Composition allégorique

Inscriptions: Signed (lower right)

Collection: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

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

Exhibitions: Salon des Indépendants, Un siècle d’art français, 1850-1950, Paris, 17 April – 10 May 1953, no. 828.

Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 31 August – 13 October 1985; The Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, 10 November – 22 December 1985; The David and Alfred Smart Gallery, University of Chicago, 23 January – 9 March 1986; Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, 29 March – 25 May 1986, catalogue no. 239, p. 124, reproduced.

Notes: With the simplification of constructed forms, the use of components associated with the industrialized world in an increasingly mechanized society; Metzinger’s 1924-1930 work needed not refer to the past, yet he chose to do so. It was the artist’s way of fusing the ‘transient’ with the ‘eternal.’ It was his way, in doing so, of rendering homage to the old masters (particularly Ingres, but also those artists of the Renaissance).

Metzinger’s representational techniques were effectively transformed by industrialization; something reflected in the dynamic brilliance of Composition allégorique, as part of a fundamental reorientation towards a dynamic and changing world. The linking of elementary geometrical forms with inherent beauty, and the influence of a growing industrial production had been pragmatically codified by Jean Metzinger. The appellation of ‘avant-garde’ was not to be solely left to the founders of Dada, Purism, De Stijl, Neo-Plasticism, Bauhaus, or to Surrealism. Metzinger then too had been an innovator. (A. Mittelmann, 2 May 2012)