Jean Metzinger

Jean Metzinger was a French painter and theorist. He studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and in 1903 he settled in Paris, where he was influenced by the Divisionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. In 1904 he began to combine the pointillist technique with the colourful Fauve aesthetic. Around 1908 he became friends with poet Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom he frequented the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, and espoused the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in his paintings. In 1910, when he published his Note sur la peinture, Metzinger furthermore became one of the foremost theoreticians of the new avant-garde language and laid the theoretic foundations for Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism, according to which objects are represented through successive experiences of space and time.

Between 1920 and 1924 his Cubist language shifted towards Neoclassical forms while preserving its geometric structure, and in the second half of the decade he approached the mechanical world of Fernand Léger. In his final period he continued to be concerned with aspects of form, volume and space and returned to a more classical style, though without discarding Cubist geometry.