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Art of the 20th Century
Jean Metzinger
Jean Metzinger
(b Nantes, 24 June 1883; d Paris, 3 Nov 1956).
French painter, critic and poet. Although he came from a military family, following the early death of his father he pursued his own interests in mathematics, music and painting. By 1900 he was a student at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, where he worked under the portrait painter Hippolyte Touront. After sending three pictures to the Salon des Indépendants in 1903, he moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale. Thus, from the age of 20, Metzinger supported himself as a professional painter, a fact that may account for some of the shifts to which his art submitted in later years. He exhibited regularly in Paris from 1903, taking part in 1904 in a group show with Touront and Raoul Dufy at the gallery run by Berthe Weill and also participating in the Salon d’Automne in that year. By 1906 he had enough prestige to be elected to the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants. By the time he began dating his works around 1905 he was an ardent participant in the Neo-Impressionist revival led by Henri Edmond Cross. He also formed a close friendship at this time with Robert Delaunay, with whom he shared an exhibition at Berthe Weill early in 1907. The two of them were singled out by one critic in 1907 as divisionists who used large, mosaic-like ‘cubes’ to construct small but highly symbolic compositions.
