Dame au décolleté (Madame Metzinger)

Provenance: Private Collection, New York

Expositions: Salon des Indépendants, 1911, Paris, Salle 41, no. 4267, titled Tête de femme.

Moderne Kunst Kring (Cercle de l’art moderne), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 6 October – 7 November 1912, no. 154, titled Tête de femme and dated 1910.

Littérature: Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985, catalogue no. 25, reproduced p. 48 (dated c.1911)

Notes: Albert Gleizes writes about two of Metzinger’s paintings in Art et ses représentants, La Revue Indépendante, September 1911, 161-72:
…the “Emperor of cubism” has shown us new achievements in the plastic realization of his art. In Paysage [AM-11-007], perfectly balanced and purified of any needless chatter, where the forms of houses and trees converged with those of the terrain and the sky in a whole that was classical in the full sense of the word, where the transposition of objects, soberly depicted, made it easy to read, one could assess the considerable contribution his will has given us. In Portrait de femme, which rightly led deputy public prosecutor [Joseph] Granié [pseudonyme Aloës Duravel], a subtle and knowledgeable critic, to say: “Very eighteenth century, that woman’s head by J. Metzinger,” one again found, and perhaps there more than anywhere else, the broken thread of tradition. Through the subtlety of the drawing highlighted with a completely internal, delicate color, and with a very rare sensibility, through forms diametrically opposed in appearance, the face and profile drawn and juxtaposed with perfect tact, and the picture as a whole marked by a certain preciosity, which moreover added a certain charm to the canvas, it was possible to accept it, even admire it, in good faith.