Bathers: two nudes in an exotic landscape
Metzinger, Jean
Nantes, 1883 - París, 1956
Bathers: two nudes in an exotic landscape, c. 1905
Signed lower right: "Metzinger"
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
Location: Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid
Oil on canvas
116 x 88,8 cm
CTB.2004.1
Artwork history
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Zwemmer Gallery, London, 1951
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Private Collection, 1951
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Private Collection, 1982-2004
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Sotheby’s Auctions, London, lot 251, February 4, 2004
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Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
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-Sotheby’s (aut. corp.): Impressionist & Modern Art. [Auction Cat. ]. London, February 4, 2004, lot 251, p. 64.
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-Le néo-impressionnisme. De Seurat à Paul Klee. Ferretti Bocquillon, Marina [et al.]. [Exhib. Cat. París, Musée d’Orsay]. París, Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2005 , pp. 360-361 (lám.) [Sheet by Nicole Tamburini]
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–Gauguin y el viaje a lo exótico, Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza [Exhib. Cat. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza] ., 2012, n. 34, lám. p. 146.
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– Femina Feminae. Muses and the collector. From Piazetta to Delaunay. Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra. [Exhib. Cat. Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra], 2018. P. 40-41 y p. 102-103 [Sheet by Guillermo Cervera]
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-Colección Carmen Thyssen. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Ed. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 2024. P. 276-277 [Sheet by Paloma Alarcó]
Expert report
At the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, the new Fauve painting of Henri Matisse, George Braque and André Derain caused a huge commotion. The young Jean Metzinger immediately adopted the synthetic forms and pure, unnatural colors of the new movement. Bathers (Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape), which presents two female bodies in the middle of an Arcadian landscape, belongs to a group of paintings of a certain symbolism made that same year. The artist combines the divisionist or neo-Impressionist style of his previous works with the color range of Fauvism, especially in the exotic elements of the landscape.
Although Metzinger aspired to obtain a “chromatic poetry”, the vertical format, the symmetry of the composition and the geometric structure of the color tesserae that cover the entire pictorial surface, in the manner of a divisionist mosaic, move him away from Fauve expressiveness. A geometric tendency is already visible in his work, which will increase in the cubist period.
The painter defined each touch of color as a syllable whose rhythm and homogeneous systematization gave rise to sentences and paragraphs with a chromatic syntax that translates the different emotions before nature.
Paloma Alarcó