Explore the Multiple perspective of this artwork.
Despite Metzinger's conceptualism of Cubist painting—the reflexive function of complex geometry, juxtaposed multiple perspectives, planar fragmentation suggesting motion and rhythmic play with various symmetry types—there does manifest itself in Danseuse a certain spatial depth or perspective reminiscent of the optical illusion of space of the Renaissance; in the way, for example, the wall-mounted lighting fixtures become smaller with distance, and so too the man at the upper left appearing smaller in the background than his counterparts in the foreground. It shows that non-Euclidean geometry does not imply the absolute destruction of classical perspective, or that simply, the breakdown of classical perspective need not be complete. Unlike the flattening of space associated with the Cubist paintings of others, Metzinger had no intention of abolishing depth of field. Of course here perspectival space is only alluded to by changes of scale, not by co-ordinated linear convergence, resulting in a complex space perfectly adapted to a stage-set. This feature is observed not only in Metzinger's Cubist paintings, but also in his Divisionist and proto-Cubist works between 1905 and 1909, as well as in his more figurative works of the 1920s (during the Return to order phase).
There are, however, objective factors that prevent the illusion from succeeding completely: (1) the canvas is two-dimensional while reality is three-dimensional, (2) the uniqueness of the view-point (humans have two eyes). Metzinger compensates for the missing spatiality in his two-dimensional representation by giving other cues for depth, in addition to relative size: shading and shadows, source of light, occlusion (e.g., the stage or table upon which the woman dances cuts 'in front' of the woman sitting at the table). Metzinger represents a subjective effect objectively on the canvas, imitating subjective phenomena (of vision) objectively. Henri Poincaré, in Science and Hypothesis, 1902, discusses 'representative' space (visual, tactile and motor space) versus 'geometrical' space.The painting inscribes an ambivalence in that it expresses both contemporary and classical, modern and traditional, avant-garde and academic connotations, simultaneously. The "busy geometry of planar fragmentation and juxtaposed perspectives has a more than reflexive function," notes Cottington, "for the symmetrical patterning of its reticulations (as in the dancer's décolletage) and their rhythmic parallel repetitions suggest not only movement and diagrams but also, metonymically, the mechanised object-world of modernity."Two works entitled Nu and Landscape, circa 1908 and 1909 respectively, indicate that Metzinger had already departed from his Fauvist brand of Divisionism by 1908. Turning his attention fully towards the geometric abstraction of form, Metzinger allowed the viewer to reconstruct the original volume mentally and to imagine the object depicted within space. But this wasn't the space of Euclidean geometry and its associated classical one-point perspective in use and unquestioned since the onset of the Renaissance. This was an all-out multi-frontal attack on the narrow limitations of academicism, on pre-20th century empiricism, on positivism, determinism and the untenable notions of absolute space, absolute time and absolute truth. It was a revolt inline with those leveled by the mathematician Henri Poincaré and the philosophers William James, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. This was an embrace of Riemannian geometry, of the relativity of knowledge, of realities hidden by human vision, an embrace of the world that surpassed material appearances. Poincaré, in Science & Method, The Relativity of Space (1897), wrote: "Absolute space exists no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body."
Thus the characteristic property of space, that of having three dimensions, is only a property of our distribution board, a property residing, so to speak, in the human intelligence. The destruction of some of these connections that is to say of these associations of ideas, would be sufficient to give us a different distribution board, and that might be enough to endow space with a fourth dimension. ... It quite seems, indeed, that it would be possible to translate our physics into the language of geometry of four dimensions.
Albert Gleizes, writing on Metzinger's Cubism in September 1911 (almost a year before the completion of Danseuse au café), identified Metzinger as a follower of Nietzsche who 'invents his own truth' by destroying 'old values'.His concerns for color that had assumed a primary role both as a decorative and expressive device before 1908 had given way to the primacy of form. But his monochromatic tonalities would last only until 1912, when both color and form would boldly combine to produce such works as Danseuse au café. "The works of Jean Metzinger" Guillaume Apollinaire writes in 1912 "have purity. His meditations take on beautiful forms whose harmony tends to approach sublimity. The new structures he is composing are stripped of everything that was known before him."As a resident of la Butte Montmartre in Paris, Metzinger entered the circle of Picasso and Braque (in 1908). "It is to the credit of Jean Metzinger, at the time, to have been the first to recognize the commencement of the Cubist Movement as such" writes S. E. Johnson, "Metzinger's portrait of Apollinaire, the poet of the Cubist Movement, was executed in 1909 and, as Apollinaire himself has pointed out in his book The Cubist Painters (written in 1912 and published in 1913), Metzinger, following Picasso and Braque, was chronologically the third Cubist artist.
Euclidean geometry décolletage Return to order determinism Guillaume Apollinaire Albert Gleizes Friedrich Nietzsche Divisionism positivism Cubist absolute time Cubism William James Henri Bergson geometric abstraction non-Euclidean geometry Jean Metzinger Henri Poincaré Fauvist Divisionist Riemannian geometry Montmartre left absolute space proto-Cubist