Galerie Stoliar, Cannes
Private Collection, France (acquired from the above in 1960)

Paris, Musée de la Poste & Lodève, Musée de Lodève, Gleizes-Metzinger. Du Cubisme et après, 2012-2013, n.n.

The canvas is relined. Close inspection reveals some very fine stable craquelure notably around the sun. There is no evidence of retouching under UV light. This work is in very good condition.
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"By painting with separate touches, I did not aspire to an objective rendering of light, but of iridescence and certain aspects of colour that were still foreign to painting. I created a sort of chromatic verse and for the syllables I used touches which […] could never change in size without modifying the rhythm of the visual phraseology designed to translate the diverse emotions elicited by nature.”

Jean Metzinger, circa1907

 

Painted circa 1906-1907, Paysage bleu belongs to a limited group of compositions executed by Jean Metzinger in a purely Divisionist style known as “mosaic-like”. Having admired compositions by Maximilien Luce, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross in 1904 at Galerie Druet as well as the works by Seurat exhibited at the major retrospective organised at the Salon de Indépendants in 1905, the young painter adopte✤d this method of painting and assimilated Neo-Impressionist precepts based on the theories of Chevreul.

In keeping with other works from this period, here Metzinger meticulously 🀅juxtaposes small touches of colour without ever overlapping them, associating each colour with a symbolic function. In contrast with his Pointillist predecessors, he shows a particularly marked concern for the clarity of the compositiꦓon and an extreme rigour when it come to the placements of the small cubes of colour. In his 1906 article on “Independent Artists”, the critic Chassevent defines Metzinger as a “mosaicist like Signac, but (…) more precise in his separation of cubes of colour, which seem to have been fabricated by a machine”.

Compared with the majority of Metzinger’s other Divisionist works, often painted in Fauve colours, Paysage bleu reveals a palette constructed ♊from a remarkable repertoire of blues and greens, foreshadowing the colour scheme of his later Cubist compositions. Here Metzinger attains the &ldquo♛;chromatic poetry” he had been striving for, creating a landscape infused with an almost supernatural, enchanting light.