Focus on Lady at her Dressing Table and explain the Background.
The Cubist considerations manifested prior to the outset of World War I—such as the fourth dimension, dynamism of modern life, the occult, and Henri Bergson's concept of duration—had now been vacated, replaced by a purely formal reference frame.This clarity and sense of order spread to almost all on the artists under contract with Léonce Rosenberg—including Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Auguste Herbin, Joseph Csaky and Gino Severini—leading to the descriptive term 'Crystal Cubism', coined by the critic Maurice Raynal.Femme au miroir, as other works by Metzinger of the same period, relate to those of his colleague and friend Juan Gris, whose Portrait of Josette Gris was painted just six months after Metzinger's canvas, and with Gris' Seated Woman of 1917.The works of Gris and Metzinger painted during the war employ transparencies that blur the distinction between the background and the figure. Rather than gradients of tone or color, these works are painted with flat, uniform sections of tone and color. Albeit, in Femme au miroir Metzinger uses a textured surface in the lighter blue areas. Some minimal brushstrokes remain visible throughout these paintings. Each painting represents objects or elements of the real world—such as perfume bottles, moulding of the walls, an ear ring—and human figures. Most outstanding of all, however, is the angular juxtaposition of the surface planes, which the works hold in common.During 1916, Sunday discussions at the studio of Jacques Lipchitz included Metzinger, Gris, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Reverdy, André Salmon, Max Jacob, and Blaise Cendrars. Metzinger and Gris were thus in close contact.
In a letter written in Paris to Albert Gleizes in Barcelona during the war, dated 4 July 1916, Metzinger writes:After two years of study I have succeeded in establishing the basis of this new perspective I have talked about so much. It is not the materialist perspective of Gris, nor the romantic perspective of Picasso. It is rather a metaphysical perspective—I take full responsibility for the word. You can't begin to imagine what I've found out since the beginning of the war, working outside painting but for painting. The geometry of the fourth space has no more secret for me. Previously I had only intuitions, now I have certainty. I have made a whole series of theorems on the laws of displacement [déplacement], of reversal [retournement] etc. I have read Schoute, Rieman (sic), Argand, Schlegel etc.
The actual result? A new harmony. Don't take this word harmony in its ordinary [banal] everyday sense, take it in its original [primitif] sense. Everything is number. The mind [esprit] hates what cannot be measured: it must be reduced and made comprehensible.That is the secret. There in nothing more to it [pas de reste à l'opération]. Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, lasting art is never anything more than a mathematical expression of the relations that exist between the internal and the external, the self [le moi] and the world. (Metzinger, 4 July 1916)
The 'new perspective' according to Daniel Robbins, "was a mathematical relationship between the ideas in his mind and the exterior world". The 'fourth space' for Metzinger was the space of the mind.In a second letter to Gleizes, dated 26 July 1916, Metzinger writes:If painting was an end in itself it would enter into the category of the minor arts which appeal only to physical pleasure... No. Painting is a language—and it has its syntax and its laws. To shake up that framework a bit to give more strength or life to what you want to say, that isn't just a right, it's a duty; but you must never lose sight of the End. The End, however, isn't the subject, nor the object, nor even the picture—the End, it is the idea. (Metzinger, 26 July 1916)
Continuing, Metzinger mentions the differences between himself and Juan Gris:Someone from whom I feel ever more distant is Juan Gris. I admire him but I cannot understand why he wears himself out with decomposing objects. Myself, I am advancing towards synthetic unity and I don't analyze any more. I take from things what seems to me to have meaning and be most suitable to express my thought. I want to be direct, like Voltaire. No more metaphors. Ah those stuffed tomatoes of all the St-Pol-Roux of painting.
Some of the ideas expressed in these letters to Gleizes were reproduced and quoted in an article written by Paul Dermée, published in the magazine SIC, 1919, but the existence of letters themselves remained unknown until the mid-1980s.From 1916, Lipchitz, Gris and Metzinger had been in close contact with one another. The three had just signed contracts with the dealer, art collector and gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg. It is the work executed during the war of these three artists that can be analyzed as a process of distillation in a shift towards order and purity. This process would continue through 1918 when the three spent part of the summer together in Beaulieu-Prés-Loches to escape the bombardment of Paris.At the opening of the Musée National d"art Moderne in Paris, 9 June 1947, Léonce Rosenberg related his impressions to Hélène Bauret:In the painting "La Tricoteuse", hanging next to works by Gris, Metzinger reveals himself more of a painter, more natural, more flexible [plus souple] than Gris. Often, Gris would tell me: "Ah! If I could brush [brosser] like the French!"
Gris was indeed capable of producing works closely attuned to those of Metzinger. His late arrival on the Cubist scene (1912) saw him influenced by the leaders of the movement: Picasso, of the 'Gallery Cubists' and Metzinger of the 'Salon Cubists'. His entry at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, Hommage à Pablo Picasso, was also an homage to Metzinger's Le goûter (Tea Time). Le goûter persuaded Gris of the importance of mathematics (numbers) in painting.As art historian Peter Brooke points out, Gris started painting persistently in 1911 and first exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants. "He appears with two styles", writes Brooke, "In one of them a grid structure appears that is clearly reminiscent of the Goûter and of Metzinger's later work in 1912. In the other, the grid is still present but the lines are not stated and their continuity is broken".Art historian Christopher Green writes that the "deformations of lines" allowed by mobile perspective in the head of Metzinger's Tea-time and Gleizes's Jacques Nayral "have seemed tentative to historians of Cubism. In 1911, as the key area of likeness and unlikeness, they more than anything released the laughter." Green continues, "This was the wider context of Gris's decision at the Indépendants of 1912 to make his debut with a Homage to Pablo Picasso, which was a portrait, and to do so with a portrait that responded to Picasso's portraits of 1910 through the intermediary of Metzinger's Tea-time.While Metzinger's process of distillation is already noticeable during the latter half of 1915, and conspicuously extending into early 1916, this shift is signaled in the works of Gris and Lipchitz from the latter half of 1916, and particularly between 1917 and 1918.Kahnweiler dated the shift in style of Juan Gris to the summer and autumn of 1916, following the pointilliste paintings of early 1916. This timescale corresponds with the period after which Gris signed a contract with Léonce Rosenberg, following a rally of support by Henri Laurens, Lipchitz and Metzinger.Metzinger's radical geometrization of form as an underlying architectural basis for his compositions is already visible in his work circa 1912–13, in paintings such as Au Vélodrome (1912) and Le Fumeur (1913). Where before, the perception of depth had been greatly reduced, now, the depth of field was no greater than a bas-relief.
Metzinger's evolution toward synthesis has its origins in the configuration of flat squares, trapezoidal and rectangular planes that overlap and interweave, a "new perspective" in accord with the "laws of displacement". In the case of Le Fumeur Metzinger filled in these simple shapes with gradations of color, wallpaper-like patterns and rhythmic curves. So too in Au Vélodrome. But the underlying armature upon which all is built is palpable. Vacating these non-essential features would lead Metzinger on a path towards Femme au miroir, and a host of other works created before and after the artist's demobilization as a medical orderly during the war, such as L'infirmière (The Nurse, location unknown); Soldier at a Game of Chess (1914–15, Smart Museum of Art); Landscape with Open Window (1915, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes); Femme à la dentelle (1916, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris); Summer (1916, Statens Museum for Kunst); Le goûter (1917, Galerie Malingue, Paris); Tête de femme (1916–17, private collection); and two works very closely related to Femme au miroir: Femme devant le miroir (c. 1914, private collection) and Femme au miroir (1916–17, Donn Shapiro collection).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 was 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", to use the words of Metzinger, was the ideal metaphysical starting point. Only afterwards would those structures be made to denote objects of choice.
André Salmon Daniel Robbins Amedeo Modigliani Maurice Raynal Gino Severini Albert Gleizes Blaise Cendrars Crystal Cubism Statens Museum for Kunst Cubist Cubism Pierre Reverdy Le Fumeur Pablo Picasso Henri Laurens Henri Bergson Jacques Lipchitz Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Smart Museum of Art Soldier at a Game of Chess Henri Matisse Léonce Rosenberg Joseph Csaky Le goûter (Tea Time) fourth dimension Juan Gris Diego Rivera Max Jacob Au Vélodrome Auguste Herbin Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes