Tea Time (French: Le Goûter, also known as Femme à la Cuillère or Woman with a teaspoon) is an oil painting created in 1911 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. It was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1911, and the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912.
The painting was first reproduced (illustrated) in Chroniques Médico-Artistique, Le Sabotage Anatomique au Salon d'Automne (1911).Chroniques Médico-Artistique, Le Sabotage Anatomique au Salon d'Automne, Paris médical : la semaine du clinicien. - 1911, n° 04, partie paramédicale. BIU Santé - Recherche dans les périodiques Medic@ The following year it was reproduced in Du "Cubisme", by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes (1912). In 1913 it was published in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations (Les Peintres Cubistes) by Guillaume Apollinaire. The painting was subsequently published in Arthur Jerome Eddy's Cubists and Post-impressionism, 1914, titled The Taster.Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-impressionism, Metzinger's Le goûter is reproduced and entitled The Taster, A.C. McClurg & Co. Chicago, 1914
Art critic Louis Vauxcelles in a literary newspaper Gil Blas, 30 September 1911, referred to Le goûter sarcastically as "la Joconde à la cuiller" (Mona Lisa with a spoon).
André Salmon dubbed this painting "La Joconde du Cubisme" ("La Joconde Cubiste"), "The Mona Lisa of Cubism" ("Mona Lisa with a teaspoon"). Tea Time "was far more famous than any painting that Picasso and Braque had made up until this time", according to curator Michael Taylor (Philadelphia Museum of Art), "because Picasso and Braque, by not showing at the Salons, have actually removed themselves from the public ... For most people, the idea of Cubism was actually associated with an artist like Metzinger, far more than Picasso." (Taylor, 2010)
Le Goûter forms part of the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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 painting 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 her 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 or directly on the surface), 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.
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 work. The Cézannian volumes and planes (cones, cubes and spheres) extend ubiquitously across the manifold, 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.Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001
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."David Cottington, 2004, Cubism and its Histories, Manchester University Press
The quiet atmosphere of Tea Time "seduces by means of the bridge it creates between two periods", according to Eimert and Podksik, "although Metzinger's style had already passed through an analytical phase, it now concentrated more on the idea of reconciling modernity with classical subjects".Guillaume Apollinaire, Dorothea Eimert, Anatoli Podoksik, Cubism, 2010,
A preparatory drawing for Tea Time (Etude pour 'Le Goûter'), 19 x 15 cm, is conserved in Paris at the Musée National d'Art Moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou.Centre Georges Pompidou, Etude pour 'Le Goûter
André Salmon, 1912
Following Louis Vauxcelles' sarcastic referral to Le goûter as "la Joconde à la cuiller" (Mona Lisa with a spoon) in the 30 September 1911 issue of Gil Blas, André Salmon elaborated, without sarcasm.
In his 1912 Anecdotal History of Cubism André 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)André Salmon, Anecdotal History of Cubism, quoted in Herschel Browning Chipp et al., Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, University of California Press, 1968, . p. 205
In L'Art Vivant Salmon quotes a statement made by Metzinger in defense of himself and Picasso: 'Before us, no painter had the desire to feel the objects he painted' ["Avant nous, aucun peintre n'avait eu le souci de palper les objets qu'il peignait"] (Jean Metzinger).André Salmon, Artistes d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, L'Art Vivant, Paris, Sixième Édition, Les Édition G. Crès, Paris, 1920 p. 117 What Metzinger probably refers to is that unlike the artists before them, he and Picasso move around their models and subjects, capturing not just one vision but many, capturing the full essence of their subject matter, if not all of its characteristics and properties. "Palper", or to 'palpate the objects' is more than just 'feel', it is to examine or explore by touch, a method of examination in which the artist feels size or shape or firmness or location of something, it implies volume, it involves a sense, just as taste. This text can also be found in André Salmon on French Modern Art, translated as: "We have never had the curiosity to touch the objects we were painting."André Salmon on French Modern Art, edited and translated by Beth S. Gersh-Nešić, Cambridge University Press, 2005, , p. 55 This translation of Metzinger's statement is obviously erroneous, implying nearly the exact opposite of what was meant in the original French.
Also in L'Art Vivant, André Salmon writes about Le Goûter: 'It was Metzinger who attempted and was tempted by freedom. Savant in grace, he exhibited a painting we named the Mona Lisa of Cubism' ["C'est Metzinger qui tenta et que tenta la liberté. Savant en la grâce, il exposa une toile qu'on baptisa la Joconde du cubisme"].
In his 1920 essay, André Salmon again quotes Metzinger's statement: "Jamais, jusqu’a ce jour, les peintres n’avaient eu la curiosité de toucher les objets dont ils prétendaient traduire l’apparence".André Salmon, Artistes d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, L'Art Vivant, Paris, Sixième Édition, Les Édition G. Crès, Paris, 1920, pp. 136-137 According to Salmon, Metzinger's reference to "touching" (toucher) the objects they attempted to represent, was a means by which to show all the sides, every aspect, each view-point, each element of the surface of the object simultaneously ("toutes les faces d'un objet à la fois").
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."Miller, A., 2002, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc, Basic Books, New York, 2001, pp. 167-168 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'.Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, Du "Cubisme", Edition Figuière, Paris, 1912. English edition: Cubism, Unwin, London, 1913