Le Goûter, also known as Tea Time (Tea-Time), and Femme à la Cuillère (Woman with a teaspoon) 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, the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912, and reproduced (illustrated) in Du "Cubisme", by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes in 1912. The following year it was reproduced in Les Peintres Cubistes by Guillaume Apollinaire (published in 1913). André Salmon dubbed this painting "La Joconde du Cubisme" (La Joconde Cubiste), The Mona Lisa of Cubism (Mona Lisa with a teaspoon).[1][2]
Description
Tea Time is an oil painting on cardboard with dimensions 75.9 x 70.2 cm (29.9 x 27.6 in), signed Metzinger and dated 1911 lower right. The painting represents a barely draped (nude) woman holding a spoon, seated at a table with a cup of tea. In the 'background', the upper left quadrant, stands a vase on a commode, table or shelf. A square or cubic shape, a chair or painting behind the model, espouses the shape of the stretcher. The canvas is practically square, like the side of a cube. The woman's head is highly stylized, divided into geometrized facets, planes and curves (the forehead, nose, cheeks, hair). The source of light appears to be off to her right, with some reflected light on the left side of her face. Reflected light, consistently, can be seen on other parts of her body (breast, shoulder, arm). Her breast is composed of a triangle and a sphere. The faceting of the rest of her body, to some extent, coincides with actual muscular and skeletal features (collar bone, ribcage, pectorals, deltoids, neck tissue). Both of here shoulders are coupled with elements of the background, superimposed, gradational and transparent to varying degrees. Unidentified elements are composed of alternating angular structures, The colors employed by Metzinger are subdued, mixed (either on a palette of directly on the canvas), with an overall natural allure. The brushwork is reminiscent of Metzinger's Divisionist period (ca. 1903-1907), described by the critic (Louis Vauxcelles) in 1907 as large, mosaic-like 'cubes', used to construct small but highly symbolic compositions.[3]
The figure, centrally positioned, is shown both staring at the viewer and gazing off to the right (to her left), i.e., she is seen both straight on and in profile position. The tea cup is visible both from the top and side simultaneously, as if the artist physically moved around the subject to capture it simultaneously from several angles and at successive moments in time.
"This interplay of visual, tactile, and motor spaces is fully operative in Metzinger's Le Gouter of 1911", write Antliff and Leighten, "an image of an artist's model, semi-nude, with a cloth draped over her right arm as she takes a break between sessions [...] her right hand delicately suspends the spoon between cup and mouth." The combination of frames captured at successive time intervals is given play, pictorially, in simultaneous conflation of moments in time throughout the canvas. The Cézannian volumes and planes (cones, cubes and spheres) extend ubiquitously across the canvas, merging the sitter and surroundings. The painting becomes a product of experience, memory and imagination, evoking a complex series of mind-associations between past present and future, between tactile and olfactory sensations (taste and touch), between the physical and metaphysical.[4]
Though less radical than Metzinger's 1910 Nude—which is closely related to the work of Picasso and Braque of the same year—from the viewpoint of faceting of the represented subject matter, Le goûter is much more carefully constructed in relation to the overall shape of the picture frame. "Not only was this painting more unequivocally classical in its pedigree (and recognized as such by critics who instantly dubbed it 'La Joconde cubiste') than any of its now relatively distant sources in Picasso's oeuvre," writes David Cottington, "but in its clear if tacit juxtaposition, remarked on by Green and others, of sensation and idea—taste and geometry—it exemplified the interpretation of innovations from both wings of the cubist movement that Metzinger was offering in his essays of the time, as well as the paradigm shift from a perceptual to a conceptual painting that he recognized as now common to them."[5]
The quite atmosphere of Tea Time "seduces by means of the bridge it creates between two periods", according to Eimer and Podksik, "although Metzinger's style had already passed through an analytical phaes, it now concetrated more on the idea of reconciling modernity with classical subjects".[6]
A drawing (Etude pour 'Le Goûter'), 19 x 15 cm, is conserved in Paris at the Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou.[7]
André Salmon, 1912
In his 1912 Anecdotal History of CubismAndré Salmon writes:
Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay painted landscapes planted with cottages reduced to the severe appearance of parallelepipeds. Living less of an interior life than Picasso, remaining to all outward appearances more like painters than their precursor, these young artists were in a much greater hurry for results, though they be less complete. [...]
Exhibited, their works passed almost unobserved by the public and by art critics, who...recognized only the Fauves, whether it be to praise or to curse to them.
Now, the king of the Fauves... Henri Matisse... with one word cast out Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay from the family. With that feminine sense of the appropriate, the basis of his taste, he baptized the cottages of the two painters, "Cubist." An ingenuous or ingenious art critic was with him. He ran to his newspaper and with style wrote the gospel article; the next day the public learned of the birth of Cubism. (André Salmon, 1912)[8][9][10]
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."[11] 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'.[12]
Le Goûter "was hailed as a breakthrough... and opened the eyes of Juan Gris to the possibilities of mathematics", wrote Richardson (1996).[13] 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)[11]
"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 shortlived in the case of the artists.[14]
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 [11]). 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,[15] and to some extent in an article entitled Note sur la peinture, published in Pan, 1910.[16] 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.[14]
Creative intuition (and taste)
Page from the periodical Fantasio, 15 October 1911, featuring Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes (1911) and Le goûter (Tea Time) by Jean Metzinger
Pictorial space has been transformed by the artist into the temporal flow of consciousness. Quantity has morphed into quality, creating a 'qualitative space', "the pictorial analogue", write Antliff and Leighten, "to both time and space: temporal heterogeneity and the new geometries." In accord with this view of pictorial space, Metzinger and Gleizes encouraged artists to discard classical perspective and replace it with creative intuition. "Creative intuition is manifest in an artist's faculty of discernment, or 'taste', which coordinates all other sensations." Antliff and Leighten continue, "As we have seen Metzinger celebrated this faculty in Le Gouter, and Apollinaire advised artists to rely on their 'intuition' in The Cubist Painters (1913)."[4][17]
Metzinger's interests in proportion, mathematical order, and his emphasis on geometry, are well documented.[5] But it was his personal taste (gout in French) that sets Metzinger's work apart from both the Salon Cubists and those of Montmartre. While taste in Tea Time was denoted by one of the five senses, it was also connoted (for those who could read it) as a quality of discernment and subjective judgement.[5]Le gouter translates to 'afternoon snack' but also alludes to 'taste' in an abstract sense.
A page from the periodical Fantasio, 15 October 1911, by Roland Dorgelès, features Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes (1911) and Le goûter (Tea Time) by Jean Metzinger, juxtaposed with images of unidentified models, the man with his knees crossed and a book on his lap, the woman (clothed) holding a spoon and a tea cup, as if the sitters. The commentary is heavily ironic, with the headline reading Ce que disent les cubes... (What the cubes say...).[18][19]
Albert Gleizes, 1911, Portrait de Jacques Nayral, oil on canvas, 161.9 x 114 cm, Tate, London. This painting was reproduced in Fantasio: published 15 October 1911, for the occasion of the Salon d'Automne where it was exhibited the same year. Also exhibited at Salon de ‘La Section d'Or’, Galerie La Boëtie, Paris, October 1912
The complex forms that defined Metzinger's paintings of the period serve to suggest the underlying imagery (e.g., a nude, a horse, a dancer, a café-concert), rather than define the imagery; arousing the viewer's own creative intuition to decipher the 'total image.' This meant too, inversely, that the creative intuition of the artist would be aroused. No longer did the artist have to define or reproduce, painstakingly, the subject matter of a painting. The artist became to a large extent free, libre, to place lines, shapes, forms and colors onto the canvas according to his or her own creative intuition.
A similar concept lays behind Albert Gleizes' portrait of his friend, neo-Symbolist writer Joseph Houot, pen name Jacques Nayral, who in 1912 would marry Mireille Gleizes, the sister of Albert Gleizes.[19] Along with Metzinger's Tea Time, Gleizes' Portrait of Jacques Nayral, painted the same year, exemplifies ideas and opinions formulated between 1910 and 1911 that would soon be codified in Du "Cubisme" (1912). According to Gleizes, both the content and form in this painting were the result of mind associations as he completed the work from memory; something that would play a crucial role in the works of other Cubists, such as Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia.[4][20] More so than an 'objective' view of the real-world, Jacques Nayral valorized subjective experience and expression. He embraced an anti-rationalist and anti-positivist world-view, consistent with concepts that underscored Cubist philosophies. Nayral's interest in philosophy led him to correspond with Henri Bergson, someone who would greatly inspire both Metzinger and Gleizes. Nayral's related interest in avant-garde art led him to purchase Metzinger's large 1912 oil on canvas entitled La Femme au Cheval, also known as Woman with a Horse (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). Nayral's association with Gleizes led him to write the Preface for the Cubist exhibition at Gallery Dalmau in Barcelona (April–May 2012)[4]
The following edition of Fantasio (1 November 1911) began with "A Consultation at the Salon d'Automne" by Roland Catenoy; a suppository report of a walk around the Grand Palais accompanied by two medical men who offer their 'diagnosis' of the paintings on display. A climax is attained in the presence of Metzinger's Le goûter: a "cubisticall nude woman" who presents all the symptoms of "lithopocdion", otherwise only previously seen in petrified fetuses; she is beyond treatment and close to death."[21]
"These two responses to Metzinger and the other Cubists at the 1911 Automne have one theme in common:" writes Green et al, "the absurdity of the gap between Cubist painting and appearance. Just as Louis Vauxcelles made the Cubists' repudiation of "current vision" (appearances in nature) the crux of his attacks, so most of the jokes in the press at the expense of Cubism centered on the question of likeness. If Metzinger's Tea-Time was not like its sitter, what could it mean? Surely nothing."[21]
Guillaume Apollinaire reviewing the Cubist room at the Salon d'Automne of 1911 (in L'Intransigeant) writes: 'Gleizes shows us the two sides of his great talent: invention and observation. Take the example of Portrait de Jacques Nayral, there is good resemblance, but there is nothing [not one form or color] in this impressive painting that has not been invented by the artist. The portrait has a grandiose appearance that should not escape the notice of connoisseurs.'[22]
Criticism
The Cubists had become by 1912 a legitimate target for critical disdain and satirical wit. "The cubists play a role in art today analogous to that sustained so effectively in the political and social arena by the apostles of anti-militarism and organized sabotage" wrote the critic Gabriel Mourney in his review of the Salon d'Automne of 1911 for Le Journal, "so doubtless the excesses of the anarchists and saboteurs of French painting will contribute to reviving, in artists and amateurs worthy of the name, the taste for true art and true beauty."[5]
Claude of Le Petit Parisien accused the salon cubists of arrivisme, Janneau for Gil Blas questioned the sincerity of the cubists, and Tardieu in Echo de Paris condemned 'the snobbery of the gullible which applauds the most stupid nonsenses of the arts of painting presented to idiots as the audacities of genius."[5]
Henri Guilbeaux, reviewing the 1911 Indépendants for Les Hommes du jour described the paintings of Metzinger, Léger and others as 'grotesque, ridiculous, intended to bewilder – it would appear – the bourgeoisie', paintings 'whose cubes, cones and pyramids pile up, collapse and...make you laugh.'[5]
Vauxcelles, perhaps more so than his fellow critics, indulged in witty mockery of the salon Cubists: 'But in truth, what honor we do to these bipeds of the parallelepiped, to their lucubrations, cubes, succubi and incubi'. Vauxcelles was more than just skeptical. His comfort level had already been surpassed with the 1907 works of Matisse and Derain, which he perceived as perilous, 'an uncertain schematization, proscribing relief and volumes in the name of I know not what principle of pictorial abstraction.'[5]
His concerns deepened in 1909 as the work of Le Fauconier, Delaunay, Gleizes and Metzinger emerged as a unifying force. He condemned 'the frigid extravagances of a number of mystificators' and queried: 'Do they take us for dupes? Indeed are they fooled themselves? It;s a puzzle hardly worth solving. Let M. Metzinger dance along behind Picasso, or Derain, or Bracke [sic]...let M. Herbin crudely defile a clean canvas – that's their mistakes. We'll not join them...'[5]
Apollinaire took Picasso to the opening of the exhibition in 1911 to see the cubist works in Room 7 and 8.[23]
Provenance
R. Auclair, Paris, in 1912
Possibly Pierre Faure, Paris, by 1930
Unidentified dealer, c. 1936; sold to Louise and Walter C. Arensberg, Los Angeles, through Marcel Duchamp as agent, 1936
Gift to PMA, 1950. 1. A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, Du cubisme, Paris, 1912, repro. (as exhibition Salon d'Automne; collection M[onsieur] R. Auclair); G. Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes, Paris, 1913, repro. (same information). "R. Auclair" may be a pseudonym. 2. A painting by Metzinger entitled "Le goûter" ("Le goûter" was the title by which "Tea Time" was commonly known in its earlier history) was lent by Faure for exhibition at de Hauke & Co., NY, in April 1930. The dimensions listed in the de Hauke & Co. exhibition logbook, 29 1/2 x 27 3/4 in., match the PMA painting closely. See Archives of American Art, Jacques Seligmann & Co. Records / Series 9.4 / Box 406 / f. 8/ De Hauke & Co., Inc. Records/ Exhibition Files: Logbooks, 1930-1932 (copy in curatorial file). The "Créateurs de cubisme" (Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1935, catalog by Raymond Cogniat), also lists a painting, no. 136, entitled "Le goûter," belonging to Pierre Faure. Faure may have purchased the painting through Léonce Rosenberg, his usual dealer. However, this painting is dated 1912, while the Arensberg painting is inscribed with the date 1911. In addition, the Faure painting measurements are given as 68 x 68 cm., while the Arensberg painting is rectangular, measuring 75.9 x 70.2 cm. 3. Duchamp's provenance notes dated September 8, 1951, record that it was purchased "from dealer, 1936", probably a Paris dealer, as most of Duchamp's purchases were made there (PMA, Arensberg Archives).[2]
Fantasio, 15 October 1911, Albert Gleizes, Portrait of Jacques Nayral, Jean Metzinger, Le Gouter, Tea Time, 1911
Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, Du "Cubisme", Edition Figuière, Paris, 1912 (First English edition: Cubism, Unwin, London, 1913
Guillaume Apollinaire, Méditations esthétiques. Les peintres cubistes (The Cubist Painters) Edition Figuière, Paris, 1913
Guillaume Apollinaire, Dorothea Eimert, Anatoli Podoksik, Le Cubisme, ISBN : 978-1-78-42-777-5
Jean Luc Daval, Journal de l'art moderne, 1884-1914: texte, notices explicatives, déroulement synoptique à travers le témoignage des contemporains, Skira, 1973
Joann Moser, Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger in retrospect, 1985, The University of Iowa Museum of Art (J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press)
Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001
Didier Ottinger, Le futurisme à Paris: une avant-garde explosive, exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Galerie 1 - 15 October 2008 au 26 janvier 2009, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2008
^André Salmon, La Jeune Peinture française, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme, (Anecdotal History of Cubism), Paris, Albert Messein, 1912, Collection des Trente
