Jean Metzinger Catalogue Raisonné
Number: AM-07-002 Jean Metzinger
Date: 1907
Title: Paysage coloré aux oiseaux aquatiques
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 74 x 99 cm
Collection: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
Inscriptions: Signed (lower left)
Provenance: Gift of Mme Mathilde Amos in 1955
Exhibitions: Gleizes – Metzinger, du Cubisme et après, Paris, Musée de la Poste, 7 May 2012 – 22 September 2012
Gleizes/Metzinger – Du cubisme et après, Lodève, Musée de Lodève, 22 June 2013 – 3 November 2013
End of Times, Beginning of Times: Aarhus, Danemark, ARos Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 8 April 2017 – 10 September 2017
Paris 1900: Nashville Tennessee, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 5 October 2018 – 6 January 2019; Cincinnati, Cincinnati Art Museum, 2 February 2019 – 12 May 2019; Portland, Portland Art Museum, 5 June 2019 – 10 September 2019
Literature: Joann Moser, Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985, no. 19, reproduced p. 41
Gleizes-Metzinger, Du cubisme et après, Musée de la Poste, 2012; Musée de Lodève, 2012; Beaux-Arts de Paris les édition, 2012, reproduced p. 62
AROS Triennial, The Garden – End of Times, Beginning of Times, ARos Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2017, reproduced p. 178
Notes: Since 1902 there is to be seen in the work of Metzinger a continual and relentless search for original methods and new subject matter. The methods developed from the recognition that painting needed not imitate nature, that painting had to be reinvented if it was to survive. The reproduction of nature was dead. Painting no longer served a documentary function. Painting had become a process of dividing the surface planes geometrically. The problem of structure had become the only palpable certainty. By 1907 a new path had opened.
Paysage coloré aux oiseaux aquatique is complex in both composition and color rendering. The subject matter though clearly visible is faceted, denaturalized, exotic. Brushstrokes are large. Divisionism has been abandoned, or yet again pushed to another extreme. Colors are no longer freshly squeezed, but mixed, adulterated to an extent. The treatment all around is free, loose, expressive, the spatial relationships and forms are complex. The next logical step was about to be taken. (Alexander Mittelmann, Jean Metzinger, Divisionism, Cubism, Neoclassicism and Post Cubism, 2 May 2012)
Note: in the 1985 Jean Metzinger in Retrospect catalogue, the title, dimensions and provenance for this painting, n. 19, are switched with n. 18, Le Flamant rose et le voilier.