Jean Metzinger

Jean Metzinger – Early successes paved the way to Paris

Jean Metzinger was born in Nantes on 24 June 1883 into a distinguished family of officers – his great-grandfather, a member of the Legion of Honour, had served under Napoleon Bonaparte, and the street Rue Metzinger in Nantes was named after his Jean’s grandfather. After his father’s early death, Jean Metzinger focused his interests on mathematics, painting and music, although his mother, a music professor, urged him to study medicine. However, he was not happy with his first painting lessons with the portrait painter Hippolyte Touront; his teacher adhered to academic conventions whereas Metzinger preferred to follow the current trends in painting. In 1903, he simply sent three of his early pictures to the Salon des Indépendants and with the proceeds of the sales could afford the longed-for move to Paris. There he participated in the first Salon d’Automne, exhibited in Berthe Weill’s gallery, and made friends with artists such as Raoul Dufy, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso. 

Experiments with mosaic-like patterns of colour

Along with Derain, Delaunay and Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger was one of the artists who played a key role in reviving Neo-Impressionism in a highly modified form. The high point of his Neo-Impressionist work was marked by a portrait of his friend Delaunay, who in turn depicted Metzinger. Both shared an interpretation of the art direction based on mosaic-like colour patterns which already built a bridge to the later works rooted in Cubism. To achieve an effect of vivid light, Metzinger took great care in his magnificent mosaics to ensure that the small colour squares did not touch each other. Through exchange with painters such as Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Picasso, Metzinger’s painting style became increasingly geometric and moved from Divisionism to Cubism. He experimented again and again with targeted breaks in form and tried his hand at complex multiple views of a particular subject. 

The driving force of analytical Cubism

Jean Metzinger also presented his thoughts and theories in written form. In 1910, he published his Notes on Painting, and collaborated with Albert Gleizes in 1912 on the history-making treatise Du Cubisme, which is considered a fundamental manifesto on the Cubist movement. Metzinger and Gleizes belonged to the loose association of European artists who met in Jacques Villon’s house in Puteaux and distinguished themselves as the ‘Puteaux Group’ and ‘Salon Cubists’ from the ‘Gallery Cubists’ around Braque and Picasso. In 1916, alongside Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Crotti, Jean Metzinger exhibited in New York’s Montross Gallery before the call-up to military service interrupted his artistic work. He returned to Paris in 1919 where he spent the rest of his life, turning in the 1920s temporarily away from the Analytical Cubism he had helped to develop.