La Femme au Cheval
ArtistJean Metzinger
Year1911-12
TypeOil on canvas
LocationStatens Museum for Kunst. The Royal Collection of Paintings and Sculpture. Acquisition: 1980-12-18, Inv. no.: KMS7115, Copenhagen

La Femme au Cheval (also known as Woman with horse and The Rider) is a large oil painting created in 1911-12 by the French artist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). As the original French title indicates, the painting represents a woman and a horse. In addition, the rather elegant woman wearing only a pearl necklace, and the horse, are immersed in a landscape with trees and a window (in the 'background'), a vase, fruits and vegetation (in the 'foreground'). The nude figure sitting to the left, the horse standing to the right, along with other elements of the painting are depicted in a faceted manner resulting from a free and mobile perspective used by Metzinger to constitute the image of a whole—one that includes the fourth dimension ('simultaneity' of multiple view-points).[1]

Mobile perspective

The idea, exemplified in La Femme au Cheval, of moving around an object in order to see it from different view-points is treated in Du "Cubisme" (1912),[2] written in collaboration with Albert Gleizes. It was also a central idea of Jean Metzinger's earlier Note sur la Peinture, 1910.[3][4] Indeed, prior to Cubism painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point. And it was Jean Metzinger, for the first time in Note sur la peinture who enunciated the stimulating interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time. In that article, Metzinger writes about the works of Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, noting that they "discarded traditional perspective and granted themselves the liberty of moving around objects." This is the concept of "mobile perspective" that would tend towards the representation of the "total image." Though he does not discuss his own work in Note sur la peinture, clearly by the time of writing he had already discarded classical perspective (Nu, Landscape and Nu à la cheminée (Nude), c. 1908, 1909 and 1910 respectively) turning his attention fully towards the geometric abstraction of form.[5]

Theory

Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote with reference to non-Euclidean geometry in Du "Cubisme". It was argued that Cubism itself was not based on any geometrical theory, but that non-Euclidean geometry corresponded better than classical, or Euclidean geometry, to what the Cubsists were doing. The essential was in the understanding of space other than by the classical method of perspective; an understanding that would include and integrate the fourth dimension with 3-space.[6]

Though the rupture with the past seemed total, there was still within La Femme au Cheval something of the past. Metzinger, for example, writes in a Pan article, two years before the publication of Du "Cubisme" that the greatest challenge to the modern artist is not to 'cancel' tradition, but to accept "it is in us," acquired by living. It was the combination of the past with the present, and its progression into the future that most intrigued Metzinger.[7]

If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidian mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems.[2]

The concept of observing a subject from different points in space and time simultaneously (multiple or mobile perspective) developed by Metzinger and observed in La Femme au Cheval was not derived from Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, though it was certainly influenced in a similar way, through the work of Jules Henri Poincaré (particularly Science and Hypothesis). Poincaré's writings, unlike Einstein's, were well known leading up to 1912. Poincaré's widely read book, La Science et l'Hypothèse, was published in 1902 (by Flammarion).

It was perhaps the French mathematician Maurice Princet who introduced the work of Poincaré, along with the concept of the fourth spatial dimension, to artists at the Bateau-Lavoir. He was a close associate of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jean Metzinger and Marcel Duchamp. Princet is known as "le mathématicien du cubisme." Princet brought to attention of these artists a book entitled Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions by Esprit Jouffret (1903) a popularization of Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis. In this book Jouffret described hypercubes and complex polyhedra in four dimensions projected onto a two-dimensional page. Princet was close to Metzinger and participated in meetings of the Section d'Or in Puteaux, giving informal lectures to the artists, many of whom were passionate about mathematical order. 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".[3]

Influence on quantum mechanics

Jean Metzinger, La Femme au Cheval, hanging in the office of Niels Bohr (the Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922)

Arthur I. Miller, author of Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (2002), writes: "Cubism directly helped Niels Bohr discover the principle of complementarity in quantum theory, which says that something can be a particle and a wave at the same time, but it will always be measured to be either one or the other. In analytic cubism, artists tried to represent a scene from all possible viewpoints on one canvas. [...] How you view the painting, that’s the way it is. Bohr read the book by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes on cubist theory, Du Cubisme. It inspired him to postulate that the totality of an electron is both a particle and a wave, but when you observe it you pick out one particular viewpoint."[8]

Niels Bohr (1885–1962), the Danish physicist and one of the principle founders of quantum mechanics, had indeed hung in his office a large painting by Jean Metzinger, La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a horse, The Rider) 1911-12. This work is one of Metzinger's most conspicuous early examples of 'mobile perspective' implementation. Bohr's interest in Cubism, according to Miller, was anchored in the writings of Metzinger. Arthur Miller concludes: "If cubism is the result of the science in Art, the quantum theory is the result of art in science."[9]

In the epistemological words of Bohr, 1929:

...depending upon our arbitrary point of view...we must, in general, be prepared to accept the fact that a complete elucidation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description. (Neils Bohr, 1929)[10]

Within the context of Cubism, artists were forced into the position of re-evaluating the role of the observer. Classical linear and aerial perspective, uninterrupted surface transitions and chiaroscuro were pushed aside. What remained was a series of images obtained by the observer (the artist) in different frames of reference as the object was being painted. Essentially, observations became linked through a system of coordinate transformations. The result was Metzinger's 'total image' or a combination of successive images. In Metzinger's theory, the artist and the object being observed became equivocally linked so that the results of any observation seemed to be determined, at least partially, by actual choices made by the artist. "An object has not one absolute form; it has many," Metzinger wrote. Furthermore, part of the role of placing together various images was left to the observer (the one looking at the painting). The object represented, depending on how the observer perceives it, could have as many forms "as there are planes in the region of perception." (Jean Metzinger, 1912)[11]

Exhibitions

Literature

References

  1. ^ Alex Mittelmann, State of the Modern Art World, The Essence of Cubism and its Evolution in Time, 2011
  2. ^ a b Du "Cubisme", Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, Edition Figuière, Paris, 1912 (First English edition: Cubism, Unwin, London, 1913)
  3. ^ a b Note sur la peinture, Jean Metzinger, Pan (Paris), October–November 1910
  4. ^ 'Cubisme et tradition, Jean Metzinger, Paris Journal, 16 August 1911
  5. ^ S. E. Johnson, Metzinger, Pre-Cubist and Cubist Works, 1900-1930, International Galleries, Chicago, 1964
  6. ^ Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and NonEuclidean geometry in Modern Art, 1983
  7. ^ Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, 1985, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, p. 11
  8. ^ Miller, A.
  9. ^ Miller, A., 2002, Einstein, Picasso: space, time and the beauty that causes havoc, Basic Books, New York, 2001
  10. ^ Neils Bohr, 1929, Wirkungsquantum und Naturbeschreibung', Die Naturwissenschaften 17 (The Quantum of Action and Description of Nature), pp. 483-486)
  11. ^ Gayana Jurkevic, 2000, In pursuit of the natural sign- Azorín and the poetics of Ekphrasis, pp. 200-213
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