Trois nus

Provenance: Tajan, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 25 October 2004, lot 191

Sotheby’s, London, 12 July 2005, lot 181

Notes: Three Nudes was formerly on the verso of Champs de coquelicots, an early Divisionist painting by Metzinger. The two paintings have been separated. This proto-Cubist work is comparable to Picasso’s proto-Cubist work of 1907-08 or Braque’s landscapes of 1908. Unlike Picasso’s work of the period however, Metzinger’s production bears no influence of African or Iberian art. For this reason the work of Braque is more akin. At the time of painting Trois nus, the Parisian art world was an open system, with artists visiting each other’s studios, exhibiting together at galleries and salons, exchanging ideas. Influences were omnidirectional; artists exchanging, absorbing and emitting concepts, beliefs, feelings, inspirations, interpretations, objectives, perceptions, theories, and understandings. Not all of those artists that interacted with one another at the galleries of Berthe Weill or Uhde, or at the two major salons shared common affinities. But those that did, Metzinger, Dufy, Delaunay, Braque, Herbin for example, on their departure from Fauvism, turned toward a wholly constructive idiom in 1907-08, idioms aimed directly at Cubism. (Alexander Mittelmann, 2021, extract from the Metzinger monograph, Volume I)