page_title: The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations
section_title: Jean Metzinger
hierarchical_section_title: The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations / Volume / New Painters / Jean Metzinger
caption_attribution_description: Jean Metzinger, portrait photograph, published in Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913
context_page_description: Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques, is a book written by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1905 and 1912, published in 1913. This was the third major text on Cubism; following Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger; and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme.
  Les Peintres Cubistes is illustrated with black and white photographs of works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Also reproduced are photographs of artists Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris, Picabia and Duchamp. In total, there are 46 halftone portraits and reproductions.
  Published by Eugène Figuière Éditeurs, Collection "Tous les Arts", Paris, 1913, Les Peintres Cubistes was the only independent volume of art criticism published by Apollinaire, and represented a highly original critical source on Cubism. He elucidates the history of the Cubist movement, its new aesthetic, its origins, its development, and its various features.
context_section_description: Metzinger, following Picasso and Braque, was chronologically the third Cubist artist, observed Apollinaire.
  Describing Metzinger, Apollinaire claims this 'great painter's work had not yet been fully appreciated, despite the design, composition, the contrasted lights and an overall style'. His works were "set apart" above and beyond many of the works of his contemporaries. "It was then that Jean Metzinger, joining Picasso and Braque, founded the Cubist City."
  There was "nothing incomplete" in the works of Metzinger. His works were the "fruit of a rigorous logic" writes the author. When explaining the art of our epoch, "his work will be one of the surest documents". Metzinger's paintings contained their own 'explanation'. For Apollinaire this was a case "unique in the history of art". For Apollinaire, Metzinger had purity; "his meditations take beautiful forms whose harmony tends to approach the sublime... entirely stripped of all that was known before him. [...] Each one of his pictures contains a judgment of the universe and his entire work resembles a nocturnal firmament when it is clear, free from all clouds and trembling with adorable lights. There is nothing incomplete in his works, poetry ennobles the smallest details."
caption: Jean Metzinger
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