Jean Metzinger’s firm belief was that Cubism was not anchored to a specific set of rules, but was rather a creative, even intuitive, approach to form. In the 1912 publication of Du Cubisme, Metzinger and his co-authors clarified: “it is our whole personality […] which transforms the plane of the picture”. In contrast to the realism that came before them, and the abstraction that would follow, Metzinger’s paintings reduce a series of objects into a single form through coloured planes connected by elegant lines. The objects are still legible, but they are pared down to an essential form: they are reduced and made comprehensible.

Metzinger’s magnificent 1919 Homme assis devant la table exemplifies his transformative handling of picture planes and his pursuit of formal harmony through the language of Cubism. The intelligible figure of a man sits at a table, a pipe and paper in front of him, a tessellated floor framing the lower part of the canvas. Though ostensibly part of the group manifesto, harmony of form is most keenly felt within Metzinger’s idiom. The shapes that comprise the homme assis, though angular and delineated, do not conflict with one another: they cohere in a geometric symphony that appears both multifaceted and refined. This contrasts with, for example, Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier no. 2. Despite its aesthetic sympathy with Futurism, Duchamp’s painting was reproduced in the original publication of Du Cubisme and held up as a Modernist classic, central to the evolving Cubist agenda.

The coherence and fundamental harmony found within Homme assis devant la table are perhaps attributable to Metzinger’s profound admiration for Paul Cézanne.

The conviction expressed in Du Cubisme was further clarified: “Henceforth we are justified in saying that between this school and previous manifestations there is only a difference of intensity, and that in order to assure ourselves of this we have only to study the methods of this realism, which, departing from the superficial reality of Courbet, plunges with Cézanne into profound reality, growing luminous as it forces the unknowable to retreat.”

Cézanne was considered a cornerstone of creative progression: a departure point from 19th century paintings as evinced by the work of Courbet, towards a new ‘profound reality’, as adopted by the Cubists. The geometrical overtones of Gustave Geffroy, for example, not just created by the striated books, but also the triangulated colour contouring the sitter’s face, the zig-zag effect of the open books, and the pyramidal shape of his body, demonstrate the visual tenets that so inspired Metzinger and the other Cubists. His unique idiom presented a prototype for treating forms via multiple angles of perspective.

Cézanne’s subject matter was perhaps another source of inspiration for Metzinger. Gustave Geffroy has been cited as exemplary of Cézanne’s preoccupation with depicting people in their natural environments: at home with domestic objects and immersed in their daily lives. The motif of the pipe has been held up as the icon of this kind of scene. At the beginning of Metzinger’s commitment to Cubism, he frequently depicted groups of people and athletes engaged in sporting achievements. However, in 1918 after the death of his wife (tragically followed by the death of his only daughter shortly thereafter), Metzinger pivoted his subjects to individuals and ordinary people, typically at home with mundane objects, as though the artist’s understanding of achievement had evolved into something smaller and simpler: mere existence at peace with oneself. The palette likewise modulated to a more muted range of tones, which were enduringly sophisticated and complementary. Another example of this can be seen in Tate London’s La femme à la cafetière.

As with every great shift in art history, the ground-breaking new aesthetic as practiced by the Cubists was not well received on first viewing. Celebrated art critic Apollinaire wrote of Metzinger that his pictures were ‘solidly painted’, even if they have ‘the unfortunate air of commemorating an earthquake’ (quoted in Jean Metzinger in Retrospect (exhibition catalogue), op. cit. p. 13). It is only with hindsight that we can fully appreciate the purity of Metzinger and his co-Cubists’ aims: rather than dismantling an art historical language in an earth-shattering way that the metaphor of an earthquake suggests, their goal was to refine it. In the present work, near-classical forms are articulated through sequences of planes, further characterised by a sophisticated tonality. Metzinger’s work contributed to the radical expansion of accepted visual possibilities - which was indeed a seismic shift in art history.