Portrait of Jacques Nayral (also known as Portrait de Jacques Nayral) is a large oil painting created in 1911 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes (1881–1953). It was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1911 (no. 609), the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912 (no. 38), and reproduced in Du "Cubisme" written by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes in 1912, the first and only manifesto on Cubism. Metzinger in 1911 described Gleizes' painting as 'a great portrait'. Portrait of Jacques Nayral, one of Gleizes' first major Cubist works,Daniel Robbins, MoMA, From Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009 while still 'readable' in the figurative or representational sense, exemplifies the mobile, dynamic fragmentation of form characteristic of Cubism at the outset of 1911. Highly sophisticated in theory and in practice, this aspect of simultaneity would soon become identified with the practices of the Section d'Or. Here, Gleizes deploys these techniques in a radical, personal and coherent manner.David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905-1914, Yale University Press, 1998
Jacques Nayral (a pseudonym for Joseph Houot) was a young modernist poet, dramatist, publisher and occasional sports writer,Daniel Robbins, 1964, Albert Gleizes 1881 – 1953, A Retrospective Exhibition, Published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in collaboration with Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund who shared with Gleizes a passion for the theories of Henri Bergson. He was a friend of Gleizes and married his sister Mireille in 1912. Gleizes began work on his portrait in 1910. The interfusion and interrelation between the sitter and the background of the painting reflect Bergson’s concepts about the simultaneity of experience. It was avant-garde works such as this widely exhibited portrait that fed the public outcry against Cubism. "Its scale echoes the large-scale paintings of the official exhibitions, while its style subverts that tradition". (Tate Modern)Tate, London, Albert Gleizes, Portrait de Jacques Nayral, 1911
Purchased in 1979, the painting is exhibited in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern in London.
Description Portrait of Jacques Nayral is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 162 x 114 cm (63.8 by 44.9 inches), inscribed ‘Albert Gleizes 1911' (lower right). Studies for this work began in 1910 while the full portrait was completed during the late summer or early fall of 1911.Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001 The work represents an old friend of Gleizes, Jacques Nayral; the young author-dramatist who would marry Mireille Gleizes two years later.
Nayral was a partisan of the synthetic-social ideas of the Abbaye, editor-in-chief for the publishing house of Figuière and directly responsible for the publication of Du «Cubisme» as well as for Apollinaire's Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques and the projected series Tous les Arts. The background of Portrait of Jacques Nayral depicts Gleizes' garden at 24 Avenue Gambetta in Courbevoie,Armory Show entry form for Albert Gleizes' painting La Femme aux Phlox. Walt Kuhn family papers, and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Document shows Gleizes' address the western banlieue of Paris. Stylistically this painting fulfills the direction established in the unfinished portrait of Mme. Barzun", spring of 1911.(Daniel Robbins, 1964)Jacques Barzun sitting in front of Albert Gleizes portrait of his mother Madame H. M. BarzunJacques Barzun (ca. 2000). Behind Mr. Barzun is a portrait of Madame H. M. Barzun by Albert Gleizes (1911)
A page from the periodical Fantasio, 15 October 1911, 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 by Roland Dorgelès is heavily ironic, with the headline reading Ce que disent les cubes... (What the cubes say...).Christopher Green, Art in France: 1900-1940, Yale University Press, 2000Kubisme.info, Albert Gleizes en Jean Metzinger
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 in accord with his or her own creative intuition.
Content and form A similar concept lies behind Albert Gleizes' portrait of his friend, neo-Symbolist writer Joseph Houot, pen name Jacques Nayral, who in 1912 married Mireille Gleizes, the sister of Albert Gleizes. 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"; written in 1912 by Metzinger and Gleizes in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, held in October. Du "Cubisme", published by Eugène Figuière, a close associate of Gleizes' friends Jacques Nayral and Alexandre Mercereau, was an attempt to bring together all the progressive tendencies.Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1881-1953
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.Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du "Cubisme", Paris, Figuière, 1912 (published in English and Russian in 1913, a new edition was published in 1947) More so than an 'objective' view of the real-world, Jacques Nayral valorized subjective experience and expression. He and other Symbolist writers embraced an antirationalist and antipositivist 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 Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona (April–May 2012)
The Neo-Symbolist writers Jacques Nayral and Henri-Martin Barzun associated with the Unanimist movement in poetry. In his capacity as Figuière's editorial assistant Nayral had selected Du "Cubisme" and Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques as part of a projected series on the arts. These writers and other Symbolists valorized expression and subjective experience over an objective view of the physical world.
Paul Cézanne's technique of passage, in the Bergsonian sense, was used by the Cubists to stimulate a presentiment, an awareness of the dynamism of form. "Between sculpturally bold reliefs", wrote Gleizes and Metzinger, "let us throw slender shafts which do not define, but which suggest. Certain forms must remain implicit, so that the mind of the spectator is the chosen place of their concrete birth. Let us also contrive to cut by large restful surfaces any area where activity exaggerated by excessive contiguities.Art in Theory 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell Publishers Inc
The dynamism of form resides in the unfolding response of both the artist and viewer to the quantitative and qualitative properties of the Cubist artwork. Metzinger's La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a Horse) (1911-12)—illustrated in Du "Cubisme" and owned by the poet Jacques Nayral—is structured according to these principles. The interplay of volumes, lines and planes has been 'abstracted' from the subject matter and spread throughout the composition. These complex geometric forms serve to 'suggest' the underlying imagery rather than to 'define' the subject, allowing the unity of the picture to be established by the viewer's 'creative intuition'.
In this portrait, Gleizes was interested in 'equivalences, echoes, interpenetrations [emboîtements], rhythmic correspondences with the surrounding elements—terrain, trees, houses'. He was delighted to paint a portrait of Nayral because his face corresponded well to the solid, faceted, architectural qualities he had sought.
In a departure from the static nature of single-point perspective, in his Nayral portrait, as in Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon (1911), Gleizes simplifies, interpenetrates volumes, fuses the landscape with the model, to form a homogeneous picture. While volumes point is different directions and the subject is seen from several different angles ('multiple perspective') the observer still sees the entire surface of the canvas, preserving unity.
Nayral asked Gleizes to paint his portrait in 1910, a task the artist completed over the course of several months, coming to an end in 1911. For Gleizes, this portrait, much as Metzinger's Le goûter (Tea Time), exemplified concepts that were later codified in Du "Cubisme". In his autobiographical notes Gleizes suggests that the theory of intuition propounded in that text may have been pronounced as early as 1910 (during a Proto-Cubist phase).Jean Metzinger, Note sur la peinture (Note on painting), Pan, Paris, October–November 1910, 649–51, reprinted in Edward Frym Cubism, London, 1966.
Gleizes on Nayral I was on the verge of painting the Portrait of Jacques Nayral. He was to become my brother-in-law, and was one of the most sympathetic men I have ever met. A strange lad, a little surprising on first encounter - both disturbing because of his sharp use of irony and also attractive because of a generosity that left him as vulnerable as a child. The first time I met him was at President Bonjean'sGeorges Bonjean (1848-1918). Magistrate and penal reformer. His father was Louis Bernard Bonjean, President of the Cour de Cassation (Supreme Court of Appeal), house at Villepreux-les-Clayes, near Versailles, during a dinner which brought together the committee of that 'Villa Medicis Libre'The Villa Médicis Libre was founded under the patronage of the 'Fondation Georges Bonjean' in Villepreux, in the West of Paris, providing low-cost accommodations for artists. André Lhote and Raoul Dufy stayed there in 1910. which, as I said before, had been founded by Alexandre Mercereau. From that time onwards, we saw each other often and became friends. [...]
One day he asked me to do his portrait. I agreed with joy, all the more so because his head and his whole personality [personne] seemed to me to be perfect models for emphasising the plastic elements I was trying to develop. His face with clearly demarcated surfaces that made up a passionate interplay of facets, his hair in dark masses projecting lightly in waves over his temples, his solidly constructed body - straightaway suggested to me equivalences, echoes [rappels], interpenetrations, rhythmic correspondences with the surrounding elements, fields, trees, houses. So I suggested painting him in my garden, where I found easily to hand an environment that was highly suitable for my model.