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Jean Metzinger

28 quotes

“Instead of copying Nature, we [ Cubists ] 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 of literature and music. Your [ Gelett Burgess is American] Edgar Poe 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.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) first seen 1910 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Metzinger in 'The Wild Men of Paris', by Gelett Burgess , in 'The Architectural Record, Vol XXVII, May 1910, p. 413
“So, music does not attempt to imitate Nature's sounds, but it does interpet 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 our hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiments.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) first seen 1910 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote of Metzinger in 'The Wild Men of Paris', by Gelett Burgess , in 'The Architectural Record, Vol XXVII, May 1910, p. 414
“Already, a conscious courage is coming to life. Here are some of the painters: Picasso, Georges Braque, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier.. ..they are highly enlightened, and do not believe in the stability of any system, even if it were to call itself classical art.. ..Their reason is poised between the pursuit of the fleeting and a mania for the eternal.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cézanne showed us forms living in the reality of light; Picasso gives us a material report of their real life in the mind. He establishes a free, mobile perspective, in such a way that the shrewd mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced an entire geometry.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It used to be said of a woman: why she's a Velázquez infanta! Now it is said: she's a Renoir blonde! I have no doubt that, in the future, it will be proclaimed: she's as exuberant as a Delaunay, as noble as a Le Fauconnier, as beautiful as a Braque or Picasso.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To understand Paul Cézanne is to foresee Cubism. Henceforth we are justified in saying that between this school and previous manifestations there is only a difference of intensity, and that in order to assure ourselves of this we have only to study the methods of this realism, which, departing from the superficial reality of Courbet, plunges with Cézanne into profound reality, growing luminous as it forces the unknowable to retreat.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sought refuge in my schoolbooks, among the flowers of Greek poetry, or the magical figures of geometry.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This science gave me a taste for the arts. It is Number that gives value to sounds and silences, lights and shadows, forms and spaces. Michelangelo and Bach seemed to me like divine mathematicians [calculateurs]. Already I felt that only mathematics enables works that can last. Whether as a result of patient study, or of a stormy [fulgurante] intuition, number alone can reduce all our diversities of feeling to the strict unity of a mass, a fresco, or a sculpted head.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The house was filled with the piano and violin. I turned towards the art of painting.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My conviction was justified: art, that which lasts, is based on mathematics.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nearly conscious in someone like Michelangelo, or Paolo Uccello, quite intuitive in painters such as Ingres, or Corot, it works on the basis of numbers which belong to the painting itself, not to whatever it represents.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I learned that Cézanne's success was not preventing the Neo-Impressionists from getting support. My knowledge of their technique was entirely literary.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As for Picasso, the specialist was amazed by the rapidity of his understanding. The tradition he came from had prepared him better than ours for a problem to do with structure. And Berthe Weil was right when she treated those who compared him/confused him with, a Steinlen or a Lautrec as idiots. He had already rejected them in their own century, a century we had no intention of prolonging. Whether or not the Universe was endowed with another dimension, art was going to move into a different field.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art belongs to the domain of the unreal and it is only when people try to make a reality of it that it falls apart.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wanted an art that was faithful to itself [loyal] and would have nothing to do with the business of creating illusions. I dreamed of painting glasses from which no-one would ever think of drinking, beaches that would be quite unsuitable for bathing, nudes who would be definitively chaste. I wanted an art which in the first place would appear as a representation of the impossible.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It should be said that such an art would be neither more false nor more true than classical art.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Albert Gleizes did not know Montmartre, had never seen anything of Picasso or Juan Gris, never heard Maurice Princet construct an infinite number of different spaces for the use of painters, but he described to me the absurdity of the museums in which mournful, extravagantly three dimensional crowds threaten to crush the visitor by jumping out of their frames.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The excuse that the painters were documenting reality was becoming ridiculous. Photographers and film makers went far beyond them. Already it could be said that a good portrait led one to think about the painter not the model.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gleizes was only trying to reduce the curvature of natural volumes to adapt them more naturally and rigorously to the surface of the painting, a surface which he believed to be continuous with the wall and, for all practical purposes, with no curvature at all.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the image possesses qualities which, under certain circumstances, can make it much more interesting than the object which inspired it. The portrait of a commonplace person can astound us with an air of distinction, reminding us that the best portrait is that which resembles the painter, not the model.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We could not think of going back to the symbolic measures of the ancients and the primitives. Such cheap magician's tricks did not appeal to us.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether it is Juan Gris taking objects apart, Picasso replacing them with objects of his own invention, or another who replaces conical perspective by a system based on the relations between perpendiculars, all that only goes to show that Cubism was not at all born out of an authoritative theory [mot d'ordre]; that it only marked among a few painters the will to be finished with an art that never ought to have survived the condemnation pronounced upon it by Pascal.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact it is a stupidity, Maurice Princet told me in the presence of Juan Gris, to claim to be able to bring together in a single system of relations, colour, which is a sensation that only needs to be received, and form which is an organisation that has to be understood (14); and, introducing us to the non-Euclidean geometries, he urged us to create a geometry for painters.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We could not do it in the way he meant. But from the Rue Lamarck to the Rue Ravignan, the attempt [prétention] to imitate an orb on a vertical plane, or to indicate by a horizontal straight line the circular hole of a vase placed at the height of the eyes was considered as the artifice of an illusionistic trickery that belonged to another age.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cubism was born.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Often we were joined by Maurice Princet. Although very young, he held an important post in an insurance company which he owed to his knowledge of mathematics. But outside his profession it was as an artist that he thought of mathematics, as a specialist in aesthetics that he evoked continuities in n dimensions. He liked to interest painters in the new visions of space that had been opened up by Victor Schlegel and several others. He succeeded. After having heard him by chance, Henri Matisse was caught reading an essay on hyperspace. Oh! it was only a potboiler [un ouvrage de vulgarisation]! but at least that shows that for the great 'fauve' the days of the painter who knows nothing, who runs towards a pretty subject with his beard blowing in the wind, was passed.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What madman, or what clever-dick with the instincts of a counterfeiter was the first to paint a sphere in trompe l'oeil on a surface that is vertical and rigorously flat! And that's what they teach at the Beaux-Arts [academy]! How could such idiocies ever have survived the verdict of Pascal?" [quote of Albert Gleizes ]. That was how, in 1906, Albert Gleizes was feeling his way towards Cubism and condemned in advance those who never saw anything in it other than a shibboleth [mot d'ordre]. It was still nothing more than a need he felt, the need not for an intellectual art but for an art that would be something other than a systematic absurdity. Quite clearly nature and the painting make up two different worlds which have nothing in common, and what is quite in its place in the one cannot also be in its place in the other.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had measured the difference that separated art prior to 1900 from the art which I felt was being born. I knew that all instruction was at an end. The age of personal expression had finally begun. The value of an artist was no longer to be judged by the finish of his execution, or by the analogies his work suggested with such-and-such an archetype. It would be judged – exclusively – by what distinguished this artist from all the others. The age of the master and pupil was finally over; I could see about me only a handful of creators and whole colonies of monkeys. But I could not ask Gleizes to see it that way. Happily, nothing of his social or mystical opinions remained when he was engaged in the work of painting. The work of reconciling an oval and a lozenge, a yellow and a blue, prevailed and saved him.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source