Nu à la cheminée

Provenance: Nu à la cheminée formed part of the collection of M.G. Comerre (the mother of Albert Gleizes, and sister of Léon Comerre, the academic/Symbolist painter who won the Gand Prix de Rome in 1875). Its current location is unknown.

Exhibitions: Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1910, no. 849, titled Nu.

Salon de la Section d’Or, Galerie La Boétie, Paris, October 1912, no. 112, titled Nu dans un intérieur. 

Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, Der Sturm, Berlin, 20 September – 1 November 1913, no. 29, titled Interieur mit nackter Figur.

Literature: André Warnod, Au Salon d’Automne, Notes d’un promeneur, Comœdia, 11 October 1910, p. 2, reproduced.

Fantasio, 15 October, p. 152, reproduced (allegedly).

Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du “Cubisme”, Eugène Figuière Éditeurs, 1912, reproduced.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques, 1913, reproduced.

Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985, catalogue no. 23, reproduced p. 49

Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, A Cubism Reader, Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914, The University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 80, reproduced

Erasmus Weddigen, Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the Fourth Dimension, Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2012, p. 87, reproduced

Notes: For further information about this work, see the Wikipedia article titled Nu à la cheminée, written and published by Alexander Mittelmann (aka Coldcreation) 20 June 2013.

This work is often erroneously referred to as Metzinger’s “first Cubist painting”.

Nu à la cheminée was reproduced in several newspapers and magazines in 1910, for the occasion of the 1910 Salon d’Automne. It is known only through black and white period reproductions. This painting is extensively discussed in the Metzinger monograph, Volume I.