Woman with a Fan (French: Femme à l'Éventail, also known as The Lady) is an oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). The painting was exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, 1912, Paris (hung in the decorative arts section inside the Salon Bourgeois of La Maison Cubiste, the Cubist House). A 1912 photograph of Femme à l'Éventail hanging on a wall inside the Salon Bourgeois was published in The Sun (New York, N.Y.), 10 November 1912.The Sun. (New York, N.Y.), 10 Nov. 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress The same photograph was reproduced in The Literary Digest, 30 November 1912.André Mare, Salon Bourgeois, Salon d'Automne, "Doom of the Antique", The Literary Digest, November 30, 1912, p. 1012
Metzinger's Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne created a controversy in the Municipal Council of Paris, leading to a debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such 'barbaric' art. The Cubists were defended by the Socialist politician, Marcel Sembat.Patrick F. Barrer: Quand l'art du XXe siècle était conçu par les inconnus, pp. 93-101, gives an account of the debatePeter Brooke, Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1881-1953Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Histoire & Mesure, no. XXII -1 (2007), Guerre et statistiques, L'art de la mesure, Le Salon d'Automne (1903-1914), l'avant-garde, ses étranger et la nation française (The Art of Measure: The Salon d'Automne Exhibition (1903-1914), the Avant-Garde, its Foreigners and the French Nation), electronic distribution Caim for Éditions de l'EHESS (in French) This painting was realized as Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published a major defence of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement, Du "Cubisme".Fondation Gleizes, Son Oeuvre, Du «Cubisme», published by Eugène Figuière in 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913
A photograph of Femme à l'Éventail appears among the Léonce Rosenberg archives in Paris,Jean Metzinger, Femme à l'éventail, Ministère de la Culture (France), La Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Base Mémoire but there is no indication of when he acquired the painting.Guggenheim Museum Collection Paintings, 1880-1945, Published June 1976 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation A Rosenberg label on the reverse bears the information "No.25112 J.Metzinger, 1913." By 1918 Rosenberg was buying Metzinger's paintings and may have acquired the picture around this time or soon afterwards.
In 1937 Femme à l'Éventail was exhibited at Musée du Petit Palais, Les Maitres de l'art indépendant, 1895-1937, no. 12 (dated 1912). Mlle. Gamier des Garets probably acquired the painting after the 1937 exhibition. By 1938 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum had purchased the painting. It was gifted to the museum (gift 38.531) by Guggenheim in 1938 (the year after the formation of the foundation). Metzinger's Femme à l'Éventail forms part of the Founding Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Founding Collection, Jean Metzinger, Woman with a Fan, 1912 (formerly dated c. 1912-1913), by gift 38.531Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection
Femme à l'Éventail was showcased in an exhibition entitled The Great Upheaval: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910–1918, from 30 November 2013 to 1 June 2014.A photo of Woman with a Fan at the exhibitionThe Great Upheaval: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918, Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)New York Times, The Great Upheaval: Modern Art From the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918, runs through 1 June 2014 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Description Femme à l'Éventail is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions . As the title indicates, the painting represents a woman holding a fan. She is shown in half-length sitting on what appears to be a green bench. She is wearing an elaborate gown with a Polka dot pattern consisting of an array of blue-filled circles, and holds in her right hand a folded fan. The left hand of the woman holds a paper that bears the artist's signature (lower left). She wears a hat with feathers or plumes of fashionable dressed Parisian women.Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, 1985, exhibition catalogue: Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art She is placed in an outdoor setting with buildings, windows and green shutters in the 'background'. The work is similar stylistically with another work exhibited at the same Salon d'Automne, Dancer in a café (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo New York).
As in other works by Metzinger of the same period, there are elements to be found of the real world, e.g., a fan, windows, and feathers. The rest of the canvas consists of a series of geometric forms of greater or lesser abstraction, of convex and concave gradations that stem from the teachings of Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne. The Divisionist brushwork, mosaic-like 'cubes', present in Metzinger's Neo-Impressionist phase (circa 1903 through 1907) have returned giving texture and rhythm to vast areas of the canvas, visible both in the figures and background.Art of the 20th Century, Louis Vauxcelles, 1907, describes the brushwork of Delaunay and Metzinger as mosaic-like 'cubes'
Femme à l'Éventail portrays a strikingly fashionable woman at the height of Parisian fashion in 1912. The artist depicts the figure and background as a series of subdivided facets and planes, presenting multiple aspects of the scene simultaneously. This can be seen in the deliberate positioning of light, shadow, the nonconventional use of chiaroscuro, of form and color, and the way in which Metzinger assimilates the fusion of the background with the figures. The manifold surface has a complex geometry of reticulations with intricate series of (almost mathematical looking) black lines that appear in sections as underdrawing and in others as overdrawing.
"The style of the clothes is meticulously up-to-the-minute" writes Cottington of Metzinger's three entries at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, "the cut of the dresses, and the relatively uncorseted silhouettes they permitted their weavers to display, owe much more to Poiret than to Worth—indeed the check of one figure in the Dancer and the polka dots of the Woman with a Fan anticipate the post-war geometries, if not the colour harmonies, of Sonia Delaunay's fabrics, while the open-collared sportiness of the dress and cloche-style hat in The Yellow Feather look forward to the 1920s."David Cottington, 2004, Cubism and its Histories, Manchester University Press
Multiple perspective
The reflexive function of complex geometry, juxtaposed multiple perspectives, planar fragmentation suggesting motion and rhythmic play with various symmetry types. Though very subtle, there does manifest itself in Femme à l'Éventail a spatial depth or perspective reminiscent of the optical illusion of space of the Renaissance; in the way, for example, windows appear of varying dimension depending on distance from the observer. This shows that non-Euclidean geometry does not imply the destruction of classical perspective, or that the breakdown of classical perspective need not be complete. Unlike the flattening of space associated with the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque of the same period, Metzinger had no intention of abolishing depth of field. Of course here perspectival space is only alluded to by changes of scale, not by co-ordinated linear convergence, resulting in a complex space perfectly adapted to a stage-set. This feature is observed not only in Metzinger's Cubist paintings, but also in his Divisionist and proto-Cubist works between 1905 and 1909, as well as in his more figurative works of the 1920s (during the Return to order phase).Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies, Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 52, 53Helmholtz on Space and Painting, Michael Heidelberger, University of Tübingen . Translation from Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) lectures, 1871-1873 on Optisches über Malerei (On the Relation of Optics to Painting), publ. 1876
The painting, as Metzinger's enchanting Dancer in a café, inscribes an ambivalence in that it expresses both contemporary and classical, modern and traditional, avant-garde and academic connotations, simultaneously. The "busy geometry of planar fragmentation and juxtaposed perspectives has a more than reflexive function," notes Cottington, "for the symmetrical patterning of its reticulations (as in the dancer's décolletage) and their rhythmic parallel repetitions suggest not only movement and diagrams but also, metonymically, the mechanised object-world of modernity."
"The works of Jean Metzinger" Guillaume Apollinaire writes in 1912 "have purity. His meditations take on beautiful forms whose harmony tends to approach sublimity. The new structures he is composing are stripped of everything that was known before him."Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913, The Cubist Painters, translated, with commentary by Peter F. Read, 2002
Apollinaire, possibly with the work of Eadweard Muybridge in mind, wrote a year later of this state of motion present in the Cubist paintings of Metzinger and others, as akin to cinematic movement around an object, revealing a plastic truth compatible with reality by showing the spectator "all its facets."
Albert Gleizes in 1911 remarks Metzinger is "haunted by the desire to inscribe a total image":
He will put down the greatest number of possible planes: to purely objective truth he wishes to add a new truth, born from what his intelligence permits him to know. Thus—and he said himself: to space he will join time. [...] he wishes to develop the visual field by multiplying it, to inscribe them all in the space of the same canvas: it is then that the cube will play a role, for Metzinger will utilize this means to reestablish the equilibrium that these audacious inscriptions will have momentarily broken. (Gleizes)
Now liberated from the one-to-one relationship between a fixed coordinate in space captured at a single moment in time assumed by classical vanishing-point perspective, the artist became free to explore notions of simultaneity, whereby several positions in space captured at successive time intervals could be depicted within the bounds of a single painting.Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and NonEuclidean geometry in Modern Art, 1983
This picture plane, write Metzinger and Gleizes (in Du "Cubisme", 1912), "reflects the viewer's personality back upon his understanding, pictorial space may be defined as a sensible passage between two subjective spaces." The forms situated within this space, they continue, "spring from a dynamism which we profess to command. In order that our intelligence may possess it, let us first exercise our sensibility."Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, Du "Cubisme", Paris, 1912, in Robert L. Herbert, Modern Artists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, 1964.
There are two methods of regarding the division of the canvas, according to Metzinger and Gleizes, (1) "all the parts are connected by a rhythmic convention", giving the painting a centre from which the gradations of colour proceed (or towards which they tend), creating spaces of maximum or minimum intensity. (2) "The spectator, himself free to establish unity, may apprehend all the elements in the order assigned to them by creative intuition, the properties of each portion must be left independent, and the plastic continuum must be broken into a thousand surprises of light and shade."