Explore the Proto-Cubism of this artwork, Bathers (Metzinger).
According to Metzinger, in his Cubism was Born, published years later, Cubism had been born out of the "need not for an intellectual art but for an art that would be something other than a systematic absurdity"; the idiocies of reproducing or copying nature in trompe-l'œil on a surface that is rigorously flat. With this type of illusion other artist of his generation such as Gleizes and Picasso wanted nothing to do. "Quite clearly" Metzinger notes, "nature and the painting make up two different worlds which have nothing in common ..." Already, in 1906, "it could be said that a good portrait led one to think about the painter not the model".In his Le Cubisme était Né: Souvernirs, Metzinger writes:As for Picasso ... the tradition he came from had prepared him better than ours for a problem to do with structure. And Berthe Weil was right when she treated those who compared him/confused him with, a Steinlen or a Lautrec as idiots. He had already rejected them in their own century, a century we had no intention of prolonging. Whether or not the Universe was endowed with another dimension, art was going to move into a different field.
The illusion had been maintained up to 1906 or 1907 through the negligence of those whose job it was to clear away the rubbish, but the break was achieved in 1908. No-one would again dare to look at a Puvis de Chavannes or read Balzac. No-one, I mean, among those who walked above the Moulin Rouge, which they would never even have thought of entering.
Metzinger continues:I had measured the difference that separated art prior to 1900 from the art which I felt was being born. I knew that all instruction was at an end. The age of personal expression had finally begun. The value of an artist was no longer to be judged by the finish of his execution, or by the analogies his work suggested with such-and-such an archetype. It would be judged – exclusively – by what distinguished this artist from all the others. The age of the master and pupil was finally over; I could see about me only a handful of creators and whole colonies of monkeys. (Jean Metzinger, Cubism was Born)
From his Montmartre studio on the rue Lamarck to Picasso's Bateau Lavoir studio on the rue Ravignan, writes Metzinger, "the attempt [prétention] to imitate an orb on a vertical plane, or to indicate by a horizontal straight line the circular hole of a vase placed at the height of the eyes was considered as the artifice of an illusionistic trickery that belonged to another age."
I wanted an art that was faithful to itself and would have nothing to do with the business of creating illusions. I dreamed of painting glasses from which no-one would ever think of drinking, beaches that would be quite unsuitable for bathing, nudes who would be definitively chaste. I wanted an art which in the first place would appear as a representation of the impossible. (Metzinger)
It was the search for beauty that had attracted Metzinger to the abstract. Beauty depends not only on geometrical forms or simplified colors, but plainly beauty as it exists in itself. It wasn't just the simple result of a reductive approach to the elements of all the parts. It wasn't either just a dialectic view of everything that led him just as simply to treat each object as opposed to the other, and therefore thoroughly distinct. The blurring of differences was against the entire tenor of the whole.The narrative of Metzinger outlined by his Bathers schematic geometric arrangements was the result of an abstracting process not solely based on "axiomatics". These axiomatic abstractions, however, by themselves contain no assertions as to the reality that can be experienced, not in a logical sense deduced from experience, but free inventions of the human mind, abstractions, construed by mathematical means. With works such as Bathers had emerged a growing accent on the power of the mind to create for itself, a growing spirit of abstraction, of invention, fabrication.As one would expect, Metzinger’s concept of painting was both more sophisticated and perceptive than Cézanne, but fundamentally the shape of the misunderstandings that were to follow Cubism were the same as Cézanne's, and so too were the implications. Metzinger had seen painting as rooted in the experience of nature: four-dimensional and geometric. He stressed this heavily, and at the same time brought out the flatness and dislocations of Cézanne’s transformations of nature—with the conceptual aspect of multiple perspectives and non-Euclidean spacetime. The importance of Cubism, he accepted, was to emphasize the idea that everything visible (objects) and invisible (consciousness) has an n-dimensional geometric basis (an idea he associated with ‘construct an infinite number of different spaces for the use of painters’).
Nearly conscious in someone like Michelangelo, or Paolo Uccello, quite intuitive in painters such as Ingres, or Corot, it works on the basis of numbers which belong to the painting itself, not to whatever it represents. (Metzinger)
My conviction was justified: art, that which lasts, is based on mathematics.
trompe-l'œil Bateau Lavoir abstract right Cubism Jean Metzinger Proto-Cubism Montmartre