Baigneuses, also called Bathers, 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). 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. 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".
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 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 his visit to 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. 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." 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.
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!