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Until 1910 P. Picasso, J. Metzinger, and G. Braque were the only pioneers of the movement [...] and it was they who originated the term cubism. (Maurice Raynal)
Jean Metzinger, judging from an interview with Gelett Burgess in Architectural Record, appears to have abandoned his Divisionist style in favor of the faceting of form associated with analytic Cubism around 1908 or early 1909. A resident of Montmartre, Metzinger frequented the Bateau Lavoir at this time and exhibited with Georges Braque at the Berthe Weill gallery. By 1910, the robust form of early analytic Cubism of Picasso (Girl with a Mandolin, Fanny Tellier, 1910), Braque (Violin and Candlestick, 1910) and Metzinger (Nu à la cheminée, Nude, 1910) had become practically indistinguishable.As opposed to depicting the subject matter classically from one point of view, Metzinger used a concept he enunciated for the first time in Note sur la peinture (published in Pan, 1910), of 'mobile perspective' to portray the subject from a variety of angles. The images captured from multiple spatial view-points and at successive intervals in time are shown simultaneously on the canvas.The similarity between Metzinger's own work of 1910 to that of Picasso is exemplified in his Nu à la cheminée. The style of lips in both Metzinger's Nude and Picasso's Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde (spring-automn 1910) bear resemblance to each other (both are in the form of an "X"). So too, both pictures merge the model with the environment, blurring the distinction between background and foreground. Metzinger, however—in addition to the simultaneous views and multiple perspective—has included the image of a clock in the upper right quadrant, a fact that reveals Metzinger's didactic visual and literary reference to the physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré, and to the philosopher Henri Bergson's 'duration'.Such mathematical and philosophical inferences had little in common with the paintings of Picasso or Braque. Metzinger's interpretation targeted a wide audience—as opposed to private gallery collectors—exhibits in abundance an underlying idealism, a temporal reconstruction of dissected subjects based on the principles of non-Euclidean geometry. These inferences were compelling because they offered a stimulating and intelligible rationale for his innovations—consistent with contemporary intellectual trends in literature; notably with the Abbaye de Créteil group and Bergson's philosophy.
Jean Metzinger Henri Poincaré Divisionist Georges Braque Maurice Raynal Henri Bergson Bateau Lavoir Berthe Weill Gelett Burgess Cubism Montmartre Picasso non-Euclidean geometry Architectural Record Wilhelm Uhde Abbaye de Créteil Bergson