Carnaval à Venise

Inscriptions: Signed (lower right)

Provenance: Léonce Rosenberg, Galerie l’Effort Moderne, Paris

D. H. Baudoin, Hôtel Drouot, 10 December 1943, lot 58 (titled Souper de carnaval)

Mr. and Mrs. Albert A. Robin

International Galleries, Chicago

Sotheby’s. New York, 7 October 1987, lot 101

Boisgirard, Drouot, Paris, 25 November 1987

Exhibitions: Possibly, Salon des Indépendants, 1923, no. 3272 (titled Bal travesti)

Pre-Cubist and Cubist Works, 1900-1930, International Galleries, Chicago, 17 April – 10 May 1964 (dated September 1922), no. 14, p. 23, reproduced

Literature: Joann Moser, Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985, no. 181, p. 103, reproduced.

Notes: Metzinger’s apparent departure from Cubism circa 1922 would leave open the ‘spatial’ susceptibility to classical observation, but the ‘form’ could only be grasped by the ‘intelligence’ of the observer, something that escaped classical observation.

His exhibition at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie l’Effort Moderne at the outset of 1921 was exclusively of landscapes: his formal vocabulary remained rhythmic, linear perspective was avoided. There was a motivation to unite the pictorial and the natural. Symmetry in one form or another remained a principle device throughout.