Focus on Nu à la cheminée and explain the Geometrical follies.
At the 1910 Salon des Indépendants the works of Metzinger (Nu, n. 3635, possibly Nu à la cheminée, and Portrait de M. Guillaume Apollinaire, n. 3636), Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Robert Delaunay were hung in close proximity, where the mutual geometric interests, then observable  collectively, began to unite as a group sensibility. Critics had begun treating these mutual interests as a single style, though the term Cubism would not emerge until the following spring relative to the same artists, on the occasion of the Salon des Indépendants. The autumn of 1910 saw Metzinger's Nude as the most purely Cubist work shown.In a review of the 1910 Salon d'Automne, published in La Presse, art critique Edmond Epardaud writes of the 'geometric follies' of Metzinger, and describes both Gleizes and Le Fauconnier as 'specious architects' (architectes fallacieux).The critic Jean Claude writes in his review of the same salon, with reference to Nu à la cheminée, published in Le Petit Parisien, "Metzinger painted a puzzle, cubic and triangular, which after verification, is a naked woman. I managed to discover the head, torso and legs. I had to give up finding arms. This is beyond comprehension".A few months earlier, reviewing the Indépendants, the critic Louis Vauxcelles had described Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger as "ignorant geometers".Roger Allard reviewing the 1910 Salon d'Automne used the terms "analytical" and "synthesis" in relation to Metzinger's Nu à la cheminée:Metzinger's nude and his landscape are ruled by an equal striving for fragmentary synthesis. No usual cliché from the aesthetic vocabulary fits the art of this disconcerting painter. Consider the elements of his nude: a woman, a clock, an armchair, a table, a vase with flowers...such, at least, is an account of my personal inventory. The head whose expression is very noble is rendered formally, and the artist seems to have drawn back from the integral application of his law. [...] The analytical kinships among objects and their mutual subordinations will be henceforth of little importance since they will be suppressed in the painted realization. These come into play later, subjectively, in each individual's mental realization.
"The importance of Allard's understanding of the genuine innovation visible at the salon is hard to overestimate," writes art historian Daniel Robbins, "He goes well beyond Metzinger's emphasis in the Pan article on multiple points of view, that is, beyond the technical innovations of the new painting. He penetrates to its intellectual core: an art capable of synthesizing a reality in the mind of the observer..."Albert Gleizes, in his review of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants writes about Metzinger's Nu à la cheminée:
In short, he wishes to develop the visual field by multiplying it, in order to inscribe it within the space of the canvas itself. It is at that point that the cube will play a role, and it is there that Metzinger will use that means to reestablish a balance that has been momentarily interrupted by these audacious inscriptions.
At the last Salon d'Automne [1910], we were able to get an idea of that technique, inscribed and set out in simple terms.
His Femme nu, depicted from various angles and in integral relationship with the setting, the shapes very subtly nestled one into another, was more like a masterful demonstration of the total image than an exclusively pictorial creation.Certain discriminating critics [...] considered it a metaphysical discovery more than a manifestation of art. Alembics, laboratory tubing, intellectual masturbation—people have called his work all those things, with the greatest seriousness in the world.
Daniel Robbins Louis Vauxcelles Robert Delaunay Roger Allard Cubism Salon d'Automne Henri Le Fauconnier Guillaume Apollinaire Albert Gleizes Salon des Indépendants Léger