In this artwork, how is the Wartime and after discussed?
Healing the wound of the psyche that nurtures the talent of an artist, would destroy his artistic production (Jean Metzinger)
Following the declaration of war in August 1914, many artists were mobilized, almost simultaneously: Metzinger, Gleizes, Braque, Léger, de La Fresnaye, Georges Valmier and Duchamp-Villon. Each found the space and time to make art, sustaining differing types of Cubism (primarily sketches) during the war years. They discovered a ubiquitous link between the Cubist syntax (beyond pre-war attitudes) and that of the novelty and anonymity of mechanized warfare. Cubism evolved as much a result of an evasion of the inconceivable atrocities of war as of nationalistic pressures. Along with the evasion came the need to diverge further and further away from the depiction of things. As the rift between art and life grew, so too came the burgeoning need for a process of distillation. Following the armistice and the series of exhibitions at Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, the rift between art and life—and the overt distillation that came with it—had become the canon of Cubist orthodoxy; and it would persist with the peace that followed.Metzinger served very close to the front during World War I as a medical aide, and was probably with his surgical automobile when Soldier at a Game of Chess was painted. However, very few of his works represent scenes associated with war. And rather than delving into the actual carnage of war, this painting evokes an idealized theory of war. Instead, his interest is captured by mathematical rationality, order, his faith in humanity and modernity. The war, however, is very present in this work, by the presence of the soldier and his engagement with chess, simultaneously an intellectual game and a battle. The soldier plays an abstract strategy game in which, whatever his strategy, his existence is adroitly dependent on non-deterministic results of his tactical decisions. His role is to minimize luck and the apparition of undesirable possibilities. As J. Mark Thompson wrote in his article "Defining the Abstract": There is an intimate relationship between such games and puzzles: every board position presents the player with the puzzle, What is the best move?, which in theory could be solved by logic alone. A good abstract game can therefore be thought of as a "family" of potentially interesting logic puzzles, and the play consists of each player posing such a puzzle to the other. Good players are the ones who find the most difficult puzzles to present to their opponents.
The sculptures of Lipchitz, Laurens and Csaky, and the paintings of Gris, Severini and Gleizes represented Cubism in its most distilled form between 1916 and 1920. However, by the time his exhibition at the Galerie de L'Effort Moderne at the outset of 1919—just as before the war—Metzinger was considered one of the leaders of the movement. His paintings at this exhibition were perceived as highly significant. Images were now created solely out of the imagination of the artist (or virtually so), independent of any visual starting point. Observed reality and all that is referred to in life are no longer needed as foundation for artistic production. The synthetic manipulation of abstract geometric shapes, or "mathematical expression of the relations that exist between the le moi and the world" (in Metzinger's words), was the ideal metaphysical starting point. Only afterwards would those structures be made to denote objects of predilection.Indeed, the wartime distillation of Metzinger's Cubism came with an acceleration in the type of games that could be played tactically with paradox by manipulating conflicting predications of planimetric flatness and the perspectival depth of space. This game playing would culminate between 1917 and 1919, but is already palpable in Soldier at a Game of Chess. The perspectival presentation is only fragmentary—almost non-Cubist in abstract guise—and lacks coherence, so that the resulting composition is throughout paradoxical. There are sufficient indications to suggest a soldier and the activity in which he's engaged; his military cap (and an echo of it in red), a hand (however transparent it may be), a face (with a cigarette in its mouth), the alternating colored squares of a chessboard, a rook, a pawn and other chess pieces. But the figure and his setting simultaneously fuse as an arrangement of planes that cancel those indications of depth any greater than a relief. And the disorientations are compounded by Metzinger's placing of green and orange in the soldiers upward-turned face, while the red of his arms espouse the echo-like profile of the face and cap in the background plane directed downward toward the game, for it becomes almost inevitable to see the soldier's alter ego; an effect that both pulls the man into the background of the composition and pushes him forward towards the viewer, again, canceling out indications of depth.Here, Metzinger uses a checkerboard and wooden table to establish a clearly demarcated fore-plane that is non-fixed in relation to which its 'hovering' chess pieces are situated. This profound battle between planimetric and perspectival dimensions as here in Soldier at a Game of Chess has precedence in Metzinger's Cubism of 1912–13, but the absence of decorative elements, the clarity and sense of order, and degree of game-playing with conflicting codes for the personification of space that he refined during the war places the artist at the forefront of the nascent form of art dubbed Crystal Cubism by the critic Maurice Raynal.
Maurice Raynal chessboard Galerie de L'Effort Moderne chess Gleizes alter ego pawn Crystal Cubism Cubist Cubism abstract strategy game Duchamp-Villon Léger the armistice relief Chess de La Fresnaye Jean Metzinger World War I Georges Valmier rook Braque