Focus on this artwork and explain the Salon d'Automne of 1911.
In Room 7 and 8 of the 1911 Salon d'Automne, held 1 October through November 8, at the Grand Palais in Paris, hung works by Gleizes, Portrait de Jacques Nayral and La Chasse. Metzinger exhibited Le goûter (Tea Time). Also present were Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, André Lhote, Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, František Kupka, Francis Picabia and the Cubist sculptors Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky. The result was a public scandal which brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the second time. The first was the organized group showing by Cubists in Salle 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants (Paris), with Metzinger, Delaunay, le Fauconnier and Léger.
The author of Portrait of Jacques Nayral later wrote of the exhibition that followed the infamous 1911 Salon des Indépendants: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.(Albert Gleizes, 1925)
In his review of the 1911 Salon d'Automne published in L'Intransigeant, written more as a counter attack 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].
Roger Allard remarked that the general public viewing the works Metzinger, Gleizes and Le Fauconnier at the Salon d'Automne of 1910 found the "deformation of lines" less humorous than the "deformation of color", except with regards to the human face. Christopher Green writes that the "deformations of lines" allowed by mobile perspective in the head of Metzinger's Tea-time and Gleizes's Jacques Nayral "have seemed tentative to historians of Cubism. In 1911, as the key area of likeness and unlikeness, they more than anything released the laughter." Green continues, "This was the wider context of Gris's decision at the Indépendants of 1912 to make his debut with a Homage to Pablo Picasso, which was a portrait, and to do so with a portrait that responded to Picasso's portraits of 1910 through the intermediary of Metzinger's Tea-time.Apollinaire took Picasso to the opening of the exhibition in 1911 to see the cubist works in Room 7 and 8. At about the time of this exhibition, Gleizes, through the intermediary of Apollinaire, meets Picasso and sees the work of Picasso and Braque for the first time. He gives his reaction in an essay published in another shortlived Abbaye dominated literary magazine, La Revue Indépendante. He considers that Picasso and Braque, despite the great value of their work, are engaged in an 'Impressionism of Form', which is to say that they give an appearance of formal construction which does not rest on any clearly comprehensible principle.Through the Salon d'Automne, Gleizes also enters into relations with the Duchamp brothers, Jacques Villon (1875-1963), Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918) and Marcel Duchamp (1887 1968). The studios of Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon at 7, rue Lemaître, become, together with Gleizes' studio at Courbevoie, a regular meeting place for the Cubist group, soon to become known as the Puteaux Group, or Section d'Or.Reviewing the Salon d'Automne of 1911, Huntly Carter in The New Age writes that "art is not an accessory to life; it is life itself carried to the greatest heights of personal expression." Carter continues: It was at the Salon d'Automne, amid the Rhythmists, I found the desired sensation. The exuberant eagerness and vitality of their region, consisting of two room remotely situated, was a complete contrast to the morgue I was compelled to pass through in order to reach it. Though marked by extremes, it was clearly the starting point of a new movement in painting, perhaps the most remarkable in modern times, It revealed not only that artists are beginning to recognise the unity of art and life, but that some of them have discovered life is based on rhythmic vitality, and underlying all things is the perfect rhythm that continues and unites them. Consciously, or unconsciously, many are seeking for the perfect rhythm, and in so doing are attaining a liberty or wideness of expression unattained through several centuries of painting. (Huntly Carter, 1911)
Jacques Villon La Chasse Roger de La Fresnaye Guillaume Apollinaire Albert Gleizes Alexander Archipenko Cubism Salon d'Automne Marcel Duchamp Pablo Picasso Roger Allard Joseph Csaky Cubist sculptors František Kupka Abbaye Section d'Or Le goûter (Tea Time) Francis Picabia Courbevoie Fernand Léger Henri Le Fauconnier André Lhote Raymond Duchamp-Villon