Woman with a Horse (French: La Femme au Cheval, also known as L'Écuyère and Kvinde med hest) is a large oil painting created toward the end of 1911, early 1912, by the French artist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). The work was exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants (20 March – 16 May) in 1912 and the Salon de la Section d'Or, 1912.Exhibit catalog for Salon de "La Section d'Or", 1912, Jean Metzinger, La Femme au cheval, p. 11, no. 116. Walter Pach papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution The following year La Femme au Cheval was reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913).
The artist has broken down the picture plane into facets, presenting multiple aspects of the subject in succession and/or simultaneously. This concept first pronounced by Metzinger in 1910—since considered a founding principle of Cubism—would soon find its way into the foundations of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; the fact that a complete description of one and the same subject may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description. The painting was owned by the poet Joseph Houot (known as Jacques Nayral). In 1918 La Femme au Cheval was exhibited at International Kunst, Kleis Kunsthandel, Copenhagen, an exhibition arranged by Herwarth Walden.Der Sturm, 'International Kunst, Ekspressionister og Kubister, Malerier og Skulpturer', Kleis Kunsthandel, København 1918, Herwarth Walden (titled Kone med hest, cat. 82)
It was presumably bought by a Danish collector in 1918. The painting was subsequently sold at auction through art dealer Kai Grunth hos Winkel & Magnussen, auction no. 108, 19 February 1932, lot no. 119. Purchased by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. After his death Woman with Horse was sold by his widow Margrethe Bohr (through Ernest Bohr) to the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. It is now in the Royal Collection of Paintings and Sculpture at the museum.Statens Museum for Kunst (in Danish)
Description La Femme au Cheval is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 162 × 130.5 cm (63.8 × 51.4 in). As the title indicates the painting represents a woman and a horse. The rather elegant woman wearing only a pearl necklace and the horse are immersed in a landscape with trees and a window (in the 'background'), a vase, with fruits and vegetation (in the 'foreground') clearly taken from the natural world.
, in his review of the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, noted Metzinger's 'refined choice of colors' and the 'precious rarity' of the painting's 'matière'. André Salmon also noted Metzinger's 'refined use of color' in La Femme au Cheval and praised its 'French grace', while thanking Metzinger for having, for the first time, 'illuminated a cubist figure with the virtues of a smile'.David Cottington, Cubism and Its Histories, Manchester University Press, 2004
David Cottington wrote:
The nude woman is in fact not perched side-saddle on the horse. As others have pointed out (Antliff and Leighten),Mark Antliff, Patricia Dee Leighten, Cubism and Culture, Thames & Hudson, 2001 and as emerges upon close examination, the nude woman is seated on what appears to be a rectangular block or cube, perhaps a model's pedestal (visible to the left). The horse occupies the upper right-hand quadrant as if observed from above. Its head is turned toward the monumental nude while she strokes the horse's right ear with her left hand. She cups her hand underneath the horse's mouth, as if feeding the horse a piece of fruit.
The reconstruction of the total image was left, according to Metzinger, to 'creative intuition' of the observer. While one viewer may see a woman riding a horse, another may see her sitting beside the horse, and yet others may not see a horse at all. That there even exists such ambiguity with respect to what is transpiring on the canvas is remarkable. According to the founders of Cubist theory, objects possess no absolute or essential form. "There are as many images of an object as there are eyes which look at it; there are as many essential images of it as there are minds which comprehend it."Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, Du "Cubisme", Paris, 1912, in Robert L. Herbert, Modern Artists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, 1964.
The nude figure sitting to the left, the horse standing to the right, along with other elements of the painting, are depicted in a faceted manner, based to some extent on non-Euclidean geometry. Denying the illusion of Renaissance perspective the artist breaks down the figures and background into facets and planes, presenting multiple aspects of the subject all at once. This can be seen in the deliberate positioning of light, shadow, form and color, in the way in which Metzinger assimilates the union of the background, woman and horse. For example, the division of the model's features generates a subtle profile view, the vase is shown both from above and the side.
The resulting free and mobile perspective, 'simultaneity' of multiple view-points, was used by Metzinger to constitute the image of a whole—one that includes the fourth dimension—what he called 'total image'.Alex Mittelmann, State of the Modern Art World, The Essence of Cubism and its Evolution in Time, Nov. 2011
Background: color, form and motion
Where the dialectic nature of Paul Cézanne's work had been influential between 1908 and 1910 during the expressionistic phase of Cubism, the flat, linear structures of Georges Seurat would capture the attention of the Cubists from 1911. In addition to the flattened depth of field, the colors (subtle blues, raw umber and burnt sienna) employed in La Femme au Cheval bear a resemblance to the colors of Seurat's 1889–90 Le Chahut and his 1887–88 Parade de Cirque.
"With the advent of monochromatic Cubism in 1910–1911," Robert Herbert writes, "questions of form displaced color in the artists' attention, and for these Seurat was more relevant. Thanks to several exhibitions, his paintings and drawings were easily seen in Paris, and reproductions of his major compositions circulated widely among the Cubists. The Chahut (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo) was called by André Salmon "one of the great icons of the new devotion", and both it and the Circus (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), according to Apollinaire, "almost belong to Synthetic Cubism".Robert Herbert, Neo-Impressionism, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1968)
In the composition, Metzinger depicts motion, not of the subject matter as the Futurists relative to the observer, but by successive superimposed images captured by the artist in motion relative to (or around) the subject matter. The Chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey that directly influenced Marcel Duchamp's 1912 Nu descendant un escalier n° 2Tomkins, Calvin (1996). Duchamp: A Biography. U.S.: Henry Holt and Company, Inc. could also be read into Metzinger's work of 1911–12, though here, rather than simultaneously superimposing successive images to depict the motion of the horse, Metzinger represents a horse at rest viewed from multiple angles; the dynamic role is played by the artist.Étienne-Jules Marey, La Science du mouvement et l'image du temps , (The Science of mouvement and the image of time)
Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photography of movements broken down frame by frame produced in the late 19th century depicting horses at a gallop and nudes descending a staircase, were known in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Muybridge often traveled to Europe to promote his work and he met Étienne-Jules Marey in 1881. His freeze-framed images of galloping horses evoked time and motion. Displayed in a grid, the horse is captured in split-second intervals. Because the horse's movement was too fast for the human eye to register, there was a scientific debate in the 1870s questioning (Marey's hypothesis originally) whether all four hooves ever left the ground simultaneously. To prove that Marey was right Muybridge (in Palo Alto, California) carried out his "Photographic Investigation". His photographs settled the debate, though skeptics remained. 'Many people didn't believe it,' Brookman writes, 'They thought they were fake because the horse looked so strange'.Philip Brookman, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, 2010 (Steidl).Muybridge: The Man Who Made Pictures Move, Neda Ulaby, 2010Philip Brookman, with contributions by Marta Braun, Andy Grundberg, Corey Keller and Rebecca Solnit (2010). Eadweard Muybridge. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Tate Pub.]
In an interview with Katherine Kuh, Marcel Duchamp spoke about his 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase and its relation to the photographic motion studies of Muybridge and Marey: "In 1912... the idea of describing the movement of a nude coming downstairs while still retaining static visual means to do this, particularly interested me. The fact that I had seen chronophotographs of fencers in action and horse galloping (what we today call stroboscopic photography) gave me the idea for the Nude. It doesn't mean that I copied these photographs. The Futurists were also interested in somewhat the same idea, though I was never a Futurist. And of course the motion picture with its cinematic techniques was developing then too. The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air."Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918: With a New Preface, Harvard University Press, Nov 30, 2003
Mobile perspective, 1909–1911 Rather than depicting the subject matter classically, from one point of view, Metzinger has used a concept of 'mobile perspective' to portray the subject from a variety of angles. The images captured from multiple spatial view-points and at successive time intervals are shown simultaneously on the canvas.Joann Moser, Cubist Works, 1910–1921, p. 43, 1985, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art (J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press)
The anti-Hellenic concept of representing a subject from multiple view-points was a central idea of Jean Metzinger's Note sur la Peinture, 1910.Note sur la peinture, Jean Metzinger, Pan (Paris), October–November 1910Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, 1985, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, The University of Iowa Museum of Art (J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press) p. 9-23Cubisme et tradition, Jean Metzinger, Paris Journal, 16 August 1911 Indeed, prior to Cubism painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point. And it was Jean Metzinger, for the first time in Note sur la peinture who enunciated the stimulating interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time. In that article, Metzinger writes about the works of Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, noting that they "discarded traditional perspective and granted themselves the liberty of moving around objects." All four, according to Metzinger, held in common the notion of simultaneity. This is the concept of "mobile perspective" that would tend towards the representation of the "total image". Though he does not discuss his own work in Note sur la peinture, clearly at the time of writing he had already discarded classical perspective (Nu, Landscape and Nu à la cheminée (Nude), c. 1908, 1909 and 1910 respectively) turning his attention fully towards the geometric abstraction of form.S. E. Johnson, Metzinger, Pre-Cubist and Cubist Works, 1900-1930, International Galleries, Chicago, 1964
Theoretical underpinnings, 1910–1912