In Bathers (Metzinger), how is the The Wild Men of Paris discussed?
Leading up to 1910, the draftsman, illustrator and poet Gelett Burgess interviewed and wrote about artists and artworks in and around Paris. The result of Burgess' investigation was published after his visit to the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, the massive anti-establishment art exhibition in Paris, and one year before the scandalous group exhibition that brought Cubism to the attention of the general public. At the 1910 Indépendants Jean Metzinger showed his Portrait of Apollinaire (the first Cubist portrait according to Guillaume Apollinaire); Albert Gleizes showed his Portrait de René Arcos and L'Arbre (The Tree), paintings in which the emphasis on simplified geometric form overwhelms representational interests. Louis Vauxcelles in his review of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants made a passing and imprecise reference to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger and Le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes." The works of Metzinger, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay were exhibited together. Le Fauconnier showed the geometrically simplified Ploumanac'h landscapes: Le Ravin and Village dans les Montagne, along with Femme à l'éventail and Portrait of Maroussia. In the same exhibition hung the works of Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Marie Laurencin, Kees van Dongen and Henri Rousseau.Gelett Burgess writes in The Wild Men of Paris of the same exhibition:There were no limits to the audacity and the ugliness of the canvasses. Still-life sketches of round, round apples and yellow, yellow oranges, on square, square tables, seen in impossible perspective; landscapes of squirming trees, with blobs of virgin color gone wrong, fierce greens and coruscating yellows, violent purples, sickening reds and shuddering blues.
But the nudes! They looked like flayed Martians, like pathological charts—hideous old women, patched with gruesome hues, lopsided, with arms like the arms of a Swastika, sprawling on vivid backgrounds, or frozen stiffly upright, glaring through misshapen eyes, with noses or fingers missing. They defied anatomy, physiology, almost geometry itself!
After the death of Paul Cézanne in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in Paris in the form of several large exhibitions and a retrospective at the Salon d'Automne of 1907, greatly affecting the direction taken by the avant-garde artists in Paris. Prior to the advent of Cubism, Cézanne's geometric simplifications and optical phenomena inspired not just Metzinger, Matisse, Derain and Braque, but the other artists who earlier exhibited with the Fauves. Those who had not transited through a Fauve stage, such as Picasso, also experimented with the complex fracturing of form. Cézanne had thus sparked a wholesale transformation in the area of artistic investigation that would profoundly affect the development modern art.
The Fauvism of Metzinger, Matisse and Derain was virtually over by the spring of 1907. And by the Salon d'Automne of 1907 it had ended for many others as well. The shift from bright pure colors loosely applied to the canvas gave way to a more calculated geometric approach. The priority of simplified form began to overtake the representational aspect of the works. The simplification of representational form gave way to a new complexity; the subject matter of the paintings progressively became dominated by a network of interconnected geometric planes, the distinction between foreground and background no longer sharply delineated, and the depth of field limited.
Burgess continues:Though the school was new to me, it was already an old story in Paris. It had been a nine-days’ wonder. Violent discussions had raged over it; it had taken its place as a revolt and held it, despite the fulmination of critics and the contempt of academicians. The school was increasing in numbers, in importance. By many it was taken seriously. At first, the beginners had been called "The Invertebrates." In the Salon of 1905 they were named "The Incoherents." But by 1906, when they grew more perfervid, more audacious, more crazed with theories, they received their present appellation of "Les Fauves"—the Wild Beasts. And so, and so, a-hunting I would go!
Turning his attention to Metzinger's abode, Burgess writes in The Architectural Record:Metzinger once did gorgeous mosaics of pure pigment, each little square of color not quite touching the next, so that an effect of vibrant light should result. He painted exquisite compositions of cloud and cliff and sea; he painted women and made them fair, even as the women upon the boulevards fair. But now, translated into the idiom of subjective beauty, into this strange Neo-Classic language, those same women, redrawn, appear in stiff, crude, nervous lines in patches of fierce color. Surely, Metzinger should know what such things mean. Picasso never painted a pretty woman, though we have noticed that he likes to associate with them. Czobel sees them through the bars of his cage, and roars out tones of mauve and cinnabar. Derain sees them as cones and prisms, and Braque as if they had been sawn out of blocks of wood by carpenters’ apprentices. But Metzinger is more tender towards the sex. He arranges them as flowers are arranged on tapestry and wall paper; he simplifies them to mere patterns, and he carries them gently past the frontier of Poster Land to the world of the Ugly so tenderly that they are not much damaged—only more faint, more vegetable, more anaemic.What’s Metzinger? A scrupulously polite, well-dressed gentleman as ever was, in a scrupulously neat chamber, with a scrupulously well-ordered mind. He is complete as a wax figure, with long brown eyelashes and a clean-cut face. He affects no idiosyncrasies of manners or dress. One cannot question his earnestness and seriousness or sincerity. He is, perhaps, the most articulate of them all. Let us not call him prim."Instead of copying Nature," [Metzinger] says, "we create a milieu of our own, wherein our sentiment can work itself out through a juxtaposition of colors. It is hard to explain it, but it may perhaps be illustrated by analogy with literature and music. Your own Edgar Poe (he pronounced it ‘Ed Carpoe’) did not attempt to reproduce Nature realistically. Some phase of life suggested an emotion, as that of horror in ‘The Fall of the House of Ushur.’ That subjective idea he translated into art. He made a composition of it."
"So, music does not attempt to imitate Nature’s sounds, but it does interpret and embody emotions awakened by Nature through a convention of its own, in a way to be aesthetically pleasing. In some such way, we, taking out hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiment." (Jean Metzinger, circa 1909)
Raoul Dufy Louis Vauxcelles Guillaume Apollinaire Delaunay Albert Gleizes Paul Cézanne modern art Fauvism Marie Laurencin right Maurice de Vlaminck Cubism Salon d'Automne Léger depth of field Derain Henri Rousseau Henri Matisse Jean Metzinger Le Fauconnier Kees van Dongen L'Arbre (The Tree) Gelett Burgess Architectural Record Salon des Indépendants Fauves Braque