Nature morte (Still Life), or Compotier et cruche décorée de cerfs, is a Cubist painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger. It was exhibited at Exposició d'Art Cubista, Galeries Dalmau, Barcelona, 20 April – 10 May 1912 (no. 44). During this show—the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain—Metzinger's painting became one of the preferred targets of the press. It was exhibited again 1 – 15 April 1917 at Nya Konstgalleriet (The New Art Gallery) founded by the Italian Futurist Arturo Ciacelli in Stockholm (reproduced in the catalogue). Nya Konstgalleriet was one of the three main galleries in Sweden responsible for promoting national and international modernism between 1915 and 1925. The painting would eventually be exhibited at Galerie Philippe Reichenbach, Houston, where it was acquired in 1960. In 2008 Nature morte (titled Compotier et cruche décorée de cerfs) was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York.
Description
Nature morte, signed "JMetzinger" (lower right), is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 93.5 x 66.5 cm (36 3/4 by 26 1/4 in.), representing a still life. It is an interior scene depicting various objects including a compotier filled with fruit, a carafe, pears, a cup, a vase of flowers, and a jug (cruche) decorated with dear (cerfs). The objects are placed on a diamond-shaped table. In the 'background' (upper left) is another table with a glass and bowl resting on it.
The colors employed by the artist are typical of early Cubism, ranging from reds to earth tones and greens—a legacy of Paul Cézanne.
Rather than blurring the distinction between superimposed elements with irregular brushstrokes, Metzinger has clearly outlined each object with a thin dark line.
Geometry
The vertical composition is treated in a highly personal geometrically Cubist style with various planes, angles, layers and facets. The table upon which objects are placed is angled as if seen from above. The fruits, bowl, jug and other elements are depicted as if seen from a side view and from above simultaneously, giving an illusion of an overall flattening of the picture plain—a devise used by Cézanne, from which all of the Cubists drew inspiration. Cézanne's reduction of the visible world into fundamental shapes (cone, cube, sphere), the faceted reconstruction of nature through purely painterly forms, the fracture and flattening of space, are all present in Metzinger's picture. However, where the dialectic nature of Cézanne's work had been greatly influential during the highly expressionistic phase of proto-Cubism, between 1908 and 1910, the work of Georges Seurat, with its flatter, more linear structures, would capture the attention of Metzinger from early 1911.
"With the advent of monochromatic Cubism in 1910-1911," writes art historian Robert Herbert, "questions of form displaced color in the artists' attention, and for these Seurat was more relevant. Thanks to several exhibitions, his paintings and drawings were easily seen in Paris, and reproductions of his major compositions circulated widely among the Cubists. The Chahut [Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo] was called by André Salmon "one of the great icons of the new devotion", and both it and the Cirque (Circus), Musée d'Orsay, Paris, according to Guillaume Apollinaire, "almost belong to Synthetic Cubism".
The concept was well established among the French avant-garde that painting could be expressed mathematically, in terms of both color and form. This mathematical expression resulted in an independent and compelling 'objective truth,' perhaps more so than the objective truth of the object represented. Indeed, the Neo-Impressionists had succeeded in establishing an objective scientific basis in the domain of color (Seurat addresses these problems in Circus and Dancers). Soon, the Cubists were to do so in both the domain of form and dynamics (Orphism) would later do so with color too.