How does this artwork elucidate its Creative intuition (and taste)?
Pictorial space has been transformed by the artist into the temporal flow of consciousness. Quantity has morphed into quality, creating a 'qualitative space', "the pictorial analogue", write Antliff and Leighten, "to both time and space: temporal heterogeneity and the new geometries." In accord with this view of pictorial space, Metzinger and Gleizes encouraged artists to discard classical perspective and replace it with creative intuition. "Creative intuition is manifest in an artist's faculty of discernment, or 'taste', which coordinates all other sensations." Antliff and Leighten continue, "As we have seen Metzinger celebrated this faculty in Le Gouter, and Apollinaire advised artists to rely on their 'intuition' in The Cubist Painters (1913)."Metzinger's interests in proportion, mathematical order, and his emphasis on geometry, are well documented. But it was his personal taste (gout in French) that sets Metzinger's work apart from both the Salon Cubists and those of Montmartre. While taste in Tea Time was denoted by one of the five senses, it was also connoted (for those who could read it) as a quality of discernment and subjective judgement. Le gouter translates to 'afternoon snack' but also alludes to 'taste' in an abstract sense. This painting, writes Christopher Green, "can seem the outcome of a meditation on intelligence and the senses, conception and sensation. The word in French for tea-time is "le goûter"; as a verb. "goûter" refers to the experience of tasting.A page from the periodical Fantasio, 15 October 1911, by Roland Dorgelès, features Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes (1911) and Le goûter (Tea Time) by Jean Metzinger, juxtaposed with images of unidentified models, the man with his knees crossed and a book on his lap, the woman (clothed) holding a spoon and a tea cup, as if the sitters. The commentary is heavily ironic, with the headline reading Ce que disent les cubes... (What the cubes say...).
The complex forms that defined Metzinger's paintings of the period serve to suggest the underlying imagery (e.g., a nude, a horse, a dancer, a café-concert), rather than define the imagery; arousing the viewer's own creative intuition to decipher the 'total image.' This meant too, inversely, that the creative intuition of the artist would be aroused. No longer did the artist have to define or reproduce, painstakingly, the subject matter of a painting. The artist became to a large extent free, libre, to place lines, shapes, forms and colors onto the painting according to his or her own creative intuition.
A similar concept lies behind Albert Gleizes' portrait of his friend, neo-Symbolist writer Joseph Houot, pen name Jacques Nayral, who in 1912 would marry Mireille Gleizes, the sister of Albert Gleizes. Along with Metzinger's Tea Time, Gleizes' Portrait de Jacques Nayral, painted the same year, exemplifies ideas and opinions formulated between 1910 and 1911 that would soon be codified in Du "Cubisme" (1912). According to Gleizes, both the content and form in this painting were the result of mind associations as he completed the work from memory; something that would play a crucial role in the works of other Cubists, such as Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia. More so than an 'objective' view of the real-world, Jacques Nayral valorized subjective experience and expression. He embraced an anti-rationalist and anti-positivist world-view, consistent with concepts that underscored Cubist philosophies. Nayral's interest in philosophy led him to correspond with Henri Bergson, someone who would greatly inspire both Metzinger and Gleizes. Nayral's related interest in avant-garde art led him to purchase Metzinger's large 1912 oil on canvas entitled La Femme au Cheval, also known as Woman with a Horse (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). Nayral's association with Gleizes led him to write the Preface for the Cubist exhibition at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona (April–May 2012).The following edition of Fantasio (1 November 1911) began with "A Consultation at the Salon d'Automne" by Roland Catenoy; a suppository report of a walk around the Grand Palais accompanied by two medical men who offer their 'diagnosis' of the paintings on display. A climax is attained in the presence of Metzinger's Le goûter: a "cubisticall nude woman" who presents all the symptoms of "lithopocdion", otherwise only previously seen in petrified fetuses; she is beyond treatment and close to death.""These two responses to Metzinger and the other Cubists at the 1911 Automne have one theme in common:" writes Green et al., "the absurdity of the gap between Cubist painting and appearance. Just as Louis Vauxcelles made the Cubists' repudiation of "current vision" (appearances in nature) the crux of his attacks, so most of the jokes in the press at the expense of Cubism centered on the question of likeness. If Metzinger's Tea-Time was not like its sitter, what could it mean? Surely nothing."Guillaume Apollinaire reviewing the Cubist room at the Salon d'Automne of 1911 (in L'Intransigeant) writes: '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 nothing [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.'
Louis Vauxcelles Roland Dorgelès Guillaume Apollinaire Albert Gleizes Cubism Salon d'Automne Portrait de Jacques Nayral Woman with a Horse Du "Cubisme" Robert Delaunay Henri Bergson La Femme au Cheval Jean Metzinger Francis Picabia Fernand Léger Montmartre