page_title: Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape / Description
context_page_description: Baigneuses: Deux nus dans un paysage exotique is an oil painting created circa 1905 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape is a Proto-Cubist work executed in a highly personal Divisionist style during the height of the Fauve period. The painting is now in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Spain.
context_section_description: Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 116 x 88.8 cm (45 3/8 by 35 in), signed Metzinger (lower right). The work—consistent in style with other works by Metzinger created circa 1905-1906, such as Femme au Chapeau (Woman with a Hat)—represents two nude women, one seen from the rear and the other from a more frontal position, in a lush, tropical, or subtropical setting. The landscape contains a wide variety of exotic geometrized elements (trees, bushes, flowers, a lake or river, a mountain range and a partly cloudy sky). Metzinger's use of color in Two Nudes is extremely Fauve; quasi-pure reds, greens, blues and violets, juxtaposed in groups as if randomly.
  While the two nudes are treated with rather natural colors, the rest of the canvas appears treated with more artificial tints, tones, hues and shades. Unlike other Fauve works of the same period by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck or Kees van Dongen, Metzinger's composition is strongly Cézannian. The vertical format and light colors of the sky and treatment of foreground and background elements create a flattening of spatial perspective, reminiscent of Georges Seurat, or Paul Cézanne's 'multiple viewpoints', his search for order, discipline and permanence. However, the brushstrokes and overall appearance are not at all Cézannian in nature.
caption: Paul Gauguin, 1892, Tahitiennes sur la plage, oil on canvas, 109.9 × 89.5 cm (43.3 × 35.2 in), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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