Focus on this artwork and explore the 2012 exhibition.
In 2012, one hundred years after it was painted, Metzinger's Au Vélodrome was showcased in an exhibition entitled Cycling, Cubo‐Futurism and the 4th Dimension. Jean Metzinger’s "At the Cycle‐Race Track", at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy. The painting is one of the pivotal Cubist works at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The exhibition, curated by Erasmus Weddigen, brought together two other paintings and a drawing by Metzinger treating the same theme, in addition to several other paintings on the theme of cycling. Just as Metzinger’s painting, the show combines a passion for the sport of cycle‐racing with an investigation into the nature of the Fourth dimension in art; a topic much discussed in Metzinger’s immediate circle and alluded to in the number 4 visible in the stadium grandstand in the upper left quadrant of the painting.Vintage racing bikes at the exhibition included one owned by Albert Einstein. The theoretical and sporting themes of the show were designed to illustrate theories of space and time formulated by Einstein and multiple perspective developed independently by the Cubists, and most notably by Metzinger, as early as 1910.
The combination of a sporting subject chronicling a new passion in French popular culture and an ambitious intellectual and visual apparatus central to the nascent Cubist movement qualifies Metzinger’s At the Cycle‐Race Track as a masterpiece. (Guggenheim, Venice)
Jean Metzinger Fourth dimension in art Cubist Albert Einstein Futurism Venice Peggy Guggenheim Collection