Focus on Tea Time (Metzinger) and discuss the Multiple views.
Tea Time was meant, according to A. Miller "as a representation of the fourth dimension. [...] It is straight forward multiple viewing, as if the artist were moving around his subject." However, Du "Cubisme" written the following year does not mention the fourth dimension explicitly. 'To establish pictorial space', write Metzinger and Gleizes, 'we must have recourse to tactile and motor sensations, indeed to all our faculties. It is our whole personality, contracting or dilating, that transforms the plane of the picture. Since in reaction this plane reflects the viewer's personality back upon his understanding, pictorial space may be defined as a sensible passage between two subjective spaces'.Le Goûter was hailed as a breakthrough... "and opened the eyes of Juan Gris to the possibilities of mathematics", wrote Richardson (1996). Principally due to the repercussions of Tea Time, Metzinger's publications and his high-profile status at the Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants (and in the general absence of Picasso and Braque from large public exhibitions), he became the leader of the Cubist movement (simultaneously as a painter, theorist, spokesperson and writer). The showing at the 1911 Salon d'Automne prompted Salmon to refer to Metzinger as "the young prince of Cubism"."There is certainly a parallel to be drawn," writes the art historian Peter Brooke in a letter to Miller, "between Einstein's attempt to reconcile the different viewpoints from which mathematical calculations can be made ('all reference points') and the multiple perspective of the Cubists, attempting to establish what Metzinger called (in 1910) a 'total image'. In both cases, however," Brooke continues, "what was achieved was not the longed for reconciliation of the conventions but simply the addition of another convention—very short-lived in the case of the artists.The idea of walking round an object to see it from different angles is treated in Du "Cubisme" as just another convention. Miller takes this as the central theme in Du "Cubisme" (p.258 ). The concept of observing a subject from different points in space and time simultaneously (multiple or mobile perspective) "to seize it from several successive appearances, which fused into a single image, reconstitute in time" was also developed by Metzinger in his 1911 article, and to some extent in an article entitled Note sur la peinture, published in Pan, 1910. As Brooke points out, "although it is certainly one of the central ideas in Metzinger's 1910 Note sur la Peinture, in Du "Cubisme" its just treated as another convention which has shocked the public but which the public will eventually come to accept.
Cubism Salon d'Automne Einstein Du "Cubisme" Juan Gris Salon des Indépendants simultaneously