Trois sœurs

Inscriptions: Signed (lower right)

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

Charles B. Rogers

Lent to Minneapolis Museum of Art (by the above)

Leslie Hindman Auctions, Chicago, 13 September 2009, lot 63

Charles Bolles Rogers, Champaign, IL 

Lynn Feldman (by descent from the above)

Galerie Bailly, Paris

Sotheby’s, London, 4 February 2010, lot 256

Expositions: Minneapolis Art Institute, lent by Charles B. Rogers (verso label)

Notes: Christopher Green writes: “The willingness to adapt Cubist language to the look of nature was quickly to affect his figure painting too. From that exhibition of 1921 Metzinger continued to cultivate a style that was not only less obscure, but clearly took subject-matter as its starting point far more than an abstract play with flat pictorial elements.” Green continues: “Yet, style, in the sense of his own special way of handling form and color, remained for Metzinger the determining factor, something imposed on his subjects to give them their special pictorial character. His sweet, rich colour between 1921 and 1924 was unashamedly artificial, and is itself symptomatic of the fact that his return to lucid representation did not mean a return to nature approached naturalistically.” (Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies, Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928, Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 52, 53, 166)

Metzinger himself, writing in 1922 [published by Montparnasse] could claim quite confidently that this was not at all a betrayal of Cubism but a development within it.