An illustration from Esprit Jouffret's Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions. The 1903 book, which influenced Picasso, was given to him by Princet.
Princet is credited with introducing the work of Henri Poincaré and the concept of the "fourth dimension" to the cubists at the Bateau-Lavoir.[4] Princet brought to Picasso's attention a 1903 book by Esprit Jouffret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions),[5] a popularization of Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis in which Jouffret described hypercubes and other complex polyhedra in four dimensions and projected them onto the two-dimensional page. Picasso's sketchbooks for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon illustrate Jouffret's influence on the artist's work.[6]
In 1907, Princet's wife left him for André Derain, and he drifted away from the circle of artists at the Bateau-Lavoir.[7] But Princet remained close to Metzinger and participated in meetings of the Section d'Or in Puteaux. He gave informal lectures to the group, many of whom were passionate about mathematical order.[8]
Princet's influence on the cubists was attested to by his contemporaries. Maurice de Vlaminck wrote, "I witnessed the birth of cubism, its growth, its decline. Picasso was the obstetrician, Guillaume Apollinaire the midwife, Princet the godfather."[9]
In 1910, Metzinger said of him, "[Picasso] lays out a free, mobile perspective, from which that ingenious mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced a whole geometry".[10] Later, Metzinger wrote in his memoirs that:
Maurice Princet joined us often. Although quite young, thanks to his knowledge of mathematics he had an important job in an insurance company. But, beyond his profession, it was as an artist that he conceptualized mathematics, as an aesthetician that he invoked n-dimensional continuums. He loved to get the artists interested in the new views on space that had been opened up by Schlegel and some others. He succeeded at that.[11]
Louis Vauxcelles sarcastically dubbed Princet "the father of cubism":
M. Princet has studied at length non-Euclidean geometry and the theorems of Riemann, of which Gleizes and Metzinger speak rather carelessly. Now then, M. Princet one day met M. Max Jacob and confided him one or two of his discoveries relating to the fourth dimension. M. Jacob informed the ingenious M. Picasso of it, and M. Picasso saw there a possibility of new ornamental schemes. M. Picasso explained his intentions to M. Apollinaire, who hastened to write them up in formularies and codify them. The thing spread and propagated. Cubism, the child of M. Princet, was born.[12]
Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne, "We weren't mathematicians at all, but we really did believe in Princet".[13]
↑ Robbin, Tony (2006). Shadows of Reality, The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press. p.34. ISBN0-300-11039-1.
↑ Vlaminck, Maurice (June 6, 1942). "Opinions libres... sur la peinture". Comédia: 1, 6. J'ai assisté à la naissance du cubisme, à sa croissance, à son déclin. Picasso en fut l'accoucheur, Guillaume Apollinaire la sage-femme, Princet le parrain. in Seckel, Hélène (1994). "Anthology of Early Commentary on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". In William Rubin; Hélène Seckel; Judith Cousins (eds.). Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. New York: Museum of Modern Art. p.264. ISBN0-87070-162-2.
↑ Metzinger, Jean (October–November 1910). "Note sur la peinture". Pan: 60. in Miller. Einstein, Picasso. p.167.
↑ Vauxcelles, Louis (December 29, 1918). "Le Carnet des ateliers: La Père du cubisme". Le Carnet de la semaine: 11. in Henderson, Linda Dalrymple (1983). The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.72. ISBN0-691-10142-6.
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.
Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.
Albert Gleizes was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists. He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art. He was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, and both a founder and participant in the Abbaye de Créteil. Gleizes exhibited regularly at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris; he was also a founder, organizer and director of Abstraction-Création. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing, e.g., La Peinture et ses lois, Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire and Homocentrisme.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The work, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear slightly menacing and are rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. The figure on the left exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian style. The two adjacent figures are shown in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features. The ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force."
The Section d'Or, also known as Groupe de Puteaux or Puteaux Group, was a collective of painters, sculptors, poets and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism. Based in the Parisian suburbs, the group held regular meetings at the home of the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux and at the studio of Albert Gleizes in Courbevoie. Active from 1911 to around 1914, members of the collective came to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911. This showing by Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Marie Laurencin, created a scandal that brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the first time.
Esprit Jouffret was a French artillery officer, insurance actuary and mathematician, author of Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions, a popularization of Henri Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis in which Jouffret described hypercubes and other complex polyhedra in four dimensions and projected them onto the two-dimensional page.
Cubist sculpture developed in parallel with Cubist painting, beginning in Paris around 1909 with its proto-Cubist phase, and evolving through the early 1920s. Just as Cubist painting, Cubist sculpture is rooted in Paul Cézanne's reduction of painted objects into component planes and geometric solids; cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Presenting fragments and facets of objects that could be visually interpreted in different ways had the effect of 'revealing the structure' of the object. Cubist sculpture essentially is the dynamic rendering of three-dimensional objects in the language of non-Euclidean geometry by shifting viewpoints of volume or mass in terms of spherical, flat and hyperbolic surfaces.
La Femme au Cheval is a large oil painting created toward the end of 1911, early 1912, by the French artist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). The work was exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants in 1912 and the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912. The following year La Femme au Cheval was reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913).
Danseuse au café is a large oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). The work was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1912, entitled Danseuse. The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne created a controversy in the Municipal Council of Paris, leading to a debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such 'barbaric' art. The Cubists were defended by the Socialist deputy, Marcel Sembat. This painting was realized as Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published a major defence of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement, Du «Cubisme». Danseuse au café was first reproduced in a photograph published in an article entitled Au Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants" in the French newspaper Excelsior, 2 Octobre 1912. The painting is now located at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo New York.
Le Goûter, also known as Tea Time (Tea-Time), and Femme à la Cuillère is an oil painting created in 1911 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). It was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1911, and the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912.
Les Baigneuses is a large oil painting created at the outset of 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes (1881–1953). It was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1912; the Salon de la Société Normande de Peinture Moderne, Rouen, summer 1912; and the Salon de la Section d'Or, autumn 1912. The painting was reproduced in Du "Cubisme", written by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger the same year: the first and only manifesto on Cubism. Les Baigneuses, while still 'readable' in the figurative or representational sense, exemplifies the mobile, dynamic fragmentation of form and multiple perspective characteristic of Cubism at the outset of 1912. Highly sophisticated, both in theory and in practice, this aspect of simultaneity would soon become identified with the practices of the Section d'Or group. Gleizes deploys these techniques in "a radical, personal and coherent manner". Purchased in 1937, the painting is exhibited in the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
L'Oiseau bleu is a large oil painting created in 1912–1913 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956); considered by Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon as a founder of Cubism, along with Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. L'Oiseau bleu, one of Metzinger's most recognizable and frequently referenced works, was first exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1913, several months after the publication of the first Cubist manifesto, Du "Cubisme", written by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes (1912). It was subsequently exhibited at the 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin.
Proto-Cubism is an intermediary transition phase in the history of art chronologically extending from 1906 to 1910. Evidence suggests that the production of proto-Cubist paintings resulted from a wide-ranging series of experiments, circumstances, influences and conditions, rather than from one isolated static event, trajectory, artist or discourse. With its roots stemming from at least the late 19th century this period can be characterized by a move towards the radical geometrization of form and a reduction or limitation of the color palette. It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase of an art movement that would become altogether more extreme, known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.
New possibilities opened up by the concept of four-dimensional space helped inspire many modern artists in the first half of the twentieth century. Early Cubists, Surrealists, Futurists, and abstract artists took ideas from higher-dimensional mathematics and used them to radically advance their work.
Du "Cubisme", also written Du Cubisme, or Du « Cubisme », is a book written in 1912 by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. This was the first major text on Cubism, predating Les Peintres Cubistes by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913). The book is illustrated with black and white photographs of works by Paul Cézanne (1), Gleizes (5), Metzinger (5), Fernand Léger (5), Juan Gris (1), Francis Picabia (2), Marcel Duchamp (2), Pablo Picasso (1), Georges Braque (1), André Derain (1), and Marie Laurencin (2).
Le Port, also known as The Harbor, The Port or simply Marine, is a painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger. The work was exhibited in the spring of 1912 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, and at the Salon de La Section d'Or, Galerie La Boétie, October 1912, Paris,. Le Port was reproduced a few months later in the first major text on Cubism entitled Du "Cubisme", written in 1912 by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, published by Eugène Figuière Editeurs the same year. The Harbor was subsequently reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations , written by Guillaume Apollinaire, published by Figuière in 1913. At the Salon des Indépendants of 1912, Apollinaire had noticed the classical Ingresque qualities of Metzinger's Le Port, and suggested that it deserved to be hung in the Musée du Luxembourg's modern art collection. The dimensions and current whereabouts of Le Port are unknown.
Passy, Bridges of Paris, also called Les ponts de Paris (Passy), or Paysage à Passy, is a painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. The work was exhibited at the Salon de la Société Normande de Peinture Moderne, Rouen, 1912 ; the Salon de la Section d'Or, Galerie La Boétie, Paris, 1912 ; Manes Moderni Umeni, Vystava, Prague, 1914 ; and Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, July, 1914.
Baigneuses, also called Bathers, is a Proto-Cubist painting, now lost or missing, created circa 1908 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. Possibly exhibited during the spring of 1908 at the Salon des Indépendants. This black-and-white image of Metzinger's painting, the only known photograph of the work, was reproduced in Gelett Burgess, "The Wild Men of Paris", Architectural Record, May 1910. The painting was also reproduced in The New York Times, 8 October 1911, in an article titled "The 'Cubists' Dominate Paris' Fall Salon", and subtitled, "Eccentric School of Painting Increases Its Vogue in the Current Art Exhibition - What Its Followers Attempt to Do".
Femme à l'Éventail is an oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). The painting was exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, 1912, Paris, and De Moderne Kunstkring, 1912, Amsterdam. It was also exhibited at the Musée Rath, Geneva, Exposition de cubistes français et d'un groupe d'artistes indépendants, 3–15 June 1913. A 1912 photograph of Femme à l'Éventail hanging on a wall inside the Salon Bourgeois was published in The Sun, 10 November 1912. The same photograph was reproduced in The Literary Digest, 30 November 1912.
Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques, is a book written by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1905 and 1912, published in 1913. This was the third major text on Cubism; following Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (1912); and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme (1912).
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