Bathers (French: Baigneuses) is a Proto-Cubist painting, now lost or missing, created circa 1908 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. Possibly exhibited during the spring of 1908 at the Salon des Indépendants (n. 4243).Jean Metzinger, Baigneuse, Société des artistes indépendants: catalogue de la 24ème exposition, 1908, p. 285 This black-and-white image of Metzinger's painting, the only known photograph of the work, was reproduced in Gelett Burgess, "The Wild Men of Paris", Architectural Record, May 1910.Gelett Burgess, "The Wild Men of Paris: Matisse, Picasso, and Les Fauves", Architectural Record, May 1910Gelett Burgess, "The Wild Men of Paris: Matisse, Picasso, and Les Fauves", Architectural Record, May 1910, p. 412 (PDF) The painting was also reproduced in The New York Times, 8 October 1911, in an article titled "The 'Cubists' Dominate Paris' Fall Salon", and subtitled, "Eccentric School of Painting Increases Its Vogue in the Current Art Exhibition - What Its Followers Attempt to Do".New York Times, October 8, 1911
Description Baigneuses, likely an oil painting on canvas (as practically all Metzingers' works of the period), was painted in a vertical format with unknown dimensions.
The work represents at least four nude women (or bathers) relaxing in a highly abstract landscape with vegetation and a small body of water visible through reflections and from the woman on the left whose legs are submerged from the knees down. The central figure holds the trunk of a tree with her left arm and a woman with her right, forming a tight central mass. The two nudes at the center, treated in a light color, stand-out against a darker background. They are flanked on both sides by a standing and a sitting nude.
The colors of the painting, as well as its dimensions and whereabouts, are unknown.
The Wild Men of Paris Leading up to 1910, the draftsman, illustrator and poet Gelett Burgess interviewed and wrote about artists and artworks in and around Paris. The result of Burgess' investigation was published after he visited the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, the massive anti-establishment art exhibition in Paris, and one year before the scandalous group exhibition that brought Cubism to the attention of the general public. At the 1910 Indépendants Jean Metzinger showed his Portrait of Apollinaire (the first Cubist portrait according to Guillaume Apollinaire); Albert Gleizes showed his Portrait de René Arcos and L'Arbre (The Tree), paintings in which the emphasis on simplified geometric form overwhelms representational interests.Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes, Chronology of his life, 1881–1953Daniel 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, pp. 9-23S. E. Johnson, 1964, Metzinger, Pre-Cubist and Cubist Works, 1900–1930, International Galleries, Chicago Louis Vauxcelles in his review of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants made a passing and imprecise reference to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger and Le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes."Louis Vauxcelles, A travers les salons: promenades aux « Indépendants », Gil Blas, 18 March 1910 The works of Metzinger, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay were exhibited together. Le Fauconnier showed the geometrically simplified Ploumanac'h landscapes: Le Ravin and Village dans les Montagne, along with Femme à l'éventail and Portrait of Maroussia. In the same exhibition hung the works of Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Marie Laurencin, Kees van Dongen and Henri Rousseau.Kubisme.info, Salon des Indépendants
Gelett Burgess writes in The Wild Men of Paris of the same exhibition:
There were no limits to the audacity and the ugliness of the canvasses. Still-life sketches of round, round apples and yellow, yellow oranges, on square, square tables, seen in impossible perspective; landscapes of squirming trees, with blobs of virgin color gone wrong, fierce greens and coruscating yellows, violent purples, sickening reds and shuddering blues.
But the nudes! They looked like flayed Martians, like pathological charts—hideous old women, patched with gruesome hues, lopsided, with arms like the arms of a Swastika, sprawling on vivid backgrounds, or frozen stiffly upright, glaring through misshapen eyes, with noses or fingers missing. They defied anatomy, physiology, almost geometry itself!
After the death of Paul Cézanne in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in Paris in the form of several large exhibitions and a retrospective at the Salon d'Automne of 1907, greatly affecting the direction taken by the avant-garde artists in Paris. Prior to the advent of Cubism, Cézanne's geometric simplifications and optical phenomena inspired not just Metzinger, Matisse, Derain and Braque, but the other artists who earlier exhibited with the Fauves. Those who had not transited through a Fauve stage, such as Picasso, also experimented with the complex fracturing of form. Cézanne had thus sparked a wholesale transformation in the area of artistic investigation that would profoundly affect the development modern art. The Fauvism of Metzinger, Matisse and Derain was virtually over by the spring of 1907. And by the Salon d'Automne of 1907 it had ended for many others as well. The shift from bright pure colors loosely applied to the canvas gave way to a more calculated geometric approach. The priority of simplified form began to overtake the representational aspect of the works. The simplification of representational form gave way to a new complexity; the subject matter of the paintings progressively became dominated by a network of interconnected geometric planes, the distinction between foreground and background no longer sharply delineated, and the depth of field limited.
Burgess continues:
Though the school was new to me, it was already an old story in Paris. It had been a nine-days’ wonder. Violent discussions had raged over it; it had taken its place as a revolt and held it, despite the fulmination of critics and the contempt of academicians. The school was increasing in numbers, in importance. By many it was taken seriously. At first, the beginners had been called "The Invertebrates." In the Salon of 1905 they were named "The Incoherents." But by 1906, when they grew more perfervid, more audacious, more crazed with theories, they received their present appellation of "Les Fauves"—the Wild Beasts. And so, and so, a-hunting I would go!
Turning his attention to Metzinger's abode, Burgess writes in Architectural Record:
Metzinger once did gorgeous mosaics of pure pigment, each little square of color not quite touching the next, so that an effect of vibrant light should result. He painted exquisite compositions of cloud and cliff and sea; he painted women and made them fair, even as the women upon the boulevards fair. But now, translated into the idiom of subjective beauty, into this strange Neo-Classic language, those same women, redrawn, appear in stiff, crude, nervous lines in patches of fierce color. Surely, Metzinger should know what such things mean. Picasso never painted a pretty woman, though we have noticed that he likes to associate with them. Czobel sees them through the bars of his cage, and roars out tones of mauve and cinnabar. Derain sees them as cones and prisms, and Braque as if they had been sawn out of blocks of wood by carpenters’ apprentices. But Metzinger is more tender towards the sex. He arranges them as flowers are arranged on tapestry and wall paper; he simplifies them to mere patterns, and he carries them gently past the frontier of Poster Land to the world of the Ugly so tenderly that they are not much damaged—only more faint, more vegetable, more anaemic.
What’s Metzinger? A scrupulously polite, well-dressed gentleman as ever was, in a scrupulously neat chamber, with a scrupulously well-ordered mind. He is complete as a wax figure, with long brown eyelashes and a clean-cut face. He affects no idiosyncrasies of manners or dress. One cannot question his earnestness and seriousness or sincerity. He is, perhaps, the most articulate of them all. Let us not call him prim.
"Instead of copying Nature," [Metzinger] says, "we create a milieu of our own, wherein our sentiment can work itself out through a juxtaposition of colors. It is hard to explain it, but it may perhaps be illustrated by analogy with literature and music. Your own Edgar Poe (he pronounced it ‘Ed Carpoe’) did not attempt to reproduce Nature realistically. Some phase of life suggested an emotion, as that of horror in ‘The Fall of the House of Ushur.’ That subjective idea he translated into art. He made a composition of it."
"So, music does not attempt to imitate Nature’s sounds, but it does interpret and embody emotions awakened by Nature through a convention of its own, in a way to be aesthetically pleasing. In some such way, we, taking out hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiment." (Jean Metzinger, circa 1909)
Metzinger, Picasso, and Braque
There is a close association between Metzinger's Baigneuses (Bathers) and Picasso's 1908 Paysage aux deux figures (Landscape with Two Figures). Both stances are verbalized with the same abstract vocabulary. In both cases, the figures are camouflaged or blended with the background, their bodies forming part of the landscape. These works were completed at a time when Metzinger frequented the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre, where he may have seen Picasso's painting. There are differences, too, worth noting between the two works (aside from the size and colors which are unknown in the Metzinger case). While the dominant feature of Picasso's painting is the landscape, Metzinger chose to highlight the figures; the landscape playing only a secondary role in the overall composition. Metzinger's figures are much larger relative to the canvas. They are prominently and symmetrically displayed, and of lighter color contrast relative to Picasso's asymmetrical juxtaposition and subdued contrasting. Two of Metzinger's nudes—to the right and left of the dominant central figures—are quite inconspicuous, as in Picasso's piece. In both paintings the nudes and landscape have become unified, not presuming a representation of reality.
They are the product of a reductive abstracting process, of an open, freewheeling process of synthesis—where a dialogue between components lead to the liberation from any particular classical foundation. They are combined harmoniously though pictographic imagery rendered in residuum abstractions of apparent mathematical codes. In the case of Metzinger, his prowess in mathematics is well documented. In the case of Picasso, the mathematical association with his paintings has been made through Maurice Princet.