected to the hanging committee of the Salon des Independants.
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Jean Metzinger formed a close friendship at this time with Robert Delaunay, with whom he shared an exhibition at Berthe Weill early in 1907.
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Jean Metzinger painted exquisite compositions of cloud and cliff and sea; he painted women and made them fair, even as the women upon the boulevards fair.
27.
In 1908 Jean Metzinger frequented the Bateau Lavoir and exhibited with Georges Braque at Berthe Weill's gallery.
28.
In 1912 Jean Metzinger was the leading figure in the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain at Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona, with Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Le Fauconnier, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, and August Agero.
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In drawing, in composition, in the judiciousness of contrasted forms, Jean Metzinger's works have a style which sets them apart from, and perhaps even above most of the works of his contemporaries.
30.
Two works directly preceding Apollinaire's portrait, Nu and Landscape, circa 1908 and 1909 respectively, indicate that Jean Metzinger had already departed from Divisionism by 1908.
31.
Jean Metzinger's meditations take on beautiful forms whose harmony tends to approach sublimity.
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Jean Metzinger's belief was that technique should be simplified and that the "trickery" of chiaroscuro should be abandoned, along with the "artifices of the palette".
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Jean Metzinger felt the need to do without the "multiplication of tints and detailing of forms without reason, by feeling":.
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From that exhibition of 1921 Jean Metzinger continued to cultivate a style that was not only less obscure, but clearly took subject-matter as its starting point far more than an abstract play with flat pictorial elements.
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Yet, style, in the sense of his own special way of handling form and color, remained for Jean Metzinger the determining factor, something imposed on his subjects to give them their special pictorial character.
36.
Jean Metzinger himself, writing in 1922 [published by Montparnasse] could claim quite confidently that this was not at all a betrayal of Cubism but a development within it.
37.
Jean Metzinger was at the center of Cubism, not only because of his role as intermediary among the orthodox Montmartre group and right bank or Passy Cubists, not only because of his great identification with the movement when it was recognized, but above all because of his artistic personality.
38.
Jean Metzinger's concerns were balanced; he was deliberately at the intersection of high intellectuality and the passing spectacle.
39.
Jean Metzinger's Note sur la peinture not only highlighted the works of Picasso and Braque, on the one hand, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay on the other, but it was a tactical selection that highlighted the fact that only Jean Metzinger himself was positioned to write about all four.
40.
Jean Metzinger, uniquely, had been closely acquainted with the gallery cubists and the burgeoning salon cubists simultaneously.
41.
Jean Metzinger was likely familiar with the works of Gauss, Riemann and Poincare prior to the development of Cubism: something that reflects in his pre-1907 works.
42.
Jean Metzinger was a close associate of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jean Metzinger and Marcel Duchamp.
43.
However, Princet would remain close to Jean Metzinger and participate in meetings of the Section d'Or in Puteaux.
44.
Jean Metzinger gave informal lectures to the artists, many of whom were passionate about mathematical order.
45.
In 1910, Jean Metzinger said of him, "[Picasso] lays out a free, mobile perspective, from which that ingenious mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced a whole geometry".
46.
Jean Metzinger loved to get the artists interested in the new views on space that had been opened up by Schlegel and some others.
47.
On 19 June 1916 Jean Metzinger signed a three-year contract with the dealer, art collector and gallery owner Leonce Rosenberg.
48.
The contract fixed the prices of Jean Metzinger's works bought by Rosenberg, who agreed to purchase a certain number of works every month.
49.
In 1923 Jean Metzinger moved away from Cubism towards realism, while still retaining elements of his earlier Cubist style.
50.
Jean Metzinger was commissioned to paint a large mural, Mystique of Travel, which he executed for the Salle de Cinema in the railway pavilion of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris 1937.
51.
Jean Metzinger had been appointed to teach at the Academie de La Palette, in Paris, 1912, where Le Fauconnier served as director.
52.
In 1913 Jean Metzinger taught at the Academie Arenius and Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.
53.
Jean Metzinger later moved to Bandol in Provence where he lived until 1943 and then returned to Paris where he was given a teaching post for three years at the Academie Frochot in 1950.
54.
Jean Metzinger again exhibited in New york at the Bourgeois Gallery for the occasion of the 1917 and 1919 Annual Exhibition of Modern Art.
55.
In taking into account these various factors, we can understand why Jean Metzinger must be included among that small group of artists who have taken a part in the shaping of Art History in the first half of the Twentieth Century.