Lady with a her Dressing Table (French: Femme au miroir) is a painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger. This distilled synthetic form of Cubism exemplifies Metzinger's continued interest, in 1916, towards less surface activity, with a strong emphasis on larger, flatter, overlapping abstract planes. The manifest primacy of the underlying geometric configuration, rooted in the abstract, controls nearly every element of the composition. The role of color remains primordial, but is now restrained within sharp delineated boundaries in comparison with several earlier works.Joann Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, Cubist works, 1910–1921, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press 1985, pp. 44, 45 The work of Juan Gris from the summer of 1916 to late 1918 bears much in common with that of Metzinger's late 1915 – early 1916 paintings.Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies, Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 14-47
Painted during the spring of 1916, Femme au miroir formed part of the collection of Léonce Rosenberg, and was probably exhibited at Galerie de L'Effort Moderne in Paris. In 1918, the painting was shipped to New York City for the occasion of the Léonce Rosenberg collection auction. For the same occasion, Femme au miroir was reproduced in The Sun, New York, Sunday 28 April 1918. The painting was purchased in New York City (at the auction or afterwards) by the American art collector John Quinn, and formed part of his collection until 1927.
The work was subsequently featured at The University of Iowa Museum of Art in the Jean Metzinger in Retrospect exhibition, 1985, and reproduced as a full page color plate in the catalogue.Daniel Robbins, Joann Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press 1985
Description Femme au miroir, signed "JMetzinger" and dated Avril 1916 on the reverse, is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 92.4 x 65.1 cm (51 1/16 x 38 1/16 in.). The vertical composition is painted in a geometrically Cubist style, representing a woman holding a mirror in her left hand, standing in front of a chair and dressing table upon which rests a perfume atomizer. The setting appears to be an interior. An angled window appears to the left with an awning above, part of a tree and blue sky beyond.
The woman appears simultaneously clothed and unclothed in an interplay of transparencies, visual, tactile, and motor spaces, evoking a series of mind-associations between past present and future not atypical of Metzinger's earlier works.Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001 Her left breast is seen both from the front and from the side simultaneously. Her pose is elegant. Her face is eminently stylized, her neck is tubiform, her hair almost realistic in appearance as if combed onto the canvas; her shoulders, decidedly cubic from which emanate long slender arms superimposed with geometric elements that compose the background. Depth of field is practically non-present. Blues, whites and reds dominate the composition. Greens and ochers serve to delineate elements in the foreground (arms, leg, table).
Metzinger's works from 1915 and 1916 show a more restrained use of rectilinear grids, heavy surface texture and bold decorative patterning. The manifest primacy of the geometric armature strikingly controls nearly every element of the composition, ensuring the synthetic unity of the whole.
"Direct reference to observed reality" is still present, but now the emphasis is placed on the self-sufficiency of the painting as an object unto itself. "Orderly qualities" and the "autonomous purity" of the composition are now a prime concern.Christopher Green, Late Cubism, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009
Background
The Cubist considerations manifested prior to the outset of World War I—such as the fourth dimension, dynamism of modern life, the occult, and Henri Bergson's concept of duration—had now been vacated, replaced by a purely formal reference frame.
This clarity and sense of order spread to almost all on the artists under contract with Léonce Rosenberg—including Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Auguste Herbin, Joseph Csaky and Gino Severini—leading to the descriptive term 'Crystal Cubism', coined by the critic Maurice Raynal.
Femme au miroir, as other works by Metzinger of the same period, relate to those of his colleague and friend Juan Gris, whose Portrait of Josette Gris was painted just six months after Metzinger's canvas, and with Gris' Seated Woman of 1917.
The works of Gris and Metzinger painted during the war employ transparencies that blur the distinction between the background and the figure. Rather than gradients of tone or color, these works are painted with flat, uniform sections of tone and color. Albeit, in Femme au miroir Metzinger uses a textured surface in the lighter blue areas. Some minimal brushstrokes remain visible throughout these paintings. Each painting represents objects or elements of the real world—such as perfume bottles, moulding of the walls, an ear ring—and human figures. Most outstanding of all, however, is the angular juxtaposition of the surface planes, which the works hold in common.
During 1916, Sunday discussions at the studio of Jacques Lipchitz included Metzinger, Gris, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Reverdy, André Salmon, Max Jacob, and Blaise Cendrars.Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, 1985, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press, pp. 9–24 Metzinger and Gris were thus in close contact.
In a letter written in Paris to Albert Gleizes in Barcelona during the war, dated 4 July 1916, Metzinger writes: After two years of study I have succeeded in establishing the basis of this new perspective I have talked about so much. It is not the materialist perspective of Gris, nor the romantic perspective of Picasso. It is rather a metaphysical perspective—I take full responsibility for the word. You can't begin to imagine what I've found out since the beginning of the war, working outside painting but for painting. The geometry of the fourth space has no more secret for me. Previously I had only intuitions, now I have certainty. I have made a whole series of theorems on the laws of displacement [déplacement], of reversal [retournement] etc. I have read Schoute, Rieman (sic), Argand, Schlegel etc.
The actual result? A new harmony. Don't take this word harmony in its ordinary [banal] everyday sense, take it in its original [primitif] sense. Everything is number. The mind [esprit] hates what cannot be measured: it must be reduced and made comprehensible.
That is the secret. There in nothing more to it [pas de reste à l'opération]. Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, lasting art is never anything more than a mathematical expression of the relations that exist between the internal and the external, the self [le moi] and the world. (Metzinger, 4 July 1916)Peter Brooke, Higher Geometries, Precedents: Charles Henry and Peter Lenz, The subjective experience of space, Metzinger, Gris and Maurice Princet
The 'new perspective' according to Daniel Robbins, "was a mathematical relationship between the ideas in his mind and the exterior world". The 'fourth space' for Metzinger was the space of the mind.
In a second letter to Gleizes, dated 26 July 1916, Metzinger writes:
If painting was an end in itself it would enter into the category of the minor arts which appeal only to physical pleasure... No. Painting is a language—and it has its syntax and its laws. To shake up that framework a bit to give more strength or life to what you want to say, that isn't just a right, it's a duty; but you must never lose sight of the End. The End, however, isn't the subject, nor the object, nor even the picture—the End, it is the idea. (Metzinger, 26 July 1916)
Continuing, Metzinger mentions the differences between himself and Juan Gris: Someone from whom I feel ever more distant is Juan Gris. I admire him but I cannot understand why he wears himself out with decomposing objects. Myself, I am advancing towards synthetic unity and I don't analyze any more. I take from things what seems to me to have meaning and be most suitable to express my thought. I want to be direct, like Voltaire. No more metaphors. Ah those stuffed tomatoes of all the St-Pol-Roux of painting.
Some of the ideas expressed in these letters to Gleizes were reproduced and quoted in an article written by Paul Dermée, published in the magazine SIC, 1919,Jean Metzinger, Une Esthétique, by Paul Dermée, SIC, Volume 4, Nos. 42, 43, March 30 and April 15, 1919, p. 336 but the existence of letters themselves remained unknown until the mid-1980s.
From 1916, Lipchitz, Gris and Metzinger had been in close contact with one another. The three had just signed contracts with the dealer, art collector and gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg. It is the work executed during the war of these three artists that can be analyzed as a process of distillation in a shift towards order and purity. This process would continue through 1918 when the three spent part of the summer together in Beaulieu-Prés-Loches to escape the bombardment of Paris.
At the opening of the Musée National d"art Moderne in Paris, 9 June 1947, Léonce Rosenberg related his impressions to Hélène Bauret:
In the painting "La Tricoteuse",Jean Metzinger, Tricoteuse, Dépôt du Centre Pompidou, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Agence Photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées hanging next to works by Gris, Metzinger reveals himself more of a painter, more natural, more flexible [plus souple] than Gris. Often, Gris would tell me: "Ah! If I could brush [brosser] like the French!"
Gris was indeed capable of producing works closely attuned to those of Metzinger. His late arrival on the Cubist scene (1912) saw him influenced by the leaders of the movement: Picasso, of the 'Gallery Cubists' and Metzinger of the 'Salon Cubists'. His entry at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, Hommage à Pablo Picasso, was also an homage to Metzinger's Le goûter (Tea Time). Le goûter persuaded Gris of the importance of mathematics (numbers) in painting.John Richardson: A Life of Picasso, volume II, 1907–1917, The Painter of Modern Life, Jonathan Cape, London, 1996, p. 211
As art historian Peter Brooke points out, Gris started painting persistently in 1911 and first exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants. "He appears with two styles", writes Brooke, "In one of them a grid structure appears that is clearly reminiscent of the Goûter and of Metzinger's later work in 1912. In the other, the grid is still present but the lines are not stated and their continuity is broken".Peter Brooke, On "Cubism" in context, online since 2012
Art historian Christopher Green writes that the "deformations of lines" allowed by mobile perspective in the head of Metzinger's Tea-time and Gleizes's Jacques Nayral "have seemed tentative to historians of Cubism. In 1911, as the key area of likeness and unlikeness, they more than anything released the laughter." Green continues, "This was the wider context of Gris's decision at the Indépendants of 1912 to make his debut with a Homage to Pablo Picasso, which was a portrait, and to do so with a portrait that responded to Picasso's portraits of 1910 through the intermediary of Metzinger's Tea-time.Christopher Green, Christian Derouet, Karin Von Maur, Juan Gris: [catalogue of the Exhibition], 1992, London and Otterlo, pp. 29, 160