Jean Metzinger

Nantes, 1883 – Paris, 1956

Jean Metzinger was a French painter and theorist born at Nantes. He studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and, in 1903, went to Paris where his painting was influenced by Neo-Impressionism and then by Fauvism. Around 1908, he became friends with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom he frequented the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, and his painting became associated with the Cubist movement of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. He became a member of the cubist school, exhibiting with them in 1910 and 1911, and was a founder member of the “Section d’Or”. In 1910, when he published his “Note sur la peinture”, Metzinger became one of the main theorists of the new avant-garde language and articulated the theoretical basis of Picasso and Braque’s Cubism, according to which objects are represented through successive experiences of space and time. In 1913, he was represented in the “Strum” exhibition at Berlin. Between 1920 and 1924, his cubist language evolved towards neoclassical forms without losing the geometric structure, and in the second half of the decade, he approached the mechanical world of Fernand Léger. In his final stage, he remained concerned with aspects of form, volume, and space, while returning to a more classical style, without forgetting the cubist geometry. He was active in the dissemination of Cubist ideas and is now chiefly remembered for the book Du Cubisme (1912) which he wrote in collaboration with Gleizes.