Explore the 1911 Salon d'Automne about the 1911 in brief of this artwork.
Following the Salon des Indépendants of early 1911, a new scandal is produced; this time in the Cubist room at the Salon d'Automne. Gleizes shows his Portrait de Jacques Nayral and La Chasse (The Hunt). Metzinger exhibits Le goûter (Tea Time). Other artists join the Salle 41 group: Roger de La Fresnaye, André Lhote, Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, František Kupka, Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky and Francis Picabia, occupying rooms 7 and 8 of the salon. At about the time of this exhibition, through the intermediary of Apollinaire, Gleizes meets Picasso and sees his work along with that of Braque for the first time. He gives his reaction in an essay published in La Revue Indépendante. He considers that Picasso and Braque, despite the great value of their work, are engaged in an Impressionism of Form, i.e., they give an appearance of formal construction which does not rest on any clearly comprehensible principle. [...] We went to Kahnweiler's for the first time and saw the canvasses of Braque and Picasso which, rightly or wrongly, did not thrill us. Their spirit, being the opposite of our own. [...] And as far as Kahnweiler is concerned I never again put my foot in his boutique after this first visit in 1911.Through the Salon d'Automne, Gleizes becomes associated with the Duchamp brothers, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp. The studios of Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon at 7 rue Lemaître in the Parisian suburb Puteaux, become, together with Gleizes' studio at Courbevoie, a regular meeting places for the Cubist group. The Puteaux studios share a garden with the studio of František Kupka, the Czech painter who is developing a non-representational style based on music and the progressive abstraction of a subject in motion.The critic Jean Claude writes, in a review of the 1911 Salon d'Automne titled Cubistes, Triangulistes, Trapézoïdistes et Intentionnistes, published in Le Petit Journal:There is a cubist art... Those who doubt can go into the room where enclosed are the productions of wild beasts [fauves] who practice it...
You will see there the Paysage lacustre, by Le Fauconnier, the Jeune homme et Jeune fille dans le printemps, mosaic of yellow, green, brown and pink, represented by small trapezoids of color, juxtaposed, the Paysage and Goûter by Jean Metzinger, classic cubist... A Marine by Lhote who invented the cubistic water. A figure nue by de la Fresnaye, which seems made with wooden bricks, and a mind-boggling Essai pour trois portraits by Fernand Léger. There too, Gleizes, a Chasse and a Portrait, which I find deeply regrettable, because the author, once, proved he had talent.Non of this would have any importance if these horrors did not take up space that could be usefully occupied by other works, and if, above all, a few snobs did not offer them to the crowds as the last canons of modern beauty. But, really, extravagance, has it ever been art? And can art survive without beauty and without nobility? The Cubists and other "artists" will hardly make us forget Ingres, Courbet or Delacroix. So much for them. To be continued. (Jean Claude)
Gleizes later recalled of the two major 1911 Salons:It was at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1911 that, for the first time, the public was confronted with a collection of paintings which still did not have any label attached to them. [...]Never had the critics been so violent as they were at that time. From which it became clear that these paintings—and I specify the names of the painters who were, alone, the reluctant causes of all this frenzy: Jean Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself—appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever. [...]With the Salon d'Automne of that same year, 1911, the fury broke out again, just as violent as it had been at the Indépendants. I remember this Room 8 in the Grand Palais on the opening day. People were crushed together, shouting, laughing, calling for our heads. And what had we hung? Metzinger his lovely canvas entitled Le Goûter; Léger his sombre Nus dans un Paysage; Le Fauconnier, landscapes done in the Savoie; myself La Chasse and the Portrait de Jacques Nayral. How distant it all seems now! But I can still see the crowd gathering together in the doors of the room, pushing at those who were already pressed into it, wanting to get in to see for themselves the monsters that we were.The winter season in Paris profited from all this to add a little spice to its pleasures. While the newspapers sounded the alarm to alert people to the danger, and while appeals were made to the public authorities to do something about it, song-writers, satirists and other men of wit and spirit, provoked great pleasure among the leisured classes by playing with the word 'cube', discovering that it was a very suitable means of inducing laughter which, as we all know, is the principle characteristic that distinguishes man from the animals.
The contagion, naturally, spread in proportion to the violence of the effort that was being put into stopping it. It quickly went beyond the frontiers of its country of origin. Public opinion throughout the world was occupied with Cubism. As people wanted to see what all the fuss was about, invitations to exhibit multiplied. From Germany, from Russia, from Belgium, from Switzerland, from Holland, from Austro-Hungary, from Bohemia, they came in great numbers. The painters accepted some of them and writers like Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Raynal, André Salmon, Alexandre Mercereau, the advocate-general Granié, supported them in their writings and in the talks they gave. (Albert Gleizes, 1925)
In his review of the 1911 Salon d'Automne published in L'Intransigeant, written more as a counterattack in defense of Cubism, Guillaume Apollinaire expressed his views on the entries of Metzinger and Gleizes:The imagination of Metzinger gave us this year two elegant canvases of tones and drawing that attest, at the very least, to a great culture... His art belongs to him now. He has vacated influences and his palette is of a refined richness. Gleizes shows us the two sides of his great talent: invention and observation. Take the example of Portrait de Jacques Nayral, there is good resemblance, but there is not one form or color in this impressive painting that has not been invented by the artist. The portrait has a grandiose appearance that should not escape the notice of connoisseurs. This portrait covers [revêt] a grandiose appearance that should not elude connoisseurs... It is time that young painters turn towards  the sublime in their art. La Chasse, by Gleizes, is well composed and of beautiful colors and sings [chantant].
Albert Gleizes Alexander Archipenko André Lhote André Salmon Cubism Fernand Léger Francis Picabia František Kupka Guillaume Apollinaire Jacques Villon Jean Metzinger Joseph Csaky Le goûter Le goûter (Tea Time) Marcel Duchamp Maurice Raynal Raymond Duchamp-Villon Robert Delaunay Roger de La Fresnaye Salon d'Automne Salon des Indépendants