Baigneuses

Inscriptions: Signed (lower right)

Literature: Gelett Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, The Architectural Record, Document 3, May 1910

The New York Times, 8 October 1911, reproduced

Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, The University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 38, reproduced 

Notes: By 1908, Metzinger turned his attention fully towards questions of mathematics and the geometrical abstraction of form; allowing the viewer to reconstruct the original volume mentally and to imagine the object within both space and time. The emphasis on simplified form began to overwhelm the representational interest of the painting. In Baigneuses, the simplification of representational form gave way to a new complexity; the subject matter of the paintings became obscured, intertwined, by a network of interconnected geometric elements—arcs, planes, arabesques—the distinction between foreground and background, between figure and landscape blurred, and depth perception reduced to that of a bas-relief.

For further information see Baigneuses (Metzinger), Wikipedia, by Alexander Mittelmann, published 1 August 2013‎.