Paysage au bas Meudon

Inscriptions: Signed and dated (1916) (lower right); titled Paysage au Bas Meudon on the verso.

Provenance: Possibly, Léonce Rosenberg, Galerie l’Effort Moderne, Paris (by March 1917)

Anon. sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 12 November 1951, lot 139.

David W. Hughes & Co., London.

Private collection, acquired from the above, April 1979.

Christie’s, New York 13 November 2021, lot 743

Notes: Just as Metzinger’s 1916 Femme et paysage à l’aqueduc (AM-16-008), Paysage au bas Meudon is a striking example of the artist’s “hyperspatial”, or ‘metaphysical perspective, based on a series of theorems founded on the laws of displacement, of reversal [”retournement”], resulting in a new harmony’, as Metzinger wrote in 1916. It “was a mathematical relationship between the ideas in his mind and the exterior world”, as interpreted by Daniel Robbins (1985).

In a letter by Metzinger addressed to Léonce Rosenberg dated 26 March 1917, the artist mentions the titles of 5 paintings recently purchased by Rosenberg: “Usines d’Issy les Moulineaux”, “Nu”, “Paysage parisien”, “Portrait de jeune fille”, and “Paysage de Meudon”.

As anecdotal the mention of a “Paysage de Meudon” may be, there is only one other work by Metzinger, painted between 1916 and 1917, that represents a chimney of the type that existed in Bas-Meudon at the time. 

The other work is known today as “Le village”, 1917 (AM-17-007). If it was painted after 26 March 1917, then Metzinger is possibly referring to Paysage au bas Meudon.