How does this artwork elucidate its Description?
Portrait of Jacques Nayral is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 162 x 114 cm (63.8 by 44.9 inches), inscribed ‘Albert Gleizes 1911' (lower right). Studies for this work began in 1910 while the full portrait was completed during the late summer or early fall of 1911. The work represents an old friend of Gleizes, Jacques Nayral; the young author-dramatist who would marry Mireille Gleizes two years later.
Nayral was a partisan of the synthetic-social ideas of the Abbaye, editor-in-chief for the publishing house of Figuière and directly responsible for the publication of Du «Cubisme» as well as for Apollinaire's Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques and the projected series Tous les Arts. The background of Portrait of Jacques Nayral depicts Gleizes' garden at 24 Avenue Gambetta in Courbevoie, the western banlieue of Paris. Stylistically this painting fulfills the direction established in the unfinished portrait of Mme. Barzun", spring of 1911.(Daniel Robbins, 1964)
A page from the periodical Fantasio, 15 October 1911, features Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes (1911) and Le goûter (Tea Time) by Jean Metzinger, juxtaposed with images of unidentified models, the man with his knees crossed and a book on his lap, the woman (clothed) holding a spoon and a tea cup, as if the sitters. The commentary by Roland Dorgelès is heavily ironic, with the headline reading Ce que disent les cubes... (What the cubes say...).
The complex forms that defined Metzinger's paintings of the period serve to suggest the underlying imagery (e.g., a nude, a horse, a dancer, a café-concert), rather than define the imagery; arousing the viewer's own creative intuition to decipher the 'total image.' This meant too, inversely, that the creative intuition of the artist would be aroused. No longer did the artist have to define or reproduce, painstakingly, the subject matter of a painting. The artist became to a large extent free, libre, to place lines, shapes, forms and colors onto the canvas in accord with his or her own creative intuition.
Daniel Robbins Roland Dorgelès Albert Gleizes banlieue right Cubism Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques Abbaye Jean Metzinger Le goûter (Tea Time) Courbevoie Du «Cubisme»