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Jean Metzinger Quotes
1883–1956 France
Jean Metzinger (24 June 1883 – 3 November 1956) was a French artist who lived and worked in Paris for most of his professional career. Inspired by the work of Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne, he is one of the founders of Cubism, along with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Albert Gleizes.
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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.
It should be said that such an art would be neither more false nor more true than classical art.
My conviction was justified: art, that which lasts, is based on mathematics.
I sought refuge in my schoolbooks, among the flowers of Greek poetry, or the magical figures of geometry.
The house was filled with the piano and violin. I turned towards the art of painting.
I learned that Cézanne's success was not preventing the Neo-Impressionists from getting support. My knowledge of their technique was entirely literary.
If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems.
Du Cubisme (1912)
We are frankly amused to think that many a novice may perhaps pay for his too literal comprehension of the remarks of one cubist, and his faith in the existence of an Absolute Truth, by painfully juxtaposing the six faces of a cube or the two ears of a model seen in profile.
Du Cubisme (1912)
Unless we are to condemn all modern painting, we must regard cubism as legitimate, for it continues modern methods, and we should see in it the only conception of pictorial art now possible. In other words, at this moment cubism is painting.
Du Cubisme (1912)
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.
Note sur la Peinture (1910)
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.
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.
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.
Note sur la Peinture (1910)
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