Soldier at a Game of Chess (in French Soldat jouant aux échecs, or Le Soldat à la partie d'échecs, also referred to as Joueur d'échecs),Correspondance échangée entre Léonce Rosenberg et Jean Metzinger, 25 May 1916, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre de documentation et de recherche du MNAM/Cci, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (Metzinger mentions the paintings as titled Joueur d'échecs) is a painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger. While serving as a medical orderly during World War I in Sainte-Menehould, France, Metzinger bore witness to the ravages of war firsthand. Rather than depicting such horrors, Metzinger chose to represent a poilu sitting at a game of chess, smoking a cigarette. The military subject of this painting is possibly a self-portrait.
During March 1915, Metzinger was called to serve the military,L'Intransigeant, La Boîte aux Lettres, 23 March 1915, p. 2 and was invalided out of service later that year.Larousse, Dictionnaire de la peinture, Jean Metzinger Soldier at a Game of Chess was painted either before or during his mobilization.Soldat jouant aux échecs: un portrait cubiste magistral, Musée de Lodève Evidence found in a letter by Metzinger addressed to Léonce Rosenberg suggests the work was painted before his March 1915 mobilization, and possibly late 1914.
This distilled form of Cubism, soon to be known as Crystal Cubism, is consistent with Metzinger's shift, between 1914 and 1916, towards a strong emphasis on large, flat surface activity, with overlapping geometric planes. The manifest primacy of the underlying architectonics of the composition, entrenched in the abstract, controls practically all of the elements of the painting. Color remains primordial but is moderate and sharply delineated by boundary conditions.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 painting—a gift of John L. Strauss, Jr. in memory of his father John L. Strauss—forms part of the permanent collection at the Smart Museum of Art, located on the campus of the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.Jean Metzinger, Soldier at a Game of Chess (Soldat jouant aux échecs), oil on canvas, 81.3 x 61 cm, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
Description Soldier at a Game of Chess, initialed "JM" and signed "JMetzinger" (lower right), is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 81.3 x 61 cm (32 x 24 in.). The vertical composition is painted in a geometrically advanced Cubist style, representing a solitary French soldier playing a game of chess. He wears a military hat (képi) and bears a cigarette in his mouth. Because of this, Joann Moser suggests that this may be a self-portrait. Images of Metzinger often depicted him with a cigarette in his mouth: consider for example Robert Delaunay's 1906 Portrait of Metzinger (Man with a Tulip); Suzanne Phocas, Portrait de Metzinger, 1926.Daniel Robbins, Joann Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press 1985Suzanne Phocas, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Photo (C) RMN-Grand Palais / Agence BullozRestauration du « Portrait de Jean Metzinger » par Suzanne Phocas, INP, Institut national de patrimoine, Médiathèque Numérique
The soldier's head and hat are seen in both frontal side views simultaneously. His facial features are eminently stylized, simple, geometric, resting on rounded shoulders delineated by a rectangular structure superimposed with elemental monochromatic planes that compose the background. Depth of field is practically nonexistent. Blues, reds, green and black dominate the composition. The table—treated in faux bois, or trompe-l'œil—and the chessboard are practically seen from above, while the chess pieces are observed from the side; his right hand is fused within.
"Direct reference to observed reality" is present, but 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 a prime concern.Christopher Green, Late Cubism, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009
The overall composition is highly crystalline in its geometricized materialization, consisting of superimposed synthetic planes; something Albert Gleizes would later refer to, in La Peinture et ses lois (1922), as "simultaneous movements of translation and rotation of the plane".Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 85-102, Gleizes too had been working along similar lines during his mobilization at Toul, where he painted Portrait of an Army Doctor (Portrait d'un médecin militaire), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.Albert Gleizes, 1914–15, Portrait of an Army Doctor (Portrait d'un médecin militaire), oil on canvas, 119.8 x 95.1 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York The synthetic factor was ultimately taken furthest of all from within the Cubists by Gleizes.Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies, Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 13–47, 215
Mobilization
The number 24 on the soldier's collar represents the . That regiment participated in a brutal offensive on 25 May 1915 in Aix-Noulette, where contact with a bitter enemy caused unusually heavy losses. Metzinger had been stationed further south of the devastated area. The town of Sainte-Menehould, located south of the Forest of Argonne, became a command and control center of the Marne.La Marne et la Grande Guerre dans les collections photographiques et cinématographiques de l’ECPAD, Les archives de la SPCA sur la Marne, 1915–1919
From January 1915, St. Menehould was the command post of the IIIe armée française under General Maurice Sarrail. The city suffered its first bombing campaign by canon the same year. Thereafter, aircraft and zeppelins took over the skies. In September 1915 the successful counter-offensive moved the front closer to the German border.L'Histoire , accessed 24 January 2011.
Crystal Cubism
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 of the artists under contract with Léonce Rosenberg—including Metzinger, 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.
By its very date of execution, Metzinger's Soldier at a Game of Chess was precursor to a style that would become known as Crystal Cubism.H. Harvard Arnason, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography, edited by Peter Kalb, Pub. Prentice Hall, 2004
Comparisons have been made between war-time works of Metzinger and Juan Gris. These works were created within a specific context, a particular timeframe, a relatively restrained milieu, and influenced by a diverse grouping of factors. Metzinger's milieu at the time included his close friend Juan Gris. Both artists (with Lipchitz) exchanged ideas and worked together in Paris and Beaulieu-lès-Loches. Despite theoretical or conceptual differences, the works by these artists (and practically all those who exhibited at Rosenberg's Galerie de L'Effort Moderne) bear striking similarities.
The 'Latin' virtues of clarity and order were indeed dominants in the recent works of most who exhibited. Nowhere was this more so than is the works of three artists who had been in close contact with one another from 1916... the painters Gris and Jean Metzinger, and the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz... It is above all the wartime work of these three Cubists that can be analysed as a move towards order alongside as process of distillation. (Green, 1987, p. 25)
The new aesthetic unity associated with the underlying geometric structure of the works created by these artists is what would lead to the appellation Crystal Cubism. Metzinger and Gris were at the forefront, among the leaders of this second phase of Cubism.Christopher Green, Christian Derouet, Karin von Maur, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Juan Gris: Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 18 September -29 November 1992: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 18 December 1992 - 14 February 1993: Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, 6 March - 2 May 1993, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 6, 22-60July 09: Futurism at the Tate Modern: a review by Peter Brooke, From Cubism to Classicism, Painting and its Laws, From Cubism to Classicism by Gino Severini / Painting and its laws by Albert Gleizes, Francis Boutle, 2001, André Salmon, Cubisme: Exposition Metzinger, L'Europe Nouvelle, 18 January 1919, pp. 139-40Paul Dermée, Jean Metzinger, S.I.C., Nos. 42, 43, 30 March – 15 April 1919, p.13
In Crystal Cubist works, the distinction between the background and the figure are blurred. Rather than gradients of tone or color, the works are painted with flat, uniform sections of tone and color. Though highly abstract in overall construction, objects or elements of the real world are present. The primacy of the manifest geometric manifold, the angular juxtaposition of the surface planes, are distinct features of this second phase of Cubism. This reductionist style is consistent with a process of distillation otherwise auxiliary before the war.
During 1916, Sunday discussions at the studio of 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 in close contact.
In a letter written 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: