Welcome to the online platform dedicated to French artist Jean Metzinger (24 June 1883 – 3 November 1956) launched by the Metzinger Association, Défense et promotion de l’œuvre de l’artiste Jean Metzinger. The nonprofit organization bears the essential goal of ensuring the knowledge and dissemination of the life, art, and literary work of Jean Metzinger, to protect its diffusion; to preserve the heritage of the painter, theoretician, writer, art critic and poet of major importance in the history of modern art.
The Metzinger Association (Défense et promotion de l’œuvre de l’artiste Jean Metzinger) embraces responsibility for creating the Metzinger digital research portal with free access, including the Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonné which draws upon the most complete inventory of the artist’s work.
Défense et promotion de l’œuvre de l’artiste Jean Metzinger consists of a team of four persons: Président de l’Association Alexander Mittelmann (art historian, curator, artist and art collector); Secrétaire Général Maître Louis Buchman (lawyer, arbitrator, mediator, admitted to the Bars of Paris and New York, and legal adviser to several nonprofit organizations, including endowment funds, to the Dubai International Financial Center courts, and avid art collector); Trésorier Jean Laporte (former Directeur du Service des Affaires Européennes du Sénat, and prominent art collector); and Vice-Président Pilar Barea (digital strategy and sustainability, telecom engineer, university professor and business angel).
Défense et promotion de l’œuvre de l’artiste Jean Metzinger collaborates with art historians, auction houses, galleries, public and private institutions, museums, and art collectors to update and supplement scholarly research on Metzinger’s life and art.
Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonné
Researched and written by Alexander Mittelmann
We are pleased to present the Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonné (or Critical Catalogue); the authoritative listing of Metzinger’s artistic production. This digital platform is the result of several decades of research into documenting Metzinger’s artwork. This research initiative into the artist’s life and work began in the mid-1980s, and has continued to date with the collaboration of art historians worldwide. The goal is to provide, chronologically, the complete scholarly digital publication of all works by Jean Metzinger. This comprehensive online publication—including documentation, iconographic and bibliographic sources—is intended for art historians, collectors, and researchers looking for specific works, but may also be useful for those who simply want to get acquainted with Metzinger’s œuvre as a whole.
Jean Metzinger Monograph
Researched and written by Alexander Mittelmann
The first monograph book on Jean Metzinger—set to be released online—is a detailed study of Metzinger’s life and work, presented in three volumes. This ouvrage combined constitutes a world reference on the artist, intended for the general public, art historians, researchers, and art connoisseurs.
Volume I details the artist’s career as a poet, theorist, and major artist throughout the Divisionist, Fauve, Proto-Cubist, and Cubist periods, from 1902 to 1914. Volume II encompasses Metzinger’s Crystal Cubist work, beginning in 1914, through phase transitions that signaled an apparent Retour à l’ordre, the emergence of Conceptualist Realism, culminating in 1924. Volume III covers Metzinger’s mechanized Surrealist/Neoclassicist phase, from 1924 to 1930, characterizes by order, purity and nobility; Metzinger’s subsequent monumental-figure stage, extending into the artist’s ultimate Post-Cubist epoch.
Metzinger’s influence on artists associated with Léonce Rosenberg forms an integral part of this exhaustively referenced monograph. The scope of discussion—beyond mere primary research and original scholarship research on Metzinger—encompasses and surveys the state of knowledge within the realm of Cubism and Modernism more generally. This one-stop source of historical documentation, conceptual and empirical research is presented at length and in progression across many academic disciplines and relationships; visual arts, poetry, philosophy, science, metaphysics, mathematics, literature, music, aesthetics and popular culture.
The Metzinger monograph provides key information for those interested in gaining a factual and straightforward account of the artist’s involvement and importance in the history of modern art, and how his influence extended beyond Paris to the rest of the world. In providing further insight into Metzinger’s life, the critical reception of his work, and the influence engendered upon others of his entourage and beyond, the hope is to provide a more complete account of art history and Metzinger’s role in the shaping of it.
Metzinger Digital Archive
Virtual digital research portal
The Jean Metzinger Association (Défense et promotion de l’œuvre de l’artiste Jean Metzinger) houses extensive archival holdings consisting of scholarly papers, literature, and correspondence, both published and unpublished research relating to Metzinger’s life and work.
This archival database aims to make accessible a large portion of primary source material associated with Metzinger in a single inclusive interface—over time providing access to more than 20,000 documents and close to 3,000 uniform resource locator (URL) links to press articles and diverse publications on Metzinger spanning from the outset of the twentieth century to the present. This digitized virtual archive includes the general image bank of artworks, correspondence, personal papers, manuscripts; press articles, exhibition and auction catalogues, reproductions of works published in avant-garde periodicals, newspapers, magazines, and other period literature.