Curated by Erasmus Weddigen Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the Fourth Dimension Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track Curated by Erasmus Weddigen Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice June 9–September 16, 2012 Lead sponsor: Mapei Spa Sponsor: Tempini Main media partner: La Gazzetta dello Sport With the support of: Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim In collaboration with: Corriere della Sera Media partner: Radio Italia Thanks to: Hangar Design Group Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the Fourth Dimension Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track © 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-89207-486-0 Peggy Guggenheim Collection Palazzo Venier dei Leoni Dorsoduro 701 I-30123 Venice Design: Andrea Soffientino Editorial: Philip Rylands, Gražina Subelyte, Chiara Barbieri Production: Chiara Barbieri Translations: George Hicks, Carol Escow Printed in Italy by Grafiche Aurora Cover: Jean Metzinger, At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome), 1912 (cat. no. 11) Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors and omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. © 2012 Georges Braque, Fortunato Depero, Albert Gleizes, Natalia Goncharova, Vasily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Louis Marcoussis, Jean Metzinger, Gino Severini, Mario Sironi, by SIAE 2012 © Succession Marcel Duchamp, by SIAE 2012 © Succession Picasso, by SIAE 2012 © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, by SIAE 2012 CONTENTS Prologue Preface and Acknowledgments The Cubism of the Paris-Roubaix Giorgio Squinzi The Criterium A Short Cycle Ride through Art History towards New Dimensions Erasmus Weddigen, Sonya Weddigen-Schmid The Yellow Jersey Jean Metzinger. A Chronology (1883–1956) Božena Nikiel The Champion Erasmus Weddigen Substances and Stimulants The Mathematical and Physical Dimensions Wolfgang Drechsler The Brain Dimensions. The Brain and the Fourth Dimension Are Made for Each Other André Blum The Anthropological Dimension. Childhood, Myth, Ecstasy and the Unconscious: Places without Time? Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, Nina Aydt The Third Dimension in Painting: Sand. The Race for New Painting Techniques in Synthetic Cubism Sonya Weddigen-Schmid Overlooking the Horizon Media and the Arts. From the Fourth to Nth Dimensions? Erasmus Weddigen The Astrophysical Dimension Hanns Ruder The Dispensary Team Forgery and Doping Erasmus Weddigen At the Cycle-Race Track: a Non-Invasive Investigation of Materials and Pictorial Technique Ferruccio Petrucci, Paul Schwartzbaum The Race Metzinger’s Racing Cyclists, the Race of 1912, and Its Protagonists Erasmus Weddigen The Sportsman’s Dimension Fabian Cancellara interviewed by Erasmus Weddigen Paul Wiedmer and the Fourth Dimension Erasmus Weddigen, Elija Rijeka Catalogue Gražina Subelyte 6 8 10 30 33 36 44 53 57 65 68 71 74 84 98 102 105 Preface and Acknowledgments Philip Rylands Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection Richard Armstrong Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation This exhibition focuses on a work of Cubist painting by Jean Metzinger, in the centenary year of its execution. Whatever it reveals is therefore a contribution to the understanding of one of the most remarkable moments in European art history: the intellectual avant-garde in Paris in the years preceding World War I. The artist Jean Metzinger is a relatively neglected figure in the scholarship of Cubism, even though his name appears in all accounts of the movement. A 1985 exhibition at the Iowa University Museum of Art in the United States, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, has remained a unique occasion. Joann Moser, writing in the catalogue, described how she was obliged to conduct basic research in order to identify and locate Metzinger’s painted oeuvre prior to selecting works for the exhibition. Metzinger’s role in the history of Cubism, together with those of his fellow ‘Salon Cubists’—those who exhibited together in Salle 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants in Paris—has been subordinated to the pre-eminence of Picasso and Braque and to a reading of the Cubist story rendered canonical by Alfred Barr in his 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Yet Lynda Dalrymple Henderson opens a chapter dedicated to Cubism in a lengthy essay on art and the fourth dimension by citing Jean Metzinger as “the first to write about the importance of the new geometries for contemporary painters. . .”1 His written explanations of the Cubist style were published, in 1910, at a time when Picasso and Braque were all but silent. The injustice of Metzinger’s emargination was argued by Daniel Robbins in an essay in the 1985 Iowa catalogue titled “Jean Metzinger: at the Center of Cubism”. Despite the attention given to Metzinger in 1985, there has been little progress for him since. Metzinger’s racing cyclists are overlooked in standard English texts on Cubism such as those by John Golding and Douglas Cooper, perhaps because the two paintings, for reasons one can only speculate about, were exhibited for the first time in New York, rather than in Paris, and only in 1915. Yet thanks to the research of the curator of this exhibition, Erasmus Weddigen, we now know that they were completed as early as 1912, the year in which the Cubists, other than Picasso and Braque, were most unified and concentrated, dominating the Salons that year. They offer us an intellectual Cubism very different from the high analytical Cubism of Picasso and Braque the previous year. At the Cycle-Race Track illustrates the final yards of the Paris-Roubaix race, and portrays Charles Crupelandt, its winner in 1912. The Paris-Roubaix has earned several nicknames: ‘Queen of the Classics,’ the ‘Easter Race’ (it takes place on a Sunday in April) and the ‘Hell of the North’, owing to the extreme hardship of cycling over the cobbled pavé roads of northern France. Metzinger’s painting was the first in Modernist art to represent a specific sporting event and its champion. He folded into the image his concepts of ‘mobile’ perspective, simultaneity, and time, according to his belief that the fourth dimension was crucial to a new art that could compete with the classical French tradition of Jacques-Louis David and Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Metzinger belonged to a loose- knit group of friends, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Albert Gleizes, and František Kupka, that frequented the household of the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, and who, inspired by their admiration for Maurice Princet, known as the ‘the mathematician of the Cubists,’ discussed such matters as non-Euclidean geometry, theoretical mathematics, the golden section and non-visible dimensions. The combination of a sporting subject chronicling a new passion in French popular culture and an ambitious intellectual and visual apparatus central to the nascent Cubist 6 movement qualifies Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track as a masterpiece. We trust therefore that this kind of ‘work in focus’ exhibition, examining a work in the museum’s own collection, also has the effect of reaching out and adding to the myriad of scholarship concerning the period as a whole. The exhibition is inspired by and curated by Erasmus Weddigen, whose discovery of the identity of the cyclist in At the Cycle-Race Track and its precise date dates from 1997, first published in 1998.2 We are grateful to Mr Weddigen for the service he has rendered to one of the Foundation’s masterworks, and for his considerable efforts and enthusiasm for this exhibition. The exhibition will include a drawing, two further paintings of racing cyclists by Metzinger, and a third, recently rediscovered painting, Cubist Composition with Clock, treating the subject of time and the fourth dimension, and signaling the end of Metzinger’s research into the dynamics of movement. We would like to thank those who have lent these works of art: Alfred Pacquement, Director, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle, Paris, Nicholas S. Zoullas, as well as those who have chosen anonymity. Metzinger’s cyclists are exhibited together here for the first time. Images of cyclists by Italian Futurists— Umberto Boccioni, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini and Mario Sironi—are also displayed. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) by Boccioni and works by Marcel Duchamp further reference the elasticity of space. Paintings by Georges Braque and Louis Marcoussis from Peggy Guggenheim’s collection illustrate the use of sand or other similar substances added to artists’ pigments, as the ‘third dimension’ in art. We are grateful to Cristiana Collu, Director, MART—Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Laura Mattioli and Romana Severini for making works from their collections available for this show. We are grateful to the Impressionist & Modern Art department at Christie’s New York which was generous with its help in making possible the loan of Metzinger’s Cubist Composition with Clock, and which provided high resolution photographs of the painting for the catalogue. The exhibition documents the passion, then and now, for cycle racing, and for the Paris-Roubaix race in particular, with early and modern bicycles loaned from the collection of Ivan Bonduelle, a long-term loan to the Musée Régional du Vélo ‘La Belle Echappée’, La Fresnaye-sur-Chédouet, France, directed by Grégory Belperche; from the Museo del Ciclismo Madonna del Ghisallo, Fiorenzo Magni, President, and Carola Gentilini, Director; and by designer Marco Mainardi of Studio Dimensione Servizi. In addition, the racing cycle of Fabian Cancellara, winner of the Paris-Roubaix race in 2006 and 2010, is loaned by the RADIOSHACK NISSAN TREK team. The theoretical and sporting themes of the show come together in the exhibition of a stationary bicycle, that can be ridden by our visitors, designed to illustrate theories of space and time formulated by Albert Einstein. This is loaned by Prof. Dr. Hanns Ruder, Color-Physics GmbH, Tübingen, Germany. We are most grateful to all these lenders for their generosity. A special feature of the exhibition is a new sculpture, created by the distinguished Swiss artist Paul Wiedmer. Titled Cyclosna this work deals with concepts of time and the connection between the past, the present and the future. It documents how space and time, and Einstein’s marriage of the two in a continuum, are still relevant in contemporary art, as they have been in successive generations of the historic avant- garde. The exhibition is small, but the catalogue is large. Thank you to all those who have contributed a spectrum of essays on the diverse themes inspired by Metzinger’s painting: Erasmus Weddigen, Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, André Blum, Wolfgang Drechsler, Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs and Nina Aydt, Božena Nikiel, Hanns Ruder, Paul Schwartzbaum, Ferruccio Petrucci and his colleagues, and Giorgio Squinzi. We are grateful to Fabian Cancellara for his interview. We have had occasion in the past to express our immense gratitude to Mapei SpA, Milan, which funded the restoration of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s building façades in 2009, and which still today is a member of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim. Mapei was the sponsor from 1993—2002 of a celebrated and successful cycle racing team at the highest international level. In the historic years of 1996, 1998 and 1999, cyclists of the Mapei team dominated the podium of the Paris-Roubaix, placing first, second and third. An introduction by Giorgio Squinzi, President and CEO of Mapei, recalls Mapei’s impassioned participation in the world of competitive cycling. We are grateful to Mapei for its financial support for this exhibition. Thank you also to Enrico and Angelo Tempini for the valuable support of Tempini SpA of Brescia, over and above its membership of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim. The Gazzetta dello Sport, which has been covering the Paris-Roubaix race for over a century, generously opened its archives for research and loans that have enriched both the exhibition and its catalogue. It has also provided much appreciated media support, together with Corriere della Sera and Radio Italia. Hangar Design Group has provided the graphic design for the exhibition. Finally, the loyalty and generosity of the members of Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim are fundamental to the museum’s ability to mount important exhibitions: Aermec, Aperol, Apice, Arclinea, Corriere della Sera, Distilleria Nardini, Gruppo Pirelli, Hangar Design Group, Hausbrandt, Istituto Europeo di Design, Mapei, MST–Gruppo Maccaferri, Oracle, Rubelli, Swatch, Tempini, Trend. 1 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in Twentieth Century Art and Culture,” Configurations (Johns Hopkins University Press), vol. 17, no. 1, Winter 2009, pp. 131-60, esp. p. 142. 2 Sonya Schmid, Erasmus Weddigen, “Jean Metzinger und die ‘Königin der Klassiker‘, eine Cyclopädie des Kubismus,“ Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, Cologne, Bd. LIX, 1998, pp. 229-58. 7 The Cubism of the Paris-Roubaix Giorgio Squinzi President and CEO, Mapei Spa The Cubism of the Paris-Roubaix, the Futurism of speed records, the fourth dimension of a Tour de France never won, ever coveted, ever cursed, that condemned us to stand helpless, immobilized and defeated on the sidelines. The Cubism of the Paris-Roubaix, the race closest to my heart which has thrilled us with unknown surprises, such as the journey to the cycle-race track in that small French town on the border with Belgium, a cauldron of emotions televised the world over. The Cubism of the Paris-Roubaix, the race of the pavé, the maddest, the most untypical of all cycle races, and for this the most fascinating and the most consuming. The race over cobblestones, cubes of granite that have become the symbol of our company, of the culture of our labors and our industry. One, two, three. Three Mapei team members alone across one of the greatest finishing lines of world cycling, surely the most celebrated and mythical in the sport of cycle-racing. One, two, three. Three Mapei team members who enter the stadium arrayed together, all three winners, their arms raised high: Johan Museeuw, Gianluca Bortolami, and Andrea Tafi. “To win together” was the title of that historic day in 1996, now a motto, a concept, a philosophy, an incentive, a discipline, for whoever joins Mapei, whether athlete, employee, office worker, manager or researcher. Cycle-racing as a sublime expression of Impressionism. A film-still that fixes indelibly an instant that can never be repeated. Indeed, for me, and for all of us at Mapei, across that finishing line, over those cobbles, symbol of a race and a team, ours, over that surface, whether muddy or dusty but always bumpy, we scored four other victories: once more with Museeuw, another with Tafi, and two with the unforgettable Franco Ballarini, who shortly before he died gave me the cube of granite which today, for me, is golden. Stills of cycling. Stills of history, that cannot be repeated because once-in-a-lifetime moments. Cycling as the myth of speed, of Futurist dynamism. The bicycle as a symbol of motion, more than the train, more than the automobile, more than all the demonic inventions still to come. Thus Dynamism of a Cyclist, a sublime image by Umberto Boccioni with its ‘force-lines’ that convey the strength, the momentum, the explosiveness of swift movement: a dizzying dynamic vortex of muscular power generated by the cyclist as he hurtles forward powered only by his legs. Futurism as the language of the speed record, emblem and symbol of velocity, power and dynamism. How clearly I recall Tony Rominger’s record in 1994. In a cycle- race track like the one depicted by Jean Metzinger, Tony shrugged off all that could hold him back and took flight in a performance as mad as it was sublime, of supreme harmony and dynamism. Cycling as musical rhythm, as an algebraic equation, as the exalted union of science and man. What a joy it was, at the racetrack of Bordeaux, to watch at the side of an old friend, Ernesto Colnago, whose eyes shone at the sight of the shining steel of his creation. At the side too of Aldo Sassi, who had studied every last detail to release the talents of Tony, as strong in muscle and spirit as he was slight of build. Cycling as chemistry, because passion is a function of chemistry. It has always been lodged in my heart, in my blood, since I was a boy, when I went to cheer Fausto Coppi and when, at the finishing line of the Lombardia, I picked up one of his aluminum water-flasks that I kept like the precious relic of a world that was slipping away. It vanished during a house move, but then, in the ‘cyclical’, even dynamic way of things, it was restored to me some years later. 8 I have loved cycle-racing—followed it, practiced it; I have breathed the pungent air of hardship, and the thinner air of the peak that has been scaled. Cycling as a mental attitude, as a metaphor for a life in society and in industry made up of laps, of ascents and descents, but also of tumbles and painful withdrawals. A life measured in kilometers, of endurance, of dreams nurtured anew at the end of each stage. As the sponsor of a cycling team, a source of immense gratification in a decade of races (678 winners, Stefano Della Santa the first and Paolo Bettini the last, four World Championships, four individual and five team World Cup winners). As a captain of industry, who must ceaselessly hold before him the importance of attaining objectives, but more importantly who must be ever ready to set new ones. Among my triumphs there was also the intuition of Fabian Cancellara’s greatness: I met him at the world championships in Verona in 1999 when he was eighteen- years old, and invited him to join the mythical Mapei youth team which has nurtured many of the cycling greats of today, such as Cadel Evans, Pippo Pozzato, and Michael Rogers. Cancellara wore the Mapei shirt in the 2001 and 2002 seasons. I have won, but I have also lost, and this has made me unhappy. But even from these upsets positive and valuable lessons have been learned: every defeat has its upside. I longed to win the Tour de France, but I soon learned that, in the historic time that I was involved in cycling, a long race in multiple stages could not be won without ‘a little help’. I lost the Tour, but somehow I also won, attaining my visionary goal in the fourth dimension by setting up the Centro Mapei Sport Service in Castellanza—today a model of excellence in the field of sports medicine. It was this that enabled me vicariously to win the Tour de France with Cadel Evans in 2011. I have always believed that given the right conditions one can win without subterfuge or tricks. Not a Futurist project, but one projected into the future because always evolving. A project shared with and wholeheartedly adopted by my family: my wife Adriana and my children Marco and Veronica. But above all the project of a man no less visionary than I who has shared with me the dream of making sport in a certain way and under certain conditions: Aldo Sassi. In all these years, sometimes I have won and sometimes I have lost. But I have never foregone the appetite for a challenge. Because cycling is a passion, it’s love, which is nothing more or less than chemistry, a science I know thoroughly. It is also dynamism and motion. It is mathematics: numbers and tables for training. It is physics. For us at Mapei cycling is the Cubism of the Paris-Roubaix, the Futurism of speed records, but also the analysis that makes possible the image of an immobilized figure located in an exclusively spatial ‘fourth dimension.’ Stationary, in our laboratories, we engage with the movement of the world: from science to research, for me the key concept, whether in industry or in sport. 9 A Short Cycle Ride Through Art History towards New Dimensions Erasmus Weddigen, Sonya Weddigen-Schmid From striving not to stop at the solid, when structuring all form came the idea of four-dimensionality. It is intrinsically a bid to capture time moving through space. This is the conflict between dynamic and static, science and metaphysical philosophy. Time and space are neither relative nor absolute, but coexist, interpenetrate in all forms of life. Albert Gleizes1 The world as an n-dimension vélodrome The intuition that further dimensions must exist beyond the three that we can see and touch has probably been harbored by man from the moment his brain began to function. The domestication of fire, the earliest abstract thought and speech, the growing awareness of the relationship between cause and effect had already put him on the track of the extra-sensory. With awareness of death came the wish for an afterlife in a world to come. Fear of the unpredictable, of fate, chance and the incomprehensible created the Divine, without which culture can scarcely find expression. As the wolfhound must have felt it to his advantage to attach himself to man, as the wild animal considered the human projectile as belonging to an incalculable power, so Neanderthal man will also have thought that the Cro-Magnon newcomer, his superior in speech, had a mental, dimensional advantage. Until the dawn of the Enlightenment every scientific thought process, from primitive tribes to the intellectual world of Euclid or Aristotle, reached its boundary in the explanation of the visible, tactile world. A dimension beyond that of the third was the realm of miracles, faith and spiritualism. Initially it was mathematics, physics and fundamental enquiries into the reasons for existence that expanded awareness to further dimensions. In the 19th century Charles Howard Hinton and Henri Poincaré considered the possibility of the fourth dimension, and Albert Einstein developed his theory of relativity. Benoît Mandelbrot discovered the fractal and comparable structures in nature and the universe, and researchers into the brain also confirmed the latter for the structure of our synapses. That artists took matters beyond Euclidean dimensions of geometry is clear from the experiments of analytic and synthetic Cubism. The Futurists, privileging kinetic representation, stimulated their French colleagues by their familiarity with Eadweard Muybridge’s and Etienne-Jules Marey’s chrono-photographic studies of movement (fig. 22). Of them all, however, it was only Marcel Duchamp who dared to venture into abstract and theoretically challenging realms to plot an end to two-dimensional painting. The strongest stimulus for investigating humanity’s extended dimensional possibilities was delivered socially in the mid-19th century: by industrialization, liberation of the individual, democratization, school education, freedom of thought for the media, applied research and increasing mobility. All gave rise to a boundless optimism for the future, reflected in the sciences, but also taking hold in music, poetry, theater and finally the visual arts. Symptomatic of this optimism was a new sporting spirit, a new cult of the body; it created the Olympic Games in 1896 and moved forward the liberation of women (literally in the case of the painful and harmful bone corsets, which could not be worn when cycling!). Scarcely imaginable for us now were the effects on the psyche of ordinary citizens generated by mobility: hardly had the Draisine, Laufrad or the Grand Bi’ bicycles permitted individual movement than the first cycle races sprang into being.2 Spectators and commentators were wildly enthusiastic. Speed was seen as granting access to a new social dimension without restraint of rank or of prohibitive financial barriers. Travel by rail and car, balloon flights and putting to sea in steamers was complex and costly, because they were bound up with destination and countless staff, availability of time and place. Riding a bicycle was a personal and private accomplishment, to be pursued almost at will. The victor of a cycle race rose as quickly to hero status as the former martial hero fell into disuse following mechanization, loss of individuality and the long range power of the killing machines. 10 The spectator’s identification with the cyclist came close to the cult for touching icons, reliquaries and lingams; one inhaled the sweat of the mountain riders and to this day collects their jerseys and deals in their autographs. The live coverage of racing on television by the media, with helicopters and travelling camera teams, was a new advance on sports reports in the press and on the radio. Even now, when cycling as a sport has tarnished its image with doping scandals, team arrangements, the business aspects of sponsors, fees, and the highly specialized nature of its equipment as compared with the ubiquitous soccer, little has changed since the 1900s as far as the spectator is concerned. All the more so as amateur sport cycling is on the rise again, in inverse proportion to the fading romance of the car trip, its charm dissipated in the jammed traffic of polluting and costly vehicles. Whether a national tour or a 24-hour race like the Paris-Roubaix, cycle-racing remains a spectacle in which man pits himself alone against the rigors of route, weather, luck, and physical condition. The almost religious veneration of victors compensates for the loss of individual identity within the anonymous mass of urbanized human beings. On 12 July 1817, Karl Friedrich Drais von Sauerbronn traveled the fourteen kilometers between Mannheim and Schwetzingen on his wooden ‘running machine’ Laufrad in one hour, ushering in the glorious epoch of the bicycle. In 1818 the inventor lodged the first brevet (patent) with the French Ministry of the Interior, at the same time that the vehicle, now made of iron and weighing 32 kilos, reached the enthusiastic England of the Dandies, where in 1839 the first pedal-powered velocipede (‘bone-shaker’) was produced by a Scotsman, Kilpatrick MacMillan. Italians tell of a celerifero (celerifere), also a ‘running machine’, belonging to Count Mede de Sivrac as early as 1790. In the mid-20th century it was claimed that none other than Leonardo da Vinci had invented a bicycle, ca. 1490, but the drawing in question was recently revealed to be a forgery.3 Acrobatic high-wheelers (‘penny farthings’) followed in the wake of the Frenchman Michaux’s cycle in the 1860s. As early as 1869 the first Paris-Rouen race was celebrated over 126 kilometers, with 304 entrants. In Italy in 1870 a race took place over 33 kilometers between Florence and Pistoia, followed by the Milan-Turin in 1876. In Paris in 1870 there were over 60 different manufacturers, a further 15 in the provinces. Only the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 disrupted production for a time. The constant improvements in gearing, gear ratio and comfort soon ousted the ‘high-wheelers’ that in England had evolved into grotesque monsters, with tiny ‘farthings’ as rear wheel support. In 1888 Dunlop developed the tubular tire, promptly improved by Michelin and Pirelli. In 1890 the first non-stop 1260 km Paris-Brest-Paris came on the scene, and finally, in 1896, the first ‘classic’ Paris-Roubaix. The first Tour de France followed in 1903. The Italians raced their first Giro in 1909. In Italy, by 1912, the number of bikes had already hit the million mark; in France that figure had been reached by 1900. The Salon du Cycle of 1894, following a similar one in London, showcased over 1400 different models. The cycle was glorified as “one of the great human events to have taken place since the origins of our race. I cannot tell whether the art of fire, writing, or printing are of more importance.”4 Roland Barthes fig. 1 Jean Béraud, The Bicycle Chalet at the Bois de Boulogne (Le Chalet du cycle au Bois de Boulogne), ca. 1900, oil on canvas. Musée de l’Île-de-France, Sceaux. 11 characterized the Tour de France as an Homeric epic: “Like the Odyssey, the journey is at once a periplus of complete trials and the total exploration of terrestrial limits. Ulysses reached the gates of Earth many times. The Tour also touches on the inhuman world in many places.”5 The combination of all aspects of public life, of the intelligentsia, journalism, fashion and worldly sophistication, meant that the velocipede was not a class divisive issue: it took all of the undifferentiated population by storm. It became first a means of moving the masses, at a time of increasing industrialization and the growth of suburbs and concrete cities. In regionally divided Italy the cycle was more the vehicle of the workers in the varying city cultures of the northern plains, to whom, somewhat later, the Milanese Futurists were to address their manifestos. The victors of cycle-races received ovations regardless of national origin. Their achievements rose above the animosities of political and martial conflicts. Cycling was more effective than any other sport in unifying peoples, and has for the most part remained so even though recent decades have been darkened by doping scandals. The Sporting Themes of Artists The motoring enthusiast Claude Monet was the first to introduce a cycle into his oeuvre—a painting of his son Jean on a mechanical hobby-horse (1872, fig. 2). Toulouse-Lautrec in 1892 sketched Aristide Bruant à bicyclette (1892, fig. 3), and advertised cycle manufacturers such as Simpson (fig. 4). Auguste Renoir, early in 1880, was one of cycling’s first prominent casualties: he broke his right arm in Essoyes, an unfortunate accident that affected him for the rest of his life. Sporting events, fairgrounds or dance halls were favorite subjects from the time of the late Impressionists: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Gustave Caillebotte, Jean- Louis Forain, and many others in Paris at the turn of the century, especially the young modern artistic set following the “bankruptcy of motifs by 1907-8.”6 Fauvists, Cubists and Futurists were ardent sports fans:7 the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon derived inspiration from the sports arenas, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso loved the corrida and boxing (the latter had his photograph taken in a boxing pose), van Dongen was keen on wrestling, and the Villon brothers, Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes on football and rugby. In 1913 Gleizes painted a picture titled Football Players (Joueurs de football, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) and Boccioni the Dynamism of a Soccer Player (Dinamismo di un footballer, Museum of Modern Art, New York). The several versions of Robert Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team were an homage to the game of rugby, and in 1917 he planned a ballet with gaily colored ‘simultaneous’ jerseys for the dancers:8 he spent many hours in the sports stadium where he found confirmation of his artistic theories: geometry of movement and dynamism of color. Gino Severini, Francis Picabia, Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, Sonia Delaunay and many others chose dance as a pictorial motif and frequented the most popular dance halls in Paris, the Bal Bullier in the fig. 3 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Aristide Bruant on His Bicycle (Aristide Bruant à bicyclette), 1892, cardboard. Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, France fig. 2 Claude Monet, Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse (Jean Monet sur son cheval de bois), 1872, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Sara Lee Corporation, 2000 (2000.195) 12 Montparnasse quarter9 or, the favorite of Severini, painter of dance par excellence, the Bal Tabarin not far from the Pigalle.10 Delaunay, Roger de la Fresnaye and the Futurists were addicted to flying, car- and cycle-racing;11 like André Derain, who drove a Bugatti, and car crazy Metzinger who acquired a white Renault Nerva 20 CV that had won the Moroccan Rally.12 As Severini reported, “Metzinger flaunted an elegance, and the manners typical of the Parc des Princes . . . racetrack set (and actually did participate in a bicycle race there).”13 Metzinger remembered in the early 1950s how he had won a bet in 1912 against Gleizes and Jacques Villon (with Fernand Léger as enthusiastic onlooker) to ride a bicycle nonstop over 100 km in the Parisian Vel d’Hiv arena (the Vélodrome d’Hiver). In 1913 Boccioni painted Dynamism of a Cyclist (cat. no. 1) and in the same year Marinetti included among “significant phenomena” indicative of the modified sensibility of modern man: “The passion, art, and idealism of Sport. Idea and love of the ‘record’.”14 The sports fanatic Maurice de Vlaminck became an artist only after his career as a racing cyclist was terminated by an attack of typhoid in 1896. Aristide Maillol titled a bronze ephebe Racing Cyclist (Le Cycliste, 1907-8, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), though without representing the vehicle. Edouard Vuillard advertized an Apéritif Bécane in the setting of a racing arena (fig. 5). Lyonel Feininger, cyclist par excellence, participated in and watched the sports of cycling and sailing, reflected in the Futuristic simultaneity of his painting The Bicycle Race in 1912 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).15 In 1913 Duchamp inverted a bicycle fork and a wheel- rim on a stool, achieving an oeuvre anartistique that he later numbered amongst his ‘ready-mades’ (fig. 37). Picasso’s Head of a Bull, 1942 (fig. 5), sprang from his lifelong love of the corrida, but also treated the cult of the cycle with irony. His friend Braque was an enthusiastic cyclist and in June 1914, for example, made a cycle tour from Paris, by way of Burgundy and Lyon, to Sorgues (near Avignon). The Italian Futurists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Antonio Sant’Elia, Ugo Piatti and Mario Sironi enlisted voluntarily for military service in a bicycle battalion in 1914-15.16 The Russian Futurist Natalia Goncharova celebrated the vehicle in a painting of 1913 (fig. 21). Writers joined the general canon: Alfred Jarry in his novel The Supermale (1902) has the cyclist Marcueil winning a 10,000 mile race against an express train and a five-seater bicycle.17 Jarry himself was a keen cyclist and suggested to artists that sporting events, not biblical events, be their inspiration.18 Not since the era of early Classical Greece, when artists studied the body movement of athletes and developed the classical canon of figure representation in the Olympic statues of the victors, when muscles and mind, athlete and artist, art and society were still closely connected, had the interest of the artistic community in sport and sportsmen been so great. Although H. G. Wells, in 1908, projected into this enthusiastic world, in his book of political philosophy New Worlds for Old, that someday: “the unhygienic horse and the plebeian cycle would be banned from the streets,” nevertheless the travelling machine of the pessimistic social utopian in Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) resembled nothing more than a bloated velocipede.19 fig. 4 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Poster for “La Chaîne Simpson,” late 1896 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris fig. 5 Edouard Vuillard, Poster for the “Bécane liqueur apéritive tonique,” ca. 1894, color lithograph. Lords Gallery, London 13 Metzinger and his fellow artists of what was to be known as the Section d’Or group met in 1911–13 at the Duchamp brothers’ studios in Puteaux (a suburb west of Paris; Metzinger moved nearby in 1912, fig. 32). The start of the annual Paris-Roubaix race took place in Chatou, less than six kilometers away (which was in turn the birthplace of the sports-fanatic Derain, who shared a studio with Vlaminck, hence the School of Chatou, the cradle of Fauvism). It is safe to assume that Metzinger and his friends also made pilgrimages to that great event.20 Only minutes away from Puteaux was the largest and most popular park for sports and outings in Paris, the Bois de Boulogne. Tout Paris made its way there, to bet on horse-racing in the Hippodrome of Longchamp (an open-air racecourse with grandstands), to watch the running in the Stade Physiologique, to follow the exciting long- distance and time-trial races in the Buffalo cycling stadium at Neuilly-sur-Seine close to Puteaux (fig. 8)21 and in the Vel d’Hiv near the Eiffel Tower, or meet up with cycling fans in the Chalet du Cycle.22 There was the Route des Érables (starting at the Porte Maillot), reserved exclusively for cyclists, evidently so popular that on weekends there was traffic congestion. All Tours de France ended in the stadium-cum vélodrome of the Parc des Princes (fig. 10), separated from Puteaux only by the Bois de Boulogne where, since the turn of the century, rugby and football matches and motor-racing were held. It is clear that artists like Metzinger who were sports enthusiasts were inspired by this ‘Sports Mecca’. The cycling euphoria of that period can be explained by the average citizen’s almost complete lack of opportunity until then for escaping from the grimy city in his or her—as it was then, very limited—free time. As the bicycle gained in popularity, the small man gained mobility and freedom to access, quickly, simply and cheaply, the surrounding suburbs, parks and palace gardens. It was not just the fresh air, the family picnic in the open, and the joys of sport that were conducive to the new surge in cycling, but also the enthusiasm for speed and an embrace of the latest technological developments. The cycle at the beginning of the century was to the French what the Deux Chevaux became later, or what the Volkswagen was to the Germans from 1950, or the Fiat Topolino or Cinquecento to the Italians. Nevertheless Metzinger’s interest in cycling as a sport cannot have been the sole reason for his studies of the Racing Cyclists.23 As his later post-Cubist development proves, his artistic world view verged more on the static, closer to Juan Gris or Léger than to that of the Futurists who had swept over Paris like a storm in 1912. The cardinal principles of representing movement and dynamism preoccupied him—if only for a short time. For this purpose he kept careful track of whatever news Gris had to report concerning the bande à Picasso that frequented Picasso’s studio, the Bateau-Lavoir.24 He visited the Salons25 and attended Maurice Princet’s discourses to the Duchamp brothers’ circle in Puteaux. fig. 6 An Edoardo Bianchi bicycle by Zanazzi used in World War I by the 8th Reggimento Bersaglieri Ciclisti, ca. 1915. Museo del Ciclismo Madonna del Ghisallo, Como fig. 7 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Bull (Tête de taureau), early 1942, bicycle saddle and handlebar in iron. Musée Picasso, Paris 14 fig. 8 Stade Buffalo, the final race of the Roue d’Or, 23 April 1911. Bibliothèque national de France, Paris fig. 9 Paris-Roubaix, 24 March 1910. Bibliothèque national de France, Paris 15 fig. 10 Parc des Princes, 1912. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris fig. 11 Octave Lapize at the finish of the Tour de France, Parc des Princes, 31 July 1910. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris fig. 12 Gustave Garrigou at the finish of the Tour de France, 30 July 1911. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris fig. 13 Charles Crupelandt, 1914. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris 16 Jean Metzinger in the intellectual peloton Jean Metzinger was one of the first to recognize the revolutionary significance of Picasso’s art, and in essays such as his “Note sur la peinture” of 1910 highlighted what was, after a short Fauvist phase, subsequently mirrored in his own painting.26 He helped to bring together a like-minded group of artists with Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Léger and Delaunay, as well as André Lhote, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Villon, Roger de la Fresnaye, František Kupka, Gris, Louis Marcoussis, and Francis Picabia—the so called Puteaux group (figs. 14, 15, 16).27 Apollinaire, in his article “Prenez garde à la peinture!” (Look out, wet paint!), in L’Intransigeant reviewing the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, characterized Metzinger as follows: “Metzinger will go far. Perhaps he undertakes a little too much in cold-blood, works that many a master might not be able to bring off. His artistic concept is never pedantic. This young man is someone to watch.”28 And in a similar vein at the opening of the 1910 Salon d’Automne, not without a cautionary note: “Hung in the dunce’s corner is the impression given by Jean Metzinger’s pictures. He has set himself the task of experimenting with all the varied methods of contemporary painting. By doing so he is perhaps losing valuable time and wasting his energy. . . . It is sad for an intelligent painter to dissipate his talent in sterile experimentation.”29 Metzinger was interested in the most up to date intellectual topics, such as the fourth dimension, simultaneity, and Futurism, and set out to incorporate them in his works, though he never entirely renounced the classical perspective that other artists believed they had long outgrown. In the following year Apollinaire praised the shortcomings he had previously criticized (21 April 1911): “Metzinger’s works are the only ones here that one could reckon as Cubist in the true sense. Their power of attraction shows that Cubism is not incompatible with reality. This art we can call kinematic shows us every facet of the pictorial truth, without ignoring the advantages of perspective. . . . This art plays with pictorial problems and masters them too.”30 Although Metzinger was against the hierarchy of master and pupil, or ‘schools’ of painting, he taught from 1912 at the Académie de la Palette in the Montparnasse quarter, where Le Fauconnier was the head, and later at the Académie Arenius. He had a lasting influence on his pupils Nadezhda Udaltsova and Liubov Popova, both of whom later represented Cubism in Russia and spread new techniques such as experimenting with sand-texturing and papiers collés. In addition to Gleizes, Metzinger counted the writers Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars amongst his friends. In 1912, probably his most successful and eventful year artistically, he joined, and briefly led the above-mentioned Puteaux group of artists. They exhibited under the name of Section d’Or, the Golden Section, which Metzinger named in the light of his study of mathematical proportions. His pictures, based on a preference for metropolitan life, are composed with balanced relationships between color and form and use spiral-like displacements within the faceted fracturing of the color planes. The series of Racing Cyclists of 1912 illustrate how carefully and painstakingly the artist refined theme and composition and, as Gleizes put it, “seeks to master chance.”31 On 3 April 1912 Apollinaire wrote of the latest Salon des Indépendants: “Metzinger aspires to attain the level of great painting. . . . The time for speaking of Cubism is perhaps already past. The time for experiment is at any rate over. Our young painters want to create definitive works now.”32 That this period was that of the greatest experimentation, and that Gleizes and Metzinger with their book Du Cubisme (1912), had made Cubism “socially acceptable,” is proven by Gleizes’ words on the two-fold split in the Cubism of the prewar years: “on the one hand the oeuvre of a Braque, a Picasso, Gris too, who live and work in a class on their own, are already roped in by the art dealers and, having worked their way through the analysis of volumes and of the object, are in reach of the intrinsic matter of painting: the creative nature [nature plastique] of the flat plane. On the other hand, in the breach, right in the thick of the rising din of battle, Jean Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Léger and myself; we are occupied mentally with investigations into fig. 14 Albert Gleizes, Woman with Animals (Madame Raymond Duchamp- Villon) (La Dame aux bêtes [Madame Raymond Duchamp-Villon]), completed by February 1914, oil on canvas. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 17 weight, density, volumes, analysis of the object; we study the dynamic of lines; we at last understand the true nature of the plane. Finally Delaunay; he is too exuberant, too little master of himself, to spend time in analytic investigation but he has a completely clear and intuitive idea of the aim of Cubism.”33 And again: “So Cubism between 1911 and 1914 develops from the concept of form (volume) into the concept of motion (kinematics), which finally destroys the Renaissance idea of linear perspective.”34 Gleizes and Metzinger saw themselves as the true theoreticians of Cubism within the Puteaux group. Metzinger was even dubbed “Prince du Cubisme.”35 Gleizes praised his clear reasoning, great knowledge and thoroughness: “he discovered with the clarity of a physicist the building blocks of structural design.”36 At the same time he vilified the ‘genius’ that gave birth to an art of irresponsibility and disclosed nothing more than incurable laziness. By ‘genius’ Gleizes was probably aiming at Picasso, who did not concern himself with theories of Cubism or other directions taken by art, but pedaled at a rate that no-one could else could match. Picasso and Braque tenaciously held the view that their works spoke for themselves and needed no explanation, neither in interviews nor in their own writings. Such behavior gave rise in many circles to the widely held and, in the final analysis, not unwarranted view that Gleizes and Metzinger, who since 1910 had exhibited their paintings in the Salons and published theoretical treatises, were the forerunners of the movement. In 1911 the group around Gleizes and Metzinger exhibited jointly in the Salon des Indépendants for the first time. A protest they had made, supported by the writers Apollinaire, André Salmon and Roger Allard, at the General Assembly of the Salon Board of Directors concerning the prevailing, arbitrary system of hanging, led to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger and Le Fauconnier being elected members of the Hanging Committee. Using their position they and their supporters appeared in the now legendary Salle 41, whipping up a storm of criticism and protest in the press on the day after the opening. Finally the Section d’Or exhibition, in October 1912 at the Galerie La Boétie, was the first independent and united presentation of the new movement, with 31 artists represented by 185 works (amongst them many now forgotten and some not even Cubist in style).37 Braque and Picasso were conspicuous by their absence. Years later Duchamp spoke of his first contacts with the artists of the Cubist movement (1911): “When Cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about.”38 But it was Braque’s works that initially won Duchamp round.39 Gleizes declared: “Braque and Picasso exhibited only in the Kahnweiler Gallery where we took no notice of them.”40 In 1909 Braque had fallen in with Picasso’s decision not to exhibit in the Salons, after the jury of the Salon d’Automne had rejected several of his first Cubist works a year previously. As a consequence paintings by the two friends were to be seen only in the small Kahnweiler Gallery, where, furthermore, only fig. 16 František Kupka, Study for Amorpha, Warm Chromatism (Amorpha, Chromatique chaude) and for Fugue in Two Colors (Fugue à deux couleurs), ca. 1910–11, pastel on paper. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice fig. 15 Juan Gris, Bottle of Rum and Newspaper (Bouteille de rhum et journal), June 1914, paper collage, gouache, conté crayon, and pencil on newspaper, mounted on canvas. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 18 the more important works were visible to the public, while others were reserved for clients. The overt discrepancy between the bande à Picasso (Braque, Gris and several writers, Jacob for instance) and the stylistically less united Puteaux group came about through the latter’s targeted publicity, as opposed to the former’s reserve, bordering on denial. It was further exasperated by the contrast in their respective circumstances. Whereas the almost bourgeois Sunday circle met in the then tranquil countrified suburb of Puteaux in the studio garden of the Duchamp-Villon brothers to listen to lectures by mathematicians and writers, and to debate the latest scientific trends or scientific source for the new style, Picasso and his bohemian followers worked and lived in the poor wooden shacks of the Bateau-Lavoir.41 In 1911 Ardengo Soffici, poet, painter, critic and co- publisher of the leading Futurist review Lacerba, differentiated disparagingly between the work of Picasso and Braque and that of the ‘Salon Cubists’ (though he seems to have changed his mind later regarding Léger and Delaunay42): “[the Salon Cubists have taken up] deforming, geometrizing, and ‘cubifying’ randomly, without aim or purpose, perhaps in the hope of hiding their innate, ineradicable, and fatal banality and academicism behind triangles and other shapes.”43 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Parisian gallerist and later historian of Cubism, asserted the transcendence of the Braque-Picasso tandem which the art world would later corroborate. In 1916 he wrote “[Braque and Picasso] were the first and greatest Cubists . . . the contributions of the two were closely intertwined . . . [their paintings] often almost indistinguishable.”44 Finally, Wilhelm Uhde, another Parisian dealer and supporter of the avant-garde, who had introduced Kahnweiler to Picasso and who was one of the first to admire Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern art, New York) corroborated the perception of Picasso and Braque’s dominance of Cubism.45 Henceforward the contributions of the other Cubists were systematically downplayed and attention diverted away from them. As William Rubin has observed: “. . . art history has generally opted for the view represented by Kahnweiler, Soffici and Uhde.”46 Meanwhile Apollinaire had declared in his book Les Peintres cubistes (1913): “Metzinger, going off to meet Picasso and Braque, founded the city of the cubists.”47 A vote in favor not to be ignored if one considers how early Metzinger took on Braque’s most advanced techniques, such as sand- texturing, stencils and wallpaper designs (as in The Yellow Feather of 1912 in the Johnson Collection) or papiers collés in his Racing Cyclists and combed textures in his painting The Harbor of 1912 (Le Port, Dallas Museum of Art). While Gleizes had little access to Braque’s or Picasso’s atelier, Metzinger might possibly through Gris have had a closer relationship to Braque. Braque, Gris and Metzinger were not dissimilar in character. They lacked the playfulness, the mercurial creativity of the acrobatic Picasso, yet as techniciens, verifiers of new ideas, methodizers and theoreticians of Cubism, they were each taken seriously by colleagues and public alike. Metzinger’s contact with the Futurists is more conjecture and hypothesis than documented fact, the more so as they painted in a Cubist style and drew near to the movement only in the winter of 1911–12. Marinetti’s first manifestos must certainly have struck a chord with Metzinger: not so much the founding manifesto, published in Le Figaro, 20 February 1909, a straightforward declamation of theoretical initiatives and anarchical offense,48 as the technical manifesto of Futurist painting of 11 April 1910 that seems to be the very progenitor of our Racing Cyclists, with language such as “Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to those of X-rays? . . . How often have we not seen upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking the horse which passes at the end fig. 17 Jean Metzinger, Guillaume Apollinaire (Portrait de Guillaume Apollinaire), 1910, oil on canvas. Private collection fig. 18 Jean Metzinger, Tea Time (Woman with a Teaspoon),1911, oil on cardboard. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 19 of the street. Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it . . . We shall henceforward put the spectator in the center of the picture . . . WE DECLARE . . . That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.”49 The Futurist painting exhibition in 1912 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and that of Boccioni’s sculpture at the Galerie La Boétie in 1913 would have made an even greater impression.50 A now lost painting of 1913 by the Frenchman Félix Del Marle (or Delmarle), titled The Port, was like a Trojan Horse of Futurism when compared with Metzinger’s Landscape and The Harbor of 1912 or The Smoker of 1913–14 (La Fumeuse, private collection, Switzerland).51 The Cubo-Futurist Del Marle, declaring solidarity with the Futurists in 1913 with an inflammatory manifesto in Paris-Journal against the “ageing hag Montmartre”, was not only a close associate of Apollinaire, Jacob and Salmon but shared his studio with Severini, a proven friend of Metzinger. In his Comments on Simultaneity in Painting (1914) Del Marle acknowledged Metzinger and Gleizes as essential initiators of a Cubism that served as a platform for interaction with Futurist aesthetics. In late 1911 and early 1912 Delaunay and Metzinger would have been enthralled by the whirling, flickering expanse of Severini’s La Danse du “pan-pan” au Monico (1909–11). It is possible that the vivid crowd in the grandstands of Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track (cat. no. 11) or the bright posters in the Helft variant (cat. no. 9) reflect the sensational advent of that hedonistic explosion of color. Their relation to Futurist gusto seems clear and a denomination as ‘Cubo-Futurist’ justifiable.52 Once determined that Metzinger’s experimental series of the Racing Cyclist can be dated to the first half of 1912,53 it is worth locating the motif within the rest of Metzinger’s oeuvre, which arguably reached its zenith in that year. A series of masterpieces between 1911 and 1913, notable for their stylistic consistency, certainty and balance, form a homogeneous framework of systematic advancement: Tea Time of 1911 (fig. 18, sometimes described as the ‘Mona Lisa of Cubism’, since it too was stolen from the Louvre, on 21 August 1911); Portrait of Albert Gleizes of 1911 or 1912 (fig. 52, with a claim to be the first example of the addition of sand to Metzinger’s pigments54); The Dancer in the Café (Danseuse au café, 1912, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), The Yellow Feather (La Plume jaune, 1912, private collection, Chicago);55 The Harbor (1912, Dallas Museum of Art); Landscape (1912, Harvard University Art Museums Collections, Cambridge, Mass.); The Bathers (1913, Philadelphia Museum of Art); and finally The Blue Bird (L’Oiseau bleu, 1913, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris). All theoretical achievements (diaphanous transparency, purity of color, figure distortion), pictorial ideas (true perspective as planes, vector of movement) and technical finesse (texturing with sand, combing, collage) are used as an encompassing vocabulary and iterated in each work. However, our troop of cyclists stand out, within this corpus of ‘Salon’ Cubism, as an attempt to break away, with almost ideological desperation. Despite the Cubist mode of analysis, and accustomed in the past to working passively fig. 19 Marcel Duchamp, To have the apprentice in the Sun (Avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil), 1914, pen and ink, and graphite, on paper ruled for musical score, from the Bôite of 1914. Musée national d’art moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris fig. 20 Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918, oil on canvas, with bottle brush, three safety pins, and one bolt. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Gift from the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier, 1953.6.4 20 and incrementally, the contagion of the artist’s personality by the virus of euphoric Futuristic movement had the effect of turning this group of works into a metaphor for the artist as cyclist, making a strong start but eventually losing his way: was it possible to ‘overtake’ in this way the protean Braque and Picasso? Or Marinetti’s truculent team? Or the loners, Duchamp or Delaunay, in this grueling year of 1912? Each of Metzinger’s cyclists is a sprint stage in itself, challenging with his ideas those rivals who threatened his bid for leadership: now color, now speed, now the dimension of time, now the thrust of originality. Only in 1912, at the moment of his greatest mastery of all linguistic possibilities of expression, was the time ripe for Metzinger to hazard the Paris-Roubaix ‘Queen of the Classics’ against his fellows in the avant-garde. He was never again to bring such courage, spirit, and tenacity to this challenging, probably invincible subject, all the more so as the outbreak of the European war was decisively to interrupt his ‘racing’ theme. On to new dimensions The study of Euclid’s 5th postulate (the parallel postulate, also known as the 12th axiom) led after a series of (failed) attempts at proof reaching back to the ancient world, to the establishment of the so-called ‘non-Euclidean’ branches of geometry,56 developed independently of each other by various mathematicians in the nineteenth century (Carl Friedrich Gauss, Nikolai Lobachevsky, János Bolyai, and Bernhard Riemann). These filtered through, in simplistic, indeed in part erroneous articles, to popular scientific magazines. If Apollinaire in 1911 could refer to the fourth dimension, and Metzinger and Gleizes in 1912 (in Du Cubisme) to non- Euclidean geometry and the teachings of Riemann, then such concepts and theories were clearly in circulation, in the public domain and in the popular press, from the early years of the century. In particular they appeared in theosophical and philosophical circles around 1911 and 191257 (authors such as Revel,58 Hinton, Charles Leadbeater, A. de Noircarme, Pierre Valin, and in particular Poincaré59), and finally in science fiction of the genre of Alfred Jarry, creator of the scandalous Ubu Roi (1896). H. G. Wells, whose psychic novella Pyecraft was illustrated by Kupka in 1906, published regularly in, for instance, the Mercure de France. His devotee Gaston de Pawlowski printed this sort of subject matter on the front pages of his magazine Comoedia. Jarry commented in February 1899 in the Mercure about the Wellsian, clearly bicycle-like time machine and also offered pseudo-scientific advice on how it could be put together with borrowings from Riemann and Lobachevsky, in which ‘simultaneity’ also entered the discourse. Jarry was a keen cyclist, and what became the proverbial ‘gyroscopic, pataphysical’ system of Dr. Faustroll for conquering time (1898) was mounted, significantly, on a bicycle frame.60 It is possible that Duchamp later mocked these pseudo-physical gadgets in his mounted Bicycle Wheel (1913, fig. 37) or in the drawing of a cyclist storming along a steep line in To have the apprentice in the Sun (1914, fig. 19)61 or in ‘Tu m’…’ (1918, fig. 20) and lastly in the Large Glass (1915–23, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Pawlowski, founder of the Union vélocyclopédique, was a lawyer and journalist for various reviews and newspapers and published Le Vélo, L’Opinion and Automobilia, before editing the theater magazine Comoedia in which (on 26 March 1911) he reviewed Jarry’s Faustroll fully and generously. His novel Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (1912) pays homage to Wells and contains many a reflection on, indeed ‘experience’ of, the conquering of time and space. The non-Euclideans and Riemann in particular are discussed, and on 20 March 1912 the traditional idea of time is replaced by the concept of the simultaneity of all existence.62 Even if Pawlowski was not particularly receptive to Cubism, appreciating more its theories than its paintings (he reviewed Du Cubisme by Metzinger and Gleizes, 5 January 1913), he hailed its originality. Meetings and a lively exchange of ideas must have taken place: his sub-editor André Warnod reviewed the 1912 Salon des Indépendants on the front page of Comoedia on 20 March, with an illustration of Metzinger’s Cubist painting Le Port printed adjacent to Pawlowski’s “Abstractions d’espace,” serialized from Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension. By this time the review was surely being read by Gleizes and Metzinger, as well as by Kupka (influenced by the celebrated theosophist Helena Blavatsky), and, probably thanks to him, also by Duchamp, as is evident in their texts of the time. In addition to Pawlowski, between 1909 and Spring 1912 Charles Camoin, Max Weber, Roger de La Fresnaye and Apollinaire (repeatedly) drew attention in lectures (e.g. November 191163), letters and publications to the fourth dimension. In a typical simplification by Apollinaire, who had a habit of filtering the concept of time out of his approach and thus initially misunderstanding the Futurists, this is interpreted as follows: “Without wishing to indulge in mathematical speculation, . . . I would say from the standpoint of the fine arts that the fourth dimension has emerged from the three well-known dimensions: it represents the infinity of space that perpetuates itself at a particular point in time in all directions. It represents space itself, its dimension of the infinite.”64 The expression ‘fourth dimension’ had probably reached his ears during conversations in the Puteaux circle, which took an interest in the metaphysical, pseudo-scientific explanations of the amateur mathematician Princet.65 (André Salmon had inserted “Princet’s strange aesthetics” in a column of Paris- Journal, Courrier des Ateliers, 10 May 1910.) In Metzinger’s “Note sur la peinture” Princet’s significance as mathématicien du Cubisme for the early period of the movement is alluded to, although the insurance actuary was probably no more than a gifted dilettante.66 In 1912 he is said to have undertaken studies in geometry with Gris and Metzinger to implement non-Euclidean and four-dimensional ideas. Vauxcelles was even of the opinion in 1918 that Princet had been the true father of Cubism.67 According to Gleizes, who was inspired by Henri Bergson, the new four-dimensional pictorial space was to unite the contradictions between space and time, or rather lead to points of interaction; while Carl Einstein, German writer, art historian, and critic, wanted to see the destruction of the hierarchy of time and space. Ernst Mach explained that the seen object differed from the object as if reformulated by a co-ordinate of the fourth dimension, i.e. the latter transforms the plastic object into a conceptual representation.68 Maurice Raynal went a step further by demanding of modern art: “ . . . if the painter succeeds in rendering the object in all its dimensions, he achieves a work of art which is of a higher order 21 than one painted according to the visible dimensions only.”69 Metzinger was one of the first of those who from 1910 took up the time-space motif in publications, in particular in “Cubisme et Tradition” in Paris-Journal, 16 August 1911: “The men known as cubists . . . have allowed themselves to move around the object, in order to give, under the control of intelligence, a concrete representation of it, made up of several successive aspects. Formerly a picture took possession of space, now it reigns also over time [durée].”70 The fourth dimension is thereby not really time in the sense of Wells’s The Time Machine but rather the duration of time that enables the expression of consecutive circumstances simultaneously, i.e. the ability to realize a multiplicity of views permitting the ‘idea’ of an object to be expressed in all its dimensions—dimensions that reveal themselves in time. These concepts are owed in the main to the writings of Bergson. According to Bergson’s philosophy, space is in itself homogeneous, and movement only the succession of the spatial position of the solids within it. The durée does not indicate time, only changes within space. Time by comparison is not homogeneous; it is a single indivisible flow or evolution, completely different from the so-called time of the natural sciences. Space exists; time instead is in constant flux. Assigned to space is the intellect, which deals with solidity, spatiality and matter. The intellect is unable to grasp the real nature of time, pure duration, since it applies to its definitions, its perception of seen reality (segmentation, division of time into hours, minutes, seconds etc.). Pure duration of time can only be grasped intuitively. It is at any rate difficult for contemporary man to perceive the flow, the course, the organic nature of time. All reality is evolving: there is only growth, action, initiative, becoming.71 In his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) Bergson differentiated between two concepts of time: on the one hand there is the measurable, objective time of physics (temps) and on the other hand there is the time of human experience, the perceptual subjective course of time (durée). While Metzinger conceded to Picasso the achievement of a “free, mobile perspective” he also acknowledged that it was thanks to Braque that the picture was no longer a dead portion of space but shone forth in its wholeness in the duration of time.72 Plainly Metzinger then considered that Braque had to all intents and purposes caught up with and surpassed Picasso in his expressive endeavors. Gleizes described Metzinger’s obsession for representing the image totale in September 1911 in La Revue Indépendante, “Art et ses représentants: Jean Metzinger:” “to space he will now ally time (or durée).” The new sensory physiology of the nineteenth century was also relevant for the Cubists. As early as 1889 the first international congress of these psychologists, whose writings had been widely disseminated in France and who were to be familiar to the Cubists, took place in Paris. Their discussions centered mainly on concepts of form and space, as well as questions raised by the processing of sense impressions in the human brain. The Cubists distinguished between sense impressions and the representations conjured up in the consciousness. While perception of color is recorded only on the retina, awareness of form requires the logical engagement and operation of the brain. Cubists denounced Impressionism accordingly as an art that was only concerned with visualizing color. Only Cézanne existed, in their view, as one who “plumbed reality with a stubborn eye,” even if “he did not himself reach those regions where profound realism merges insensibly in to luminous spirituality.”73 Form and space would be created first in perception through experience, in which all the faculties (sense of touch, sense of movement) played a part. From Cézanne’s conversations with Joachim Gasquet, it emerged how much this had been in the former’s mind: “The eye must focus, embrace, the brain will formulate.”74 But the Cubists were the first to give this radical expression. Picasso and Braque therefore made it their principle to paint only from the concept or recollection. One of the most important conclusions in Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du Cubisme refers to ideas in Poincaré’s La Science et l’hypothèse of 1902 (as well as in publications by Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, Théodule-Armand Ribot, and others), who in his empirical theories constructed the apprehension of space from different elements of sensory perceptions and their interpretation in a process of association.75 The sense of sight alone was considered insufficient, since it reflected only a flat perspectival image on the retina. The sense of touch must be added, as also the sense of movement, in order to afford a complete concept. The fact that from 1911 (or 1912 as the case may be), sand was strewn or worked into pastose paint by many Cubists may be traced back to these theories. The sand caused rough, cracked surfaces, rising relief-like above the surrounding forms and so creating a tactile space, or a material dimension of depth.76 As early as 1910 Metzinger projected these tactile, pragmatic values, observed in Braque and Picasso, into the visual field of the fourth dimension, as confirmed by Salmon in 1912. According to Cubist theory, perspective must be sacrificed in favor of motor and tactile sensations, of a mobility in space, as Metzinger illustrated in fig. 21 Natalia Goncharova, The Cyclist, 1913, oil on canvas. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg 22 his works of 1912: one could represent objects, in the interests of a higher reality, simultaneously in different aspects on the same canvas (according to Poincaré the fourth dimension was imaginable). As Esprit Jouffret reported in his Traité elémentaire de géometrie à quatre dimensions (1903), Poincaré had already maintained in 1891 that someone who dedicated his life to this task would one day be capable of representing the fourth dimension pictorially.77 Cubists like Metzinger, but also an outsider such as Duchamp, as demonstrated by his five-figured Portrait (Dulcinea) (1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art), believed that such a realization was possible. In contrast to Apollinaire, who acclaimed the fourth dimension of the new art as the ideal norm of perfection and higher reality,78 they maintained a transcendental vision of the truth of the material world which, albeit Platonic, was rooted in nature. Raynal too (1913) judged that the Cubists “Instead of painting the objects as they saw them . . . [they] painted them as they thought them” as did “the Primitives” (pre-Renaissance artists).79 Raynal continued: “and it is precisely this law that the cubists have readopted, amplified and codified under the name of ‘The Fourth Dimension’.”80 Just when the experiments of the Salon Cubists reached a pitch in 1912, Braque and Picasso made an about- turn and ushered in so-called Synthetic Cubism, using the new media of collage, text, and texture. They were more interested in painterly and inventive problems than the theories of the geometricians. Picasso’s view of the combination of (pseudo) science and art was critical, even dismissive. Apart from crime stories and novels, he seems hardly to have read books, certainly not challenging, specialist literature such as Bergson, Lévy-Buhl, Mauss, Riemann or Poincaré. From conversations with his friends scientific catchwords such as ‘fourth dimension’, ‘simultaneity’ or ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ became familiar.81 Nevertheless he always stressed that Cubism had nothing to do with any ideas coming from the natural sciences, history, anthropology, nor the humanities and social sciences.82 Marcel Duchamp, who belonged to the Puteaux circle of artists but adopted the new ideas more as an ironic take on his own work, put it into perspective later: “[Princet] knew the fourth dimension by heart. So people listened. Metzinger, who was intelligent, used him a lot. The fourth dimension became a thing you talked about, without knowing what it meant.”83 And: “I have of course never seriously read the works of Riemann, because I was incapable of it.”84 Metzinger himself explained in a letter to Gleizes dated 4 July 1916 that the fourth dimension was a spiritual one, harmony in the sense of numbers, “Everything is number,” and that his new perspective was not the “romantic” one of a Picasso nor the “material” one of a Gris, but a metaphysical, or rather mathematical relationship between thought and the outside world: “The geometry of the fourth dimension holds no more secrets for me. Before I had only ideas, now I have certainty.”85 The result of the then so intensive discussions on dimensions, space and time in art is to be seen in Metzinger’s Racing Cyclists of 1912.86 He set out to realize in paint the very theories that were so fascinating for, if not fundamental to, fig. 22 Eadweard J. Muybridge, Batsman, from Animal Locomotion, 1887, calotype. Victoria & Albert Museum, London 23 many of the Cubists. Evidence is, if nothing else, the ubiquitous “4”, as it was important neither for the rider’s identity nor for the details of the contest. If we accept it instead as the key to unlock the fourth dimension, oscillating between esotericism and science, then in this series of pictures evident compositional experiments such as transparency, differences in texture (sand/smoothness), perspectival variance of the ‘abstract’ plane and color discrepancy between pure color and non-color all make more sense. His experiments in introducing, after the abstraction of space, now also Pawlowski’s abstraction of time, presumably peaked in the lost painting (but possibly rediscovered in this exhibition, cat. no. 12) Still Life (Fourth Dimension), the sub-title expressing in words what the number “4” signals in the Racing Cyclist. It is likely to have been painted in 1912, as it was on view in the exhibition Gleizes, Metzinger, Léger at the Berthe Weill Gallery early in 1913.87 We shall return to this enigmatic picture with a new interpretation (see pp. 84–97). Simultaneity A further concept is that of simultaneity, current as early as 1907 thanks to Bergson’s Evolution créatrice. This became a catchword in artistic circles after the appearance of the Futurist preface, “The Exhibitors to the Public,” to the exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in February 1912. Using recycled passages from the 1910 technical manifesto, this was penned jointly by Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla and Severini. It caused an uproar, even amongst their Cubist friends (“i compagni di Francia”) whom they accused of “masked academicism,” of fossilization and immobility, of traditionalism, of Impressionism and so forth: “we . . . seek for a style of motion, a thing which has never been attempted before us” they cried, and demanded “simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one another. . . . the picture must be the synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees.” The “dynamic sensation” of “what the painter Boccioni felicitously terms physical transcendentalism” and “force-lines” (linee forza) “arrive at what we call the painting of states of mind,” even if there is “chaos and clashing of rhythms, totally opposed to one another,” which we nevertheless assemble into a new harmony.”88 Apollinaire, in his article “Simultanisme-Librettisme” (1914), was of the opinion that Braque and Picasso had implemented this concept as early as 1907, but had given it no particular label. Apollinaire was in the habit of excluding the concept of time from his field of vision and for this reason initially misunderstood the Futurists. His nationalism and his disparaging estimation of the Italians in L’Intransigeant and in Le Petit bleu of 7 and 9 February 1912 on the occasion of the controversial Futurist exhibition in Paris are indicative of the climate of animosity in those years: “The most original aspect of the Futurist school of painting is the search for a representation of movement in painting. That is a completely legitimate preoccupation. In so far as this problem can be solved at all by painterly means, the painters of France have already solved it.”89 Marinetti’s manifestos had been in circulation since the summer of 1910. According to Severini, Picasso was dismissive of them.90 Ideas such as the intersection of planes, the abolition of separate categories of space, time or movement were, as we have seen, the subject of fierce discussion in contemporary Paris. Since 1912 Delaunay had adopted theories of the simultaneous contrast of colors, and Bergson had used the concept of simultaneity in his philosophy of dynamism.91 Simultaneity is implicit in Metzinger’s “Note sur la peinture” in 1910.92 In the polemic between Boccioni and Delaunay each laid claim to the primacy of simultaneity for himself. Boccioni described the origin of the concept of simultaneity in Futurist art in successive manifestos of 1910–12; indeed simultaneity was said to be the quintessential element of the Futuristic program. At the Futurist exhibition on February 5, 1912, at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune Marinetti declaimed Boccioni’s lecture of 1911 on Futurist painting in the presence of several French painters, whereupon Gleizes and Metzinger sided with the Futurists when the event deteriorated into fisticuffs. Metzinger would surely have smarted from the injustice of the Futurists, the ‘offspring’ of the new French painting, rebelling against their ‘fathers’. They were vigorous in their condemnation of the French painters: “What we have attempted and accomplished . . . has placed us at the head of the European movement in painting, by a road different from, yet, in a way, parallel with, that followed by the Post- Impressionists, Synthetists and Cubists of France, led by their masters Picasso, Braque, Derain, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Gleizes, Léger, Lhote etc. While we admire the heroism of these painters of great worth, who have displayed a laudable contempt for artistic commercialism and a powerful hatred of fig. 23 Henri Bergson (1859–1941) 24 academism [sic], we feel ourselves and declare ourselves to be absolutely opposed to their art. They obstinately continue to paint objects motionless, frozen, and all the static aspects of nature; they worship the traditionalism of Poussin, of Ingres, of Corot, ageing and petrifying their art with an obstinate attachment to the past, which to our eyes remains totally incomprehensible.”93 The manifesto-style idiom of Du Cubisme in 1912 rings like a riposte to the Italian revolutionaries, even though they are referred to only obliquely.94 If a distinct distance is kept from Impressionism, Du Cubisme nevertheless honors precursors, Cézanne in particular; Platonic perfection of a unique “absolute form” is denied (“an object has as many [absolute forms] as there are planes in the domain of meaning”), it extols “supposedly inexpressible notions of depth, density, and duration” and “a veritable fusion of objects within a restricted space;” the Cubist studies “by means of form and color, the integration of the plastic consciousness;” the authors urge that “the fact of moving around an object to seize from it several successive appearances, which, fused into a single image, reconstitute it in time, will no longer make reasoning people indignant.” They conclude: “let us grant that [Cubism] is a method, but let us not permit the confusion of method with system.” The artist should be free to follow his own path: “the painter will know no other laws than those of Taste,” by which was meant the intuition of quality.95 Metzinger’s adoption of Futurism is notable, even though for such a brief period in his career. In one detail of At the Cycle-Race Track he paraphrases a line in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting” (April 1910): “How often have we not seen upon the cheek of the person . . . the horse which passes at the end of the street.”96 In the same painting he attempted to simulate movement using the cycle’s swiveled handlebars, the flickering cycle wheels and the fast, fleeting blur of the ground. Nevertheless by comparison with the contemporary Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash or Hand of the Violinist by Balla (both 1912), his experiments lack both analytical dynamic thrust and synthetic kinetics, making them appear almost static.97 It would be beyond our scope here to discuss the sources for Russian Cubo-Futurism, whether experiments in photography (the serial photographs and stroboscopic studies by Muybridge, Marey, and even Thomas Eakins in the 1880s), or the fade in/fade out photography of a Futurist such as Anton Giulio Bragaglia, which had already caught the eyes of Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, later Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Lucien Jonas, even before any trace had appeared in their works. The liberating world of mobility in all its manifestations had emerged and sought to manifest itself in all the arts— theater, music, dance and poetry. Color It is worth comparing the different treatment of color in the two Cubist groups—the Puteaux group and the bande à Picasso— using Metzinger as an example. From 1908 Braque and Picasso increasingly reduced their palette until it was confined to a near monochrome of gray, brown, beige, black and white tones. The Puteaux group never restricted color to this extent. Braque justified his simplicity: “color works independently of form . . . color was able to release sensations that disrupt space and that is the reason why I abandoned it. . . . The Impressionists had striven to express atmosphere, the Fauvists light and the Cubists space. . . . Color concerns us only in its aspect of light: light and space are two things that touch, and we treat them together.”98 For Braque perspective and classical solidity of space, which had to be overcome, were replaced primarily by contoured non-color values, since color could not otherwise be separated from form. Delaunay by contrast, who may have had a lasting effect on the artists of the Puteaux group in this respect, strove to represent space by the very means of color, and if possible without form. Trying in the main to realize the ideas of the analytical color chemist Eugene Chevreul99 and to identify Bergson’s simultanéité with the simultaneous contrasts of color, he devised a type of painting based solely on color arrangements (naming it “peinture pure”). For Delaunay color was the universal means of replacing line, perspective, chiaroscuro, form and light, and of gaining movement, simultaneous of space and time, fourth dimension as heightened consciousness and rhythm, where color, the means of representation, and object were one. The high point of Delaunay’s simultaneity was reached in mid-1912, when his book La Lumière appeared and the concept of the simultaneity paintings, the so-called Windows (fig. 33), was fully developed. Metzinger seems to have been spurred on more by Delaunay’s teachings with respect to color than he was influenced by the tandem of Braque and Picasso. In contrast to At the Cycle-Race Track, that risks being drained of color by the weight of theory, the previous, more spontaneous studies in oils of Cyclist (cat. no. 8) and Racing Cyclist (cat. no. 9) are more vivid in their use of pure color. Nevertheless in the switch to low-keyed color, transparent flesh, and experimental ‘topography’ (sand) from strong, almost pure colors (tricolors, jersey, grandstand etc.) one senses the hesitancy of the theoretician to give free rein to sensual stimuli, and the incompatibility of the aesthetic hedonism with theory and problems of content. Braque and Picasso too finally found a way of circumventing perspective without loss of color. Color returned as an abstract value, in its own right and not local, as belonging to an object, and was thereby sacrificed to form and light. To quote Braque: “It was necessary to return color to space. . . . Using color came with papier collé. . . . So it became possible to separate color quite distinctly from form and to see its independence from form. Color functions simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with it.”100 According to Kahnweiler Picasso had been anxious to reintroduce color into analytic Cubism as early as 1910, but rejected it again and again, as bright, unmodulated color was incompatible with atmospheric, light-filled space. Only in the transition year of 1912 (in the spring and summer) when he gradually reduced this type of illusionistic spatial depth, did color again begin to have its full effect (e.g. in Violin, Verres à Vin, Pipe et Ancre, National Gallery, Prague) in Moules St. Jacques (private collection) and in the summer of 1912 in Paysage aux Affiches (National Museum of Art, Osaka) and in both Guitare paintings (private collection, Japan, and Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo). In the beginning (when he saw Souvenir du Havre, 1912, private collection, Basel) Braque was at odds with Picasso’s re-introduction of color. Only with the papier collé Still Life (with the word VIN) (1912–13, Philadelphia Museum of Art) did Braque reach a (for him) 25 acceptable “liberation” of color, in that he turned it into an autonomous symbol that no longer modified space or defined an object but lay on the picture plane uncoupled from the drawing.101 The final lap Back to our racing cyclist. It remains to consider why the fourth dimension, initially so celebrated by Metzinger and Gleizes in Du Cubisme but never directly mentioned, vanished from Apollinaire’s criticism by the autumn of 1912, as does any mention of Princet in 1913.102 His embrace of Delaunay’s dimension idéale and his Orphism may be one reason. Another was perhaps the public’s surfeit of Pawlowski’s popularizing, interminable ‘science fictions’ that subverted the discussions of the Cubists from technical theory to frivolous fantasy. If Metzinger did not wish to abandon true perspective in his Cyclists and did not do so, despite his more rigorous theories (for instance his theory on “metaphysical perspective,” commented on in the above-mentioned letter of 1916103), yet the uniqueness and also the singularity of his attempt to express ‘simultaneous’ movement (the motif of the swiveled handlebars and the kinetic forward thrust of the body and background) set him apart. These pictorial ideas are not, however, adequately incorporated into the work as a whole; they remain anecdotal, artistically undigested. The grandstands, like their collage inscriptions, are rendered in a traditional manner, with academic perspective, topographical details and painterly dabs. They serve merely as vectors, accelerators of the flow from left to right, countering the movement of the athlete. The conventions of Euclidean geometry and perspective were stronger, for Metzinger, than avant-gardist demands for a reassessment of traditional values. Finally a painter as intelligent as Metzinger may have drawn the conclusion that his risky enterprise to render the fourth dimension visible in his Racing Cyclists was inadequate, artistically and theoretically, as a means of expression, as the false start between styles had proved. The fact that he probably realized, secretly, the soundness of Braque and Picasso’s social and stylistic abandonment of the diminishing community of the Cubists presumably played its part in discontinuing his cycling images. As the Orphists and Futurists were seeking to go beyond the concepts of simultaneity and dynamism (each in its own way: the former with analytical discontinuity, the latter in terms of the concept of a dynamic continuity that they were uniquely positioned to realize, and which was boastfully asserted by Boccioni in 1913–14), such a serious and methodical Salon Cubist as Metzinger was surely discouraged from competing. All was lost by the end of 1912. The metaphor of the Racing Cyclist was applicable to himself: in the Venice painting he is not the victor, because he could not convincingly overtake the leading cyclist. The Venice version was no better than its predecessors. From 1912 the novelty of sand, symbolizing the Paris-Roubaix vélodrome gave way once again to the smooth oil medium of the more salon-compatible, more representative and more static easel painting.104 Nevertheless Metzinger had, by the time he was thirty years old, attained an undreamt-of international regard. He exhibited in 1912-13 in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Budapest, Milwaukee and Berlin as well as, shortly before war began, Prague, Brussels and New York. Almost coincidentally with the group exhibition at Berthe Weill’s he sent paintings to St. Petersburg and Riga. His paintings changed hands at twice the price of those of Braque. In August 1914 World War I began and the productive period of rebirth in the arts came to a close. Artists enlisted and were obliged to interrupt their work for years. Friendships broke up, youthful enthusiasms were dampened by the horror of war, and once vehemently held convictions lost their lustre under a changed light. Although Metzinger was called up, he managed to hold exhibitions in New York in 1915 (Carroll Galleries) and in 1916 (Montross Gallery) and two years before the end of the war was able to turn to painting once more. Compared with other artists, the war seems to have made little impression on Metzinger’s art. Excepting the painting Soldier at a Game of Chess (Le Soldat a la partie d’échecs, ca. 1915–16, University of Chicago) there is no trace of it. Although he continued to dedicate himself to Cubism in the early 20s and continued to be represented in the revived exhibitions and Salons, the inventiveness and zest of the art scene of the 1910s was gone. Metzinger’s stylistic point of reference shifted from Gris to Léger. Later he became an adherent of the German Neue Sachlichkeit. During World War II Metzinger moved to the Mediterranean town of Bandol, where in addition to painting he wrote articles for the magazines Profil Littéraire de la France and Les Facettes, as well as poetry, the publication of which (beyond the Ecluses of 1947) was keenly anticipated. In 1950 he was appointed to a three-year lectureship at the Académie Frochot in Paris and honoured three years later with the vice-presidency of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. On 3 November 1956 he died in Paris at the age of 73. Did Fate in an ironic twist determine that, on the soil of Puteaux,105 where ideas of a fourth dimension had flourished and faded in the artistic minds of the Section d’Or, a gigantic 20th century monument should evolve in 1985-89 as La Grande Arche which, following the historic axis from the Louvre, where in dialogue with the art of the past so many Cubist and Futurist concepts were borne, duplicates the Arc de Triomphe and reaches towards the infinity of the future? The perfect cube in stone, steel and glass is the three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional hypercube, a tesseract, which, due to the changing reflections of light, consumes itself continuously, a hyperbolic time-space funnel without mass through which flow streams of people, set in the traffic and architecture of the city and framed by a boulevard of trees diminishing to an ineffable and invisible vanishing point. 26 Notes 1 Albert Gleizes, Bauhaus Buch 13, 1928, reprinted Berlin: Mann, 1980. 2 The year it was founded the Véloce-Club de Paris held the first cycling race ever, on 31 May 1868 in the Parc de Saint Cloud. 3 See Erasmus Weddigen, pp. 84–97, in this catalogue. 4 J. H. Rosny Aîné (Joseph Henri Honoré Boex), Un Autre monde, 1895, published in English as Another World. Author’s translation. 5 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1957. 6 Daniel Robbins, “Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism”, in Joann Moser, ed., Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, exh. cat. (The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, 31 August–13 October, 1985), Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art. 1985, p. 13. Robbins refers to the abandonment of symbolist, literary, allegorical, academic and illusionistic content, and its replacement by varieties of expressionism. 7 See Paul Adam, La Morale des sports, 1907, in E. Magne, “Le Mécanisme dans la littérature contemporaine,” Mercure de France, 10 January 1910, p. 83. 8 The yellow jersey, maillot jaune, was first introduced in 1919 to identify the leading rider. 9 Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne that he had seen Delaunay making “a big speech” in the Bal Bullier, the favorite haunt of students, artists and literati; Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson 1971, p. 24. 10 See Daniela Fonti, ed., Gino Severini. The Dance 1909- 1916, exh. cat. (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 26 May–28 October 2001), Milan: Skira, 2011, passim. See also Picabia’s Dances at the Spring (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Jean Metzinger’s Dancer in the Café (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), both of 1912. 11 Braque enjoyed the nickname of Wilbur, after one of the celebrated Wright brothers (who died of typhoid on 30 May 1912 in Dayton, Ohio). 12 This was before World War II; see Fritz Metzinger and Daniel Robbins, Die Entstehung des Kubismus, eine Neubewrtung, Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1990 p. 40. See also Weddigen, pp. 84–97, in this catalogue. 13 Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 94. 14 From Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without Strings – Words- in-Freedom,” 1913, in Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, London: Tate Publishing, 2009, p. 97. 15 See Florens S. Deuchler, Lyonel Feininger, sein Weg zum Bauhaus-Meister, Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1996, figs. 177-78, 196-99; see also the frontispiece by Feininger to the magazine Das Narrenschiff, 1898, special edition titled Das Narrenrad (fig. 87). Every year Feininger bought a new bicycle model and is said to have travelled 10,000 km a year (see Deuchler, op. cit., pp. 203-4). 16 Apollinaire ridiculed Marinetti’s manifesto on the new “Religion of Speed” in his column “La Vie Anecdotique” in the Mercure de France on 16 October 1916: “There can be no doubt that, during their deployment as voluntary cyclists, God, who has always been represented as a triangle, appeared as a bicycle . . . It had the wheels spinning at such an unbelievable rate that until now, it was only the lot of those angels . . . who were obliged to serve as wheels to the heavenly chariot.” Quoted from Hajo Düchting, Apollinaire zur Kunst, Texte und Kritiken 1905-1918, Köln: DuMont Buchverlag, 1989, p. 272. Author’s translation. 17 The murderous stretch over the notorious cobbles of the Paris-Roubaix race established in 1896 might have been an inspiration to Jarry, who in his fictional five-seater race from Paris to Irkutsk satirized the mania for record-breaking and the adulation of the cyclist as Supermale, as well as the dominance of engineering over the authenticity of life. 18 He rode a Clément de luxe 96 bicycle that he had bought in November 1890 at the steep price of 525 Fr. francs and this remained his trademark until his early death from meningitis in 1907. The journalistic cliché of representing a sporting contest as a biblical ‘Way of the Cross’ led to Alfred Jarry’s blasphemous satire “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” (1903). 19 Egon Friedell wrote a congenial sequel in his Reise mit der Zeitmaschine (published in 1946). 20 It is possible that Metzinger and his friends even watched the final in Roubaix itself: the French public railway halved the ticket to Roubaix for spectators. 21 The Buffalo, a 333 meter open stretch with cement surface at Porte Maillot in Neuilly-sur-Seine, was the closest velodrome for members of the group based at Puteaux, where the Duchamp brothers and Kupka lived. From 1893 it had been the venue for various record-breaking cycle races and, until 1912, for almost all the prizes of the coveted Bol d’Or (from 1913 at the Vél d’Hiv), which Léon Georget (Le Père Bol d’Or) won nine times. In 1895 the playwright and journalist Tristan Bernard was its director. Toulouse Lautrec portrayed him there “vêtu à l’anglaise d’une veste érase-pet et culotté de knickerbockers.” See Daniele Devynck Toulouse-Lautrec, Paris: Ed. du Chène, 1992, p.140. There were, ca. 1900, as many as eight other vélodromes in the outskirts of Paris. 22 This was immortalized by Jean Béraud ca. 1900 in his elegant painting The Chalet du Cycle at the Bois de Boulogne (fig. 1). Perhaps Jacques Villon’s portrayal, between 1901 and 1906, of his daughter Renée’s first attempts at riding a bike was set in the same surroundings; see Cycles d’Art, 1896–1996, exh. cat. (Musée d’Art et Industrie, Roubaix, 13 April–16 June 1996), Paris: Anthèse, 1996, cat. nos. 69, 70. 23 Bernard Vere’s discussion of the cycling paintings of 1912–13 by Metzinger, Feininger and Boccioni is an excellent source for in-depth research on the topic. See B. Vere, “Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912–13,” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 28, nos. 8–9, May–June 2011, pp. 1156–73. 24 A jocular reference to the notorious anarchist ‘Bande à Bonnot’ which from 1911 to 1912, using stolen cars, overran France and Belgium robbing and murdering, and which was wiped out in the spring of 1912. See Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson. Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 135-67. 25 The Salon des Indépendants was founded in 1884, and the Salon d’Automne in 1903. 26 Jean Metzinger, “Note sur la peinture,” Pan, Paris, October-November 1910, pp. 649–52. “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.” Quoted in Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, eds., A Cubism Reader. Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 76. 27 Jean Metzinger recalled in Le Cubisme était né: “Gleizes took me to the Duchamp-Villon brothers [in Puteaux]. In this peaceful garden several years before that dark day in 1914, . . . the forms were developed that fifty years later one dared to represent as new!” See Metzinger, Robbins, op. cit., p. 194. 28 Düchting, op. cit., p. 96. 29 Idem, p. 109. 30 Idem, p. 120; author’s emphasis. On the Salon d’Automne of 1911 and the Cubists of Salle 8, Apollinaire wrote: “This year Metzinger’s power of imagination has presented us with two paintings, the elegant color and line of which bear witness at the very least to a highly sophisticated degree of painting skill. Furthermore Metzinger finishes his paintings, a rare bonus today. He is now in complete possession of his artistic powers. He has shrugged off other influences and his palette is rich and sophisticated.” Idem, p. 128. 31 Albert Gleizes, “Souvenirs, Le Cubisme 1908–1914,” in Cahiers Albert Gleizes 1, Lyon, 1957, pp.16f. 32 Düchting, op. cit., p. 161. 27 33 Gleizes, “Souvenirs…”, op. cit., p. 16. 34 Idem, p. 17. 35 André Salmon on 3 October 1911 in the Paris Journal. See See Metzinger, Robbins, op. cit., note 90, and p. 104. 36 Albert Gleizes, Kubismus, Neue Bauhausbücher, Mainz and Berlin: H.M. Wingler, 1980, p. 19. 37 In René Blum’s preface to the exhibition catalogue (Salon de la Section d’Or, Catalogue, Paris, Galerie la Boétie, 64 rue la Boétie, 10-30 October 1912), the Salon Cubists sought to distance themselves from the bande à Picasso: Blum commented that no sort of foreign influence was to be distinguished in the works, and that “the exhibitors were obligated only to each other.” In other words, this was not Cubism delivered second- hand from the Montmartre Group. See also: Lisa Werner, Der Kubismus stellt aus; der Salon de la Section d’Or, Berlin: D. Reimer, 2011. 38 Cabanne, op. cit., p. 25. 39 Idem. 40 Gleizes, Kubismus, op. cit., p. 11. 41 The Bateau-Lavoir was a cluster of ten apartments and studios at 13 place Émile Goudeau (then rue Ravagnan) in Montmartre. 42 See William Rubin, Picasso and Braque. Pioneering Cubism, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989, pp. 60-61, note 109. 43 Ardengo Soffici, “Picasso e Braque,” La Voce, 3, no. 34 (24 August 1911), pp. 635–37. The quotation from Soffici in Rubin, op.cit., p. 44. 44 Kahnweiler 1920, quoted in idem, p. 45. 45 Uhde, who knew and visited Picasso even before Kahnweiler, was of the opinion on the still vexed question of precedence that: “Cubism owes much to Braque” and Picasso, and Braque had “hand in hand left behind the world of simple appearances and laid siege to another. . . . The two friends worked towards the solution of the same problems, now one, now the other finding the means to achieve seemingly identical goals.” Wilhelm Uhde, Picasso et la tradition française, 1928, quoted in Rubin, op. cit., p. 46. As Rubin pointed out, Uhde saw differences between the work of Braque and Picasso: “For Uhde, Braque’s temperament was “limpid, controlled, bourgeois,” while Picasso’s was “somber, excessive and revolutionary. “ To their “marriage of minds” Braque brought “a great sensibility, Picasso a great plastic gift,” in idem, p. 46. 46 Idem, p. 46. Rubin corroborates this with a bibliography, p. 61, note 117. 47 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes. Méditations esthétiques, 1913, quoted in Antliff and Leighten, op. cit., p. 497. 48 The Founding Manifesto describes with gusto a car crash suffered by Marinetti and his friends when he swerved to avoid two cyclists. Marinetti praises “the beauty of speed. . . . Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” In Apollonio, op. cit., pp. 21–22. 49 Idem, pp. 28–30. The “Manifeste des Peintres Futuristes” was published in Paris in Comoedia, 18 May 1910. 50 When Boccioni and Carrà traveled to Paris in October 1911, in preparation for their exhibition in February 1912, they paid a visit, arranged by Severini, to Metzinger’s atelier, that is said to have impressed Boccioni in particular. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983, p. 112. 51 Of several studies for Le Port, the definitive oil study may be that in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes, reproduced in Pontus Hulten, Futurismo e Futurismi, exh. cat. (Palazzo Grassi, Venice 4 May–12 October 1986), Milan: Bompiani, 1986, p. 279. For notes on Del Marle and the Futurist manifesto against Montmartre, see idem, pp. 463–64. 52 A concept of the critic Marcel Boulanger, 8 October 1912, attributed to a Russian countermovement to the Section d’Or. See Werner, op. cit., note 645. 53 See Weddigen, pp. 84–97 in this catalog. 54 However, see Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, pp. XXX, in this catalog. 55 Acquired by John Quinn, together with both Racing Cyclists and Head of a Young Girl (private collection, New York), from the exhibition in the Carroll Galleries, New York, February 1916. 56 Non-Euclidean geometry differs from Euclidean geometry in that it does not recognize the 5th postulate of parallel lines. Euclid postulated that “if two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the two interior angles on one side is less than the sum of two right angles, then the two lines must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.” This is not, as once thought, dependent on the first four geometric axioms. Modification allows other geometric axiomatic systems that, like Euclid’s, are in themselves demonstrable, yet can no longer be fully comprehended by graphic images but only be thought through in logical abstraction. Most theories on cosmology adopt a non-Euclidean approach to the universe, in which only small triangles approximate Euclidean characteristics. See “Nichteuklidische Geometrie,” Brockhaus – Enzyklopädie, Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1971, vol. 13, p. 407–8. 57 See Henderson, op. cit., pp. 45f. This outstanding study concludes (p.59): “In fact, for an artist like Jean Metzinger, la quatrième dimension may well have become a guiding principle of painting.” See Düchting, op. cit., pp. 168, 335, notes 17, 19, also for further bibliography. 58 L. Revel, “L’Esprit et l’Espace: La Quatrième Dimension,” Le Theosophe, III, 16 March 1911, p. 2. 59 From whose work, La Science et L’Hypothèse, 1902, Metzinger and Gleizes drew the impetus for the tactile and mobile sensations for their book Du Cubisme of 1912 and for the possibility to perceive higher spatial dimensions: see Wolfgang Drechsler, “Marcel Duchamp und die Zeit,” in Michel Baudson, Zeit. Die vierte Dimension in der Kunst, exh. cat. (Wanderausstellung Mannheim Kunsthalle, 11 July–1 September 1985), Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1985, pp. 187f. 60 Alfred Jarry, Gestes et Opinions du dr. Faustroll, Pataphysicien (Roman néo-scientifique, suivi de speculations), the complete work, only appeared in Paris in 1911 following the author’s death (1907), after it had been serialized in various newspapers. 61 The above-mentioned speculations by Jarry are referred to by Jean Clair, Marcel Duchamp. Catalogue raisonné, Paris: Musée national d’art moderne Centre G. Pompidou, 1977, no. 89 and fig. p. 72. 62 Henderson, op. cit., p. 54. 63 The first public airing of the concept of the fourth dimension by Apollinaire, and not as had been thought by others, was published in “La Peinture nouvelle: Notes d’art,” Les Soirées de Paris, April-May 1912; see Henderson, op. cit., p. 44. 64 Apollinaire, “La Peinture..,” op cit., in Düchting, op. cit., p. 168. 65 Early on Maurice Princet (1875–1973) made Esprit Jouffret’s Traité elémentaire de géometrie à quatre dimensions (1903) known to Picasso, whose studies for the Demoiselles d’ Avignon reflect its influence. When in 1907 Princet’s wife left him for Derain, Princet dropped the artists of the Bateau-Lavoir and kept closer contact with Metzinger and the Puteaux group, where he delivered lectures on mathematics and geometry. 66 “Maurice Princet often joined us. Although very young, he occupied an important position in an insurance company, due to his knowledge of mathematics. But beyond his profession he conceived mathematics as an artist and evoked continua of n-dimensions as an aesthetician. . . . He directed us to non-Euclidean geometry and pressed us hard to create a geometry for painters. But that we could not do in the sense in which he meant it.” Metzinger, Robbins, op. cit., pp. 183, 196. 67 Louis Vauxcelles, “Le Père du cubisme,” 29 December 1918, in Le Carnet de la semaine, 11; in Henderson, op. cit., p. 68. 68 Ernst Mach, Space and Geometry in the light of Physiological, Psychological and Physical Inquiry, Chicago: Open Court, 1906 (reprint 1960). 69 Maurice Raynal, “Conception et vision,” Gil Blas, Paris, 29.August 1912; translated in Edward F. Fry, Cubism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1966, p. 95. 70 Jean Metzinger, “Cubism and Tradition,” Paris Journal, 16 August 1911, in Fry, op. cit., p. 66. 71 See Hans Joachim Störig, Weltgeschichte der Philosophie, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1985 (4th ed.) 1985. 72 “[Picasso] establishes a free, mobile perspective in such a way that the shrewd mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced an entire geometry from it.” Metzinger, op. cit.; in Antliff and Leighten, op. cit., p. 76. 73 Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme, 1911, reprinted Frankfurt: R. G. Fischer Verlag 1993, pp. 27, 79. 74 “L’oeil doit concentrer, englober, le cerveau formulera.” Joachim Gasquet, Paul Cézanne, Paris 1921. 28 75 Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, although published in 1905, was less of a source for the Cubists. Only after the celebrated expeditions in 1919 to view the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 had confirmed Einstein’s theory did it become known in wider circles (and also translated into French). In the early 1920s it interested Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and Paul Klee. 76 Apart from the cyclist pictures, granular surfaces are visible in Metzinger’s Portrait of Albert Gleizes (1911–12, fig. 52). In contrast to Robbins (see note 6), we date this portrait after the cyclists; see Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, pp. 57–64, in this catalog. In Du Cubisme, Metzinger and Gleizes explained: “In the sculpturally formed low reliefs we want to be able to slip in those delicate transitions which suggest rather than define. Many forms must remain a suggestion whose actuality is only accomplished by the mind of the viewer.” Gleizes and Metzinger, op. cit., p. 86. 77 E. Pascal Jouffret, “Traité,” Revue générale des Sciences, 1891, in Henderson. op. cit., p. 73. See also Anastasios Brenner, “Géométrie et genèse de l’espace selon Poincaré,” Philosophiques, 31,1, 2004, pp. 115–30. 78 “The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as ideal. Only the fourth dimension places at the artist’s disposal the new measure of perfection that allows him to give proportions to the object, as it corresponds to the degree of plasticity.” Apollinaire, “La Peinture…,” op . cit.. 79 Maurice Raynal, “Qu’est-ce que…le Cubisme,” Comoedia Illustré, Paris, 20 December 1913, trans. in Fry, op. cit., p. 129. 80 Ibid. 81 In a letter to Kahnweiler of June 1912, Picasso recalled that on a visit by Matisse and Leo Stein to his atelier, the latter jokingly said of a work in progress (presumably 1908) “That is the fourth dimension?”; Rubin, op. cit., pp. 346, 376, and note 49, which makes clear that the concept was in circulation long before 1912. 82 Rubin, op. cit., p. 49, and note 3. 83 Cabanne, op. cit., p. 24. Duchamp also tells of his notes for the “Green Box” on the fourth dimension, and referred, though in an off-hand manner, to Pawlowski and his popular scientific articles; idem, p. 39. 84 Dore Ashton,” An Interview with Marcel Duchamp”, Studio International, year 171, no. 878, London, June 1966. 85 Metzinger and Robbins, op. cit., p. 117. 86 See Baudson, op. cit., pp. 187f. 87 The title seems a contradiction in terms, if the wish is to express movement, time and the dynamic of the fourth dimension inscribed in a Still Life. Only the still lifes dated “10-17” and “4-18” (both unknown location, but illustrated in Moser, op. cit., nos. 88, 94) and another of 1919 (ibid. fig. 103) in the Rijkmseum Kröller- Müller, Otterlo, offer us the dial of a clock, or rather mantel clock, with a sequenced repeating pendulum movement, in each case in the upper part of the picture. (Paul Klee made ample allowance for the concept of time in that he represented clock faces in more than 80 works. See Paul Klee und die Zeit in ‘Rubrik Works in Progress,’ erasmusweddigen.jimdo.com.) We shall discuss elsewhere the hypothesis with regard to the rediscovered painting, ca. 1912, of a timepiece with a clearly swinging pendulum. 88 Foreword to the catalog of the exhibition at the Sackville Galleries, London, March 1912, in Apollonio, op. cit., pp. 45-50. 89 Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Petit bleu, 9 February 1912. 90 Severini, op. cit., p. 136. 91 See his Essai sur les donnés immédiates de la conscience (De la multiplicité des états de conscience: L’Idee de la durée) 1889. See Gabriele Hoffmann, “Intuition, durée, simultanéité, Drei Begriffe der Philosophie Henri Bergsons und ihre Analogien im Kubismus von Braque und Picasso von 1910 bis 1912,” in Hannelore Paflik, Das Phänomen Zeit in Kunst und Wissenschaft, Weinheim: Acta humaniora, 1987, pp. 39–64. Boccioni defined dynamism in his “Plastic Dynamism” lecture published in Lacerba, 15 December 1913, as follows: “Plastic dynamism is the simultaneous action of the motion characteristic of an object (its absolute motion), mixed with the transformation which the object undergoes in relation to its mobile and immobile environment (its relative motion).” In Apollonio op. cit., p. 92. The most telling realization of this can be seen in his Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913 (cat. no. 1). 92 Examples of simultaneous paintings are: Le Fauconnier, The Huntsman (Le Chasseur,1911, Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag); Boccioni, Simultaneous Visions (Visioni simultanee, 1911, Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal) and States of Mind. The Farewells (Stati d’animo. Gli addii, 1911, Museum of Modern Art, New York); Severini, The Obsessive Dancer (Ballerina ossessiva, 1911, private collection), Blue Dancer (Ballerina blu, 1912, Gianni Mattioli Collection on long term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice) and Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (Geroglifico dinamico del Bal Tabarin, 1912, Museum of Modern New York); Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase No. I (1911) and No. 2 (1912, both Philadelphia Museum of Art); Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio,1912, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo) and Hand of the Violinist (Le mani del violinista,1912, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London); Malevich, The Knife Grinder (1912, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven); Feininger, The Bicycle Race (1912, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC); Metzinger, Dancer in a Café (1912, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo). 93 Apollonio, op. cit., pp. 45–46. 94 “those who mistake the bustle of the street for plastic dynamism”; Gleizes, op. cit., p. 95. 95 Ibid., p. 97. 96 Apollonio, op. cit., p. 28. 97 Marietta Mautner Markof, “Umberto Boccioni und die Zeitbegriffe in der futuristischen Kunst 1910–1914,” in Baudson, op. cit., pp. 164f. 98 Monica Vallier, “Braque, la peinture et nous,” Cahiers d’Art, October 1954, no. 1, p. 16. 99 Michel Eugène Chevreul, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés, Paris 1839. 100 Vallier, op. cit., p. 16. 101 Rubin, op. cit., pp. 33, 53, and note 84. 102 Apollinaire, “Les Peintres…,”, op. cit., in Antliff and Leighten, op. cit., p. 478: “But the painter must above all make a spectacle of his own divinity . . . one must embrace in a glance the past, present, and the future.” 103 See Robbins, op. cit., p. 21–22, and note 65. 104 Idem, p. 56, no. 49. 105 The site of La Défense is where Gaston Duchamp, alias Jacques Villon once had his atelier, 7 rue Lemaître. See Germaine Viatte, Jacques Villon, né Gaston Duchamp, Paris: Expressions Contemporaines, 2011, p. 33, fig. 28. 29 Jean Metzinger A Chronology (1883–1956). Božena Nikiel 24 June 1883 Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was born in Nantes, the son of a telegrapher Eugène and a music teacher Eugènie Argould. ca. 1885 Metzinger’s brother Maurice was born. ca. 1900 Metzinger studied painting with the portraitist Hippolyte Touront at the Académie Cours Cambronne. 1903 He exhibited successfully at the Salon des Indépendants (20 March–25 April), and decided to move to Paris where he had a studio in Rue Lamarck in Montmartre, selling his paintings at the Galerie du Père Thomas on Boulevard de Rochechouart. 1904 19 January–22 February: his first group exhibition, at the Galerie Berthe Weill, also included Raoul Dufy, Henri Lejeune and Hippolyte Touront. It was here that Metzinger met Max Jacob. Henceforward he submitted regularly to the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. 1906 Metzinger met Robert Delaunay through the art critic Louis Chassevent, and invited Delaunay to adopt a Divisionist technique. 1907 Metzinger exhibited in the Galerie Berthe Weill alongside Delaunay. He met Apollinaire through Max Jacob, and became acquainted with Maurice Princet and Pablo Picasso. 1908 Metzinger exhibited in several galleries in Paris, such as the Galerie Notre Dame des Champs (21 December 1908–15 January 1909), alongside artists such as Georges Braque, Sonia Delaunay, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Auguste Herbin, Jules Pascin, and Pablo Picasso. 25 December: Metzinger’s daughter Odette Ivane was born. Guillaume Apollinaire published Metzinger’s poem Paroles vers la Lune in the journal La Phalange Nouvelle. In Moscow, Alexandre Mercereau included him in the group exhibition of French art, Toison d’Or. 1909 30 December: Metzinger married the seamstress Lucie Soubiran, thus legitimizing their daughter. In the same month he took part in the Izdebski Salon, which showed in Odessa and Saint Petersburg (1910). 1910 Metzinger met Albert Gleizes through Mercereau. Both artists regularly visited Henri Le Fauconnier’s studio in rue Visconti, where Delaunay and Fernand Léger were also based, and spent many evenings with Paul Castiaux, Paul Fort, Apollinaire, Roger Allard, André Salmon, Le Douanier Rousseau and others. October–November: Metzinger’s essay “Note sur la peinture” appeared in Pan. 1911 The Comité d’Accrochage of the Salon des Indépendants was formed in Le Fauconnier’s studio, a group that ensured that its members were exhibited together, in Room 41. A public scandal ensued, which introduced Cubism to the general public. The Puteaux Group was formed, the meetings of which were held in Jacques Villon’s studio along with Villon’s two brothers, Gleizes, Metzinger, Roger de la Fresnaye, Francis Picabia, František Kupka and Léger. 30 1912 Metzinger taught at the Académie de la Palette, 10 rue de L’Arrivée in Montparnasse, at the same time as Le Fauconnier and Dunoyer de Segonzac (among their students were the Russian artists Nadezhda Udaltsova and Liubov Popova). 20 April–10 May: at the Galeries Jean Dalmau in Barcelona, a group Cubist exhibition was held (Auguste Agero, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Henri Le Fauconnier, Léger, Metzinger) which was followed by the exhibition Moderne Kunstkring at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (6 October–1 February 1913). 10–30 October: the Salon de la Section d’Or at the Galerie La Boétie (64 bis rue La Boétie) took place, with the participation of both Gleizes and Metzinger. This exhibition brought together all of the progressive artistic trends at the time. Lectures were given by Maurice Raynal, René Blum, Apollinaire. 27 December: Metzinger and Gleizes published Du Cubisme (with Eugène Figuière, publisher). From this time until February 1929, Metzinger lived at 121 avenue Félix Faure. 1913 17 January–1 February: Metzinger exhibited with Gleizes and Léger at the Galerie Berthe Weill. Apollinaire dedicated an important passage to Metzinger in his essay, Les Peintres cubistes – Meditations estétiques. Metzinger continued teaching at Académie de la Palette as well as at the Académie Arenius and La Grande Chaumière. 17 February–15 March: Metzinger exhibited in the Armory Show, New York. Exhibitions in Chicago and Boston followed. April–May: a group exhibition was held at the Maison des Artistes in Budapest, including Delaunay, Vasily Kandinsky, Léger, Metzinger and Alfred Reth. In May Metzinger participated in the first American exhibition of Cubism in Gimbels department store in Milwaukee. 20 September–1 December: the First Autumn Salon at Der Sturm in Berlin brought Metzinger’s work together with works by Alexander Archipenko, Delaunay, Sonia Terk, Gleizes, Léger, Louis Marcoussis and Picabia. 1914 25 February to March: Alexandre Mercereau organized a group exhibition at the Manes Society in Prague. Exhibitions followed in Cleveland and Pittsburgh (Boggs and Buhl department store). Exhibitions in Brussels and Berlin took place in June at Der Sturm (with Gleizes, Raymond Duchamp- Villon and Villon). 1915 From January to April he participated in a group exhibition at the Carroll Galleries in New York. 15 March: in Ste Ménéhould, Metzinger was conscripted into the 6th Section of the army, Nursing Division. 1916 28 March: Metzinger was called to Paris to the 22nd military fig. 24 Jean Metzinger, 1912. Archives Božena Nikiel, Paris fig. 25 Jean Metzinger. Archives Božena Nikiel, Paris 31 nursing division at the Quinze Vingt hospital. There he worked as a specialist overseeing operations in the radiology department. He was able to carry on painting. 15 June: he met the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. 17 June: he exhibited in a group at Georges Chéron’s gallery Les Indépendants in rue La Boétie. 5 October: Metzinger was temporarily released from service on medical grounds. 1917 Metzinger and André Lhote, with Moïse Kisling, founded the Académie Montparnasse. Metzinger taught there until 1925. 1919 In January Metzinger had his first solo exhibition at Léonce Rosenberg’s Effort Modern gallery. 27 August: he was released definitively from military service for health reasons. 1920–1927 Metzinger’s work was shown in several exhibitions in the United States, in Paris and in Austria. In this period he contributed texts to Rosenberg’s Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne. 1928 In September Metzinger’s wife Lucie died. 1929 2 February: his daughter Odette committed suicide in Nemours. 4 March: he married the painter Suzanne Phocas and moved to live at rue Antoine Chantin 7 in the 14th arondissement. 1929–1938 Metzinger took trips to Greece and the South of France. 1932 Metzinger’s affiliation with Rosenberg came to an end. In total Rosenberg acquired 267 works. 1933 Metzinger sojourned with his wife in Tossa del Mar, Spain. 1930–1939 Metzinger had exhibitions in New York, London, Paris, La Haye. 1934 17 January: Metzinger and Phocas had an official marriage ceremony. 1937–1938 Further trips to Greece. 1939–1943 The couple rented a house above the harbor of Bandol that was next to the tavern Chez Poupoule. 1943 The couple returned to Paris. Metzinger resumed exhibiting at various galleries as well as the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. 1947 Metzinger published a poetry collection, Ecluses, with a foreword by Henri Charpentier. A new edition of Du Cubisme was released with a foreword by Gleizes and an afterword by Metzinger. 1948 Jean and Suzanne Metzinger moved to 15 Rue du Regard. 1950–1953 Metzinger taught at the Académie Frochot, Paris. 1953 30 January–9 April: Metzinger’s work was featured in a group exhibition, Le Cubisme 1907–1914, in the Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. 1956 Jean Metzinger died in Paris on 1 November. fig. 26 Suzanne Phocas. Archives Božena Nikiel, Paris fig. 27 Jean Metzinger and Suzanne Phocas in a café in Montparnasse, Paris, 1923 or 1925 (?). Archives Božena Nikiel, Paris 32 The Champion Erasmus Weddigen “We would often cross the broad avenue with the martial- sounding name,1 the one that separated Courbevoie2 from Puteaux, when Gleizes accompanied me to see the Duchamp-Villon brothers. It was in the peaceful garden of that welcoming household only a few years before the terrible year of 1914 that forms were born, that fifty years later, one would still think were new! We returned there often and soon we were spending our Sunday afternoons not merely conversing about aesthetic novelties but rather kicking a ball around or indulging in a spot of archery. That garden was the place where my appearance as a cyclist at the Vélodrome d’Hiver was thought up. Gleizes and Villon claimed that I wouldn’t be able to cycle one hundred kilometers without putting a foot on the ground. I bet them that I could for the price of a lunch. It’s actually a pretty hard thing to do to keep going over one hundred kilometers on country roads. Neither of my opponents had a car and they didn’t want to chase after me on one of those velocipedes (as they were called at the time). A journalist from our circle of friends suggested cycling in a velodrome which is actually just as tiring, especially for someone who is not used to it. But I agreed. A few days later, one morning at ten, I began my laps in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. An hour went by and then another. The spectators, Fernand Léger was among them, cheered me on with increasing enthusiasm until quite unexpectedly the sound of a gong brought me to a halt. I had won my meal by my honorable average speed.”3 “He was a small man, very delicately built with large, bright eyes. Almost always with a cigarette between his lips, he cultivated the finest manners and speech and he was always seen in the most fashionable clothes, never without ‘costume et cravatte’, such an elegance that even if you didn’t know it is immediately visible in the colors of his palette and the flair of his paintings.”4 In 1926 Suzanne Phocas portrayed Jean Metzinger, before she became his wife. He leans nonchalantly on an outsized nude Venus, apparently disrespectful of its classicism and untouched by its sensuality. In contrast, on the wall next to Metzinger’s head hangs a Cubist nature morte, something that would become a dominant feature of his repertoire in the post-war period. The austere linear composition brings to mind his participation in the Section d’Or, when mathematics and geometry preoccupied the Puteaux group. Metzinger’s earnest, somewhat melancholy gaze may reflect the family problems that he had experienced in a tragic period of his life—first the death of his wife and then the suicide of his daughter—events which led to his involvement with Phocas, if indeed this had not begun somewhat earlier (they met in 1923), or even precipitated the tragedy. As well as his need for order (his studio was always clean and tidy), his vanity, enthusiasm, thoroughness and eagerness to learn, Metzinger also possessed wit and irony. His gift for mimicry provided a respite from his dandyism. Thanks to his quick grasp of things he had a talent for recognizing new artistic trends in their nascent state, and for experimenting with them, even when this was not a matter of ambition nor a cry for attention. With élan he not only adopted and adapted techniques and inventions of the avant- garde, he tried to grow them and perfect them, distinguishing him as the most gifted among the Salon Cubists. In his best years, from 1910 to 1914, he effortlessly changed style and method, palette and brushstrokes, materials and subject matter. He took only the finest elements of the avantgarde, and went on to refine them, something only a strong 33 character such as Metzinger’s could accomplish without losing his way or losing heart. Metzinger dealt with like-minded contemporaries in an extremely candid way, and though he must often have felt superior he had enough tact not to show it. This made him popular. He was shy of Picasso, preferring to engage his visionary ideas from afar or via messagers involontaires such as Juan Gris. Picasso must have been Metzinger’s spiritus rector, but also a threat to his confidence. He therefore limited his close dealings to a second, rather eclectic set of artists: Albert Gleizes, closest to him, André Lhote, Henri Le Fauconnier, Louis Marcoussis and others. Metzinger’s naïve egocentricity contrasted with Marcel Duchamp’s ironic intellectualism. Metzinger’s ambition (evident in the retroactive pre- dating of some of his works) and vanity were reflected in his stylish clothes (the large check jacket in the Phocas portrait for example, or Delaunay’s portrait of him with a large lotus flower in his buttonhole and the allusion to the fashion for ‘chinoiserie’ in the quotation of the picture within a picture).5 He took pleasure in challenging his friends: he loved pushing his racing car to 200 km/h (much to the terror of the general public).6 He surprised his artist friends by making the above- mentioned cycling bet.7 His short stature led him to carry out Napoleonic escapades and risky acts of bravado. He was enough of a clown to present himself as a cycling aristocrat in the guise of Lord Brummel in the Bois de Boulogne. The delight he took in extravagant sports, driving at high speed, and his predilection for addictive activities (as evident in portraits of him smoking, pictures at dance halls and coffee houses and at gambling tables; there is a hardly a nature morte that does not feature alcohol or playing cards) was surely a compensation for his uneven temperament and his lack of consideration, serenity and domesticity. As far as his first marriage was concerned, he was neither a lovable father nor a good husband He took an active interest in contemporary culture, news and politics. He read periodicals such as Paris Journal, Oeuvre, Action, Excelsior, Pavlowski’s Comoedia and Gil Blas. Like Picasso and Georges Braque he read L’Intransigeant (Nikiel). The material for At the Cycle-Race Track, his first and only collage, was certainly taken from one of these papers, whose engagement with philosophers, mathematicians, journalists and poets offered a broad spectrum for intellectual stimulation (Max Jacob, Alfred Jarry, Maurice Princet, Guillaume Apollinaire, Roger Allard, the followers of Henri Bergson and several others). In his memoirs we encounter names such as Plato, Kant and Pascal, mentioned without the conceit of a bourgeois know-it-all, references to ancient painting and sculpture, contemporary poetry and philosophy (Gestalt theory) as well as evidence of his profound knowledge of the mathematics and geometry that had fascinated him since his childhood. He analyzed with keen wit the character of his fellow artists and described them with humor and humanity. In society, however, Metzinger was more an observer than an active participant.8 Only sport enticed him from his isolation. As a gentleman he encrypted his eroticism in Cubist geometries, and later in his somewhat cooler, but still sumptuous formalisms. His women wear masks of fashion or of coquetry. They have the self-confident expression of a virago or exhibit an air of aloofness; something that could have been a source of suffering for Metzinger. It is only in Maternité of 1910–11 that we see a shy child, perhaps the only true memory of the unhappy Odette, looking at her mother, her gaze questioning, resigned, gloomy and not without fear. Only the strong Phocas was able to tie down the narcissistic Metzinger, accompanying him through his tedious and repetitive late- and post-Cubist years. fig. 28 Suzanne Phocas, Portrait of Jean Metzinger, 1926, oil on canvas. Musee d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 34 Notes 1 Metzinger probably meant avenue de la Grande Armée, which came out on to the avenue de la Défense de Paris. 2 Albert Gleizes lived in Courbevoie, about one and a half kilometers from Puteaux. Both suburban towns had around 40,000 inhabitants. 3 Autobiographical diary entry by Jean Metzinger related by Božena Nikiel to the author (November 2011). The exact date of this entry is unknown, but it can be placed in the early 1950s, thus making him look back 40 years, not 50, as he writes. Metzinger‘s cycling feat took place between the end of 1911 and the beginning of 1912. 4 Quotation by Božena Nikiel in conversation with the author. 5 The panama hat and the sports cap were distinguishing features of Metzinger, like Joseph Beuys with his felt hat, Dunoyer de Segonzac with his beret, and the Futurists with their black hats. 6 As Božena Nikiel noted, in conversation with the author: “He was an enthusiastic lover of sport who thirsted for speed: as soon as he could afford it, he bought his first car, a Mathis, a small coupé with a red leather interior. Following this, in 1929 he bought a wonderful and celebrated white Renault Grand Sport Cabriolet, which won the Circuit du Maroc, which he loved to race [according to Suzanne Phocas]. Despite the assurance of the seller that the car was incapable of speeds greater than 150 km/h, Metzinger managed to drive at 200 km/h. Suzanne, who courageously accompanied him on his outings, could do nothing but pray. During the Second World War, the car was seized by the German military headquarters in Bandol to entertain the officers with. One officer died when he crashed the car. After the war Metzinger recovered the car, by then a wreck. In the end the motor made a fisherman happy.” 7 Metzinger recounted with macabre humor his first incident with a bike as a child (Metzinger and Robbins, op. cit., p. 166, from Jean Metzinger, Le Cubisme était né, Saint-Vincent-sur-Jabron: Editions Pre´sence; Paris: Minard, 1972, p. 166), when he and his brother hatched a plan for an almost fatal assassination‘ which they carried out on their much-hated militaristic and authoritarian uncle Louis. Using a wire they knocked him off his bike as he was cycling on a steep avenue, “and a soldier came in holding two halves of a bike. He had news. We understood only a couple of words, ‘fractures, lower jaw bone, left collar bone, knee cap, concussion.‘” 8 As Božena Nikiel noted, in conversation with the author: “An unfortunate incident in a dance hall in the 1950s, when Metzinger lost a part of his ear, was to precipitate his retirement from the intrigues of the ‘potain’, of the noisy ‘bal musettes’ and the often poisonous gossip of artists in the Montparnasse brasserie La Rotonde.” fig. 29 Jean Metzinger on his Renault Nerva Grand Sport (1928-30), ca. 1940. Archives Božena Nikiel, Paris 35 The Mathematical and Physical Dimensions Wolfgang Drechsler “. . . but now a few have expressed the view that space possesses more than three dimensions, so that in addition to what we are familiar with as length, breadth and height, a fourth dimension must be added which we however cannot perceive or conceive of, due to the limitations of the human mind. . . . Gauss saw the three dimensions of space as a characteristic specific to the human soul. ‘We can’, he said, ‘try to understand a person that is only aware of two dimensions to some extent; those that stand above us might also look down on us in the same way. To such a person who is only aware of two dimensions however, many things would seem impossible that for people like us, who are aware of three dimensions, are not problematic in the slightest.’” "Fourth dimension," Meyers Encyclopedia, 4th ed., Leipzig 1886 “Everything in nature takes its form from spheres, cones and cylinders; it is on the basis of these simple forms that one must learn to paint, then anything is possible.”1 Published by Émile Bernard in the Mercure de France in 1907, this claim would be repeatedly invoked by Cubist artists and theorists to justify the geometrization of form in their work. In 1908 Louis Vauxcelles criticized Georges Braque while discussing the first exhibition of his ‘Cubist’ paintings (until then they had not yet acquired a definition), by saying: “He despises form, reduces everything, places and figures and houses, to geometrical schemas, to cubes.”2 In conversation with the American artist and art critic Gelett Burgess, probably sometime towards the end of 1908, Braque qualified the criticism: “I couldn’t portray a woman in all her natural loveliness . . . I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appear to me in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight.”3 “Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music and whatnot, have been related to Cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which has only succeeded in blinding people with theories.”4 For Pablo Picasso speaking in 1925 this may have been true, being someone who for his whole life thought little, if anything, of theories. Many artists in his circle saw it differently however. As Jean Metzinger said of Picasso and his paintings: “he lays out a free, mobile perspective, from which that ingenious mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced a whole geometry.”5 Not everything an eye witness reports, however, is necessarily true. Opinions on Princet varied. For some he was a co-founder of Cubism; for others, such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the chronicler of Cubism, his theoretical capabilities were too limited to have influenced Cubist thinking.6 Addressing the question of how to define Cubism, Roger Allard wrote : “[It is] first and foremost the conscious intention to reproduce in painting an awareness of measure, volume and weight. . . . Cubism experiences space as sets of lines placed together, as spatial units, quadratic and cubic equations and relationships of balance. The task of the artist is to bring an artistic order to this mathematical chaos.”7 Metzinger also spoke about space and multiple viewpoints: “[the Cubists] have allowed themselves to move round the object, in order to give, under the control of intelligence, a concrete representation of it, made up of several successive aspects. Formerly a picture took possession of space, now it reigns also in time.”8 The object is not reproduced from a perspective dependent on a fixed viewpoint of the observer, but is first investigated in its entirety, analyzed and broken up into its components from different viewpoints (hence the term Analytical for this phase of Cubism). The individual parts, now facets freed from their objective referentiality, can then be rearranged according to the formal dictates of the picture surface. At the same time, they are arranged in such a way that the observer can reconstruct the whole object, by recombining the individual parts. As Guillaume Apollinaire, poet and friend of the Cubists, wrote in 1913: “The new artists have been violently attacked for their preoccupation with geometry. Yet geometrical figures are the essence of drawing. Geometry, the science of space, its dimensions and relations, has always determined the norms and rules of painting. . . . The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar 36 is to the art of the writer. Today scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term ‘The Fourth Dimension’.”9 The idea that space could have more than three dimensions, through the development of geometries of more than three dimensions, referred to as geometries with n-dimensions, emerged in the first half of the 19th century. The end of the century saw the publication of several popular scientific works on the possibility of a fourth dimension, which influenced artists, musicians and writers.10 As a consequence, conceptions of the ‘fourth’ dimension began to go beyond the narrow confines of the discipline of geometry. In A New Era of Thought (1888) and The Fourth Dimension (1904), for example, the English mathematician and writer Charles Howard Hinton suggested that intuition should be cultivated in order to recognize the fourth dimension of space, which he believed constituted the true reality. Only by doing so could positivist and materialist evils be countered. Hinton believed that men are four-dimensional but, since our consciousness is held captive in three-dimensionality, we are only capable of perceiving a small portion of our four-dimensional self. Even the familiar world is a world of appearances that cannot reflect the fourth-dimensional reality in which we really live. Such reflections formed the basis of Tertium Organum, published in 1911 by the Russian philosopher, theosophist and mathematician Peter Demaniovich Ouspensky. He believed human consciousness could expand into the realm of the fourth dimension to attain a ‘cosmic consciousness’. From his point of view mystics and artists were particularly gifted, and therefore particularly suited to the task: “The artist must be a clairvoyant: he must see that which others do not see; he must be a magician: must possess the power to make others see that which they do not themselves see.”11 Ouspensky’s theories rapidly acquired popularity among artistic circles in Russia. So much so that Mikhail Matyuschin (painter, musician, writer, teacher, publisher and close friend of Kazimir Malevich) included passages from Tertium Organum in a privately published 1913 Russian translation of Du Cubisme, which had been published a year earlier in Paris, in which the fourth dimension was also addressed. (“If we wished to tie the fig. 30 Mikhail Matyuschin, Kazimir Malevich, and Alexey Kruchenykh in Uusikirkko, July 1913 fig. 31 The Futurists in Paris for the opening of their exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in February 1912; left to right: Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Gino Severini fig. 32 The Duchamp brothers (left to right): Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Villon's dog Pipe, in the garden of Villon’s studio, Puteaux, ca. 1913. Courtesy Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers and Armory Show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 37 painter’s space to a particular geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean scientists; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann’s theorems.”12) Matyuschin wrote the music for the opera Victory Over the Sun (1913), for which Malevich designed the costumes and stage set for its première in the Luna- Park Theater in St Petersburg in 1913. Malevich later recognized that his designs for Victory Over the Sun, with a motif which was to form the basis of his Black Square (1915, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), contained the seed of Suprematism, while one of his Suprematist paintings he showed at the 0.10 exhibition was titled Movement of Pictorial Masses in the Fourth Dimension.13 In the first decade of the twentieth century many artists, in addition to the Cubists and to the Russian avant-garde, such as the Italian Futurists and the Puteaux Group (figs. 31, 32) to which František Kupka and the Duchamp brothers belonged, were engaging with the idea of a reality beyond the third dimension. Yet it seems that their ideas were somewhat vague. “The fourth dimension,” said Marcel Duchamp, “became a thing you talked about, without knowing what it meant. In fact, it’s still done.”14 On February 20, 1909, the first Manifesto of Futurism was published in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. Written by the young Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the manifesto affirmed “the beauty of speed,” established that “no work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece,” and ultimately, because of this, that the art of the past should be repudiated.15 About one year later, on March 8, 1910, from the stage of the Teatro Chiarella in Turin, the painter Umberto Boccioni declaimed the Manifesto of Futurist Painters. Apart from its rejection of the past and the affirmation that the present moment and modern technology found their expression in speed, it contained little of concrete value. It did offer, however, in clear reference to Marinetti’s founding manifesto, some possibilities for new subject matters: “Our forebears drew their artistic inspiration from a religious atmosphere which fed their souls; in the same way we must breathe in the tangible miracles of contemporary life—the iron network of speedy communications which envelopes the earth.”16 Somewhat more precise was the Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, dated April 11, 1910: “A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty. . . . Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium? Why should we forget in our creations the double power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to those of X-rays? . . . We shall henceforward put the spectator right in the center of the picture.”17 These demands for new subject matters demonstrated an awareness of discoveries being made at the time in both scientific and pseudo-scientific fields, and this call for their formal implementation corresponded to some extent to the discussions going on among avant- garde painters, namely Parisian Fauves and Cubists. In October 1911, the Futurists Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo were in Paris, following an invitation from Gino Severini who had been living there since 1906. At the Salon d’Automne they saw, among others, works by Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes and Metzinger, and in Kahnweiler’s gallery they admired works by Picasso, whose studio they also visited. They also met Braque and Raoul Dufy, who were working in the neighboring ateliers, as well as Apollinaire. Cubism had established itself in the Paris art scene, but threatened to dwindle into dry academicism. Braque and Picasso did not participate in the famous Salons (considered a ‘catwalk’ of the latest trends of the season) and their works were rarely exhibited, and so it was artists such as Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, De La Fresnaye and Metzinger (who were more directly oriented towards Cézanne) who determined the image of Cubism in the mind of the public. Indeed, it was Gleizes and Metzinger who in 1912 published the first book to be dedicated solely to Cubism, Du Cubisme. It was written in a rhetorical style and included excerpts on drawing, color and composition; its pictures mirrored, as did the works of many other artists, aspects of the works of Picasso and Braque, but did not provide an in depth analysis of their forms. The Cubist method of analysis, deconstruction, isolation and reconfiguration could be applied to other issues encountered at the time, especially by the Futurists. In the catalogue which accompanied the Futurist show at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, Paris, in February 1912, it was precisely those passages in which the Futurists set out to distance themselves from the Cubists—who “obstinately paint objects motionless, frozen, and all the static aspects of nature” whilst the Futurists aimed to “seek a style of motion, a thing which has never been attempted before”—that betrayed the importance of Cubism to Futurism. Futurist art aimed to convey “the simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art,” that is the “simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic and independent from one another.” The Futurists aimed to depict “not merely the small square of life,” but what “stirs and lives beyond intervening obstacles, what we have on the right, on the left, and behind us,” as “every object influences its neighbor, not by reflections of light, but by a real competition of lines and real conflicts of planes, following the emotional law which governs the picture.” “Force lines” were necessary to arrive at what they called “the painting of states of mind.” The catalogue continued in high flown, provocative language approaching propaganda: “We may declare, without boasting, that the first Exhibition of Italian Futurist Painting. . . is the most important exhibition of Italian painting which has hitherto been offered to the judgment of Europe. . . . What we have attempted and 38 accomplished, while attracting around us a large number of skillful imitators and as many plagiarists without talent, has placed us at the head of the European movement in painting.”18 Futurists ideals had not gone unnoticed in Paris before the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition. Severini reported that Picasso had poked fun at their manifesto. The French critic Roger Allard, as early as June 1911, had compared Robert Delaunay with the Futurists,19 although at the time no Futurist work existed that could justify such a comparison. Therefore, only the manifestos could evoke ideas of how the Futurist content and themes would be combined with the Cubist vocabulary of form and an increased polychromy. In 1909 Delaunay had developed an interest in Cubism but already by 1910–11, with his Eiffel Tower series, he was moving away from the prevailing severe gray-brown tones of the Cubist palette, in an effort to establish purer and more powerful colors. In his Windows (fig. 33) and, especially, Discs series (circular-shaped paintings with pure colors), of 1912–13, color became his main concern and light his central subject: “Color, which is the fruit of light, is the fundamental component of painting and its language.”20 This resulted in heated arguments and polemics between Boccioni and Delaunay, who disputed the priority of the term simultaneity, which concerned them both but which for each had a different meaning. For Delaunay it had to do with complementary colors: “The contrasts of simultaneous colors are the relationships between the colors in movement. That means that color assumes the function of form and that the form is not descriptive but is self-contained and has its own laws.”21 At the time, in Paris, the two artists who were addressing the question of how to portray movement in painting were Marcel Duchamp and the Czech František Kupka, who had come to Paris via Vienna. Duchamp repeatedly stressed that he was not influenced by the Futurists in his depiction of movement. Although his works in question had already been completed before the 1912 Futurist exhibition in Paris, the Futurist manifestos could very well have been a sufficiently powerful influence on him. His first works are still tentative, such as Dulcinea (Portrait), painted in October 1911 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which presents five different views of the same female figure, ranging from fully clothed to naked, some next to one another, others overlapping one another. Out of the temporal sequentiality of a story, a spatial simultaneity much like a comic book is created. Coffee Mill (Moulin à café, 1911, Tate, London), painted a short while after, heads in another direction: while it evokes the Futurist “twenty legs of a galloping horse,” an important requirement is missing, namely the expression of speed. The explanation offered by Duchamp of his famous Nude Descending a Staircase (fig. 34), in which he differentiated his intentions in relation to those of the Futurists’, sheds further light on Coffee Mill: “my aim was the statistical depiction of movement—a statistical composition— acquired from the indications of many different positions taken of a form in movement—without trying, through painting, to reproduce the effect of film.”22 With the handle of the grinder repeated seven times, Coffee Mill evokes a technical drawing, where the diagrammatic impression is reinforced by an arrow indicating the direction of movement. Duchamp employed the same schematic principle of simplification through abstraction in his Nude Descending a Staircase: “movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending an equally real staircase. Fundamentally, movement is in the eye of the spectator, who incorporates it into the painting.”23 As he often pointed out himself, Duchamp’s awareness of the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey was quite an important element in his work. It is especially true of the drawings of abstract-geometric diagrams made of the stroboscopic photographs which may have inspired Duchamp’s representation of the Nude. Marey’s diagrams demonstrate that we associate certain formal structures with movement, without even knowing what is being depicted. The photographs of Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, which were originally produced for scientific purposes, where popular with artists in Paris at this time. In 1912 Kupka, who undoubtedly took an interest in them, exhibited three paintings at the Salon des Indépendants— the same Salon that rejected Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase on the grounds that its title, written directly onto the canvas, was too literary, and the style insufficiently ‘Cubist’. Two of the works testify to Kupka’s engagement with movement: Planes by Colors (Plans par couleurs, 1910–11, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris) and The Musician Follot (Portrait du musicien Follot, 1910–11, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Supposedly Kupka described the latter as his attempt “to abolish the notion of time.”24 According to Margit Rowell, he achieved this by replacing the sequential representation of motion by a multitude of individual, almost unnoticeable displacements in space. fig. 33 Robert Delaunay, Windows Open Simultaneously 1st Part, 3rd Motif (Fenêtres ouvertes simultanément 1ère partie, 3e motif), 1912, oil on canvas. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 39 Kupka was likely inspired by Paul Souriau and his La Suggestion dans l’art, published in 1893: “The most exact and the most expressive pose can only show us one phase of represented movement; mobility consists of a sequence of these phases. How can one project an idea of that sequence? By depicting several figures which enact approximately the same movement, each one depicting a different phase. Thus one produces an illusion . . . the diverse images which succeed one another on our retina give the impression of a jerky movement at high speed. . . Each part of the total image presents a figure which the next figure modifies and the total impression of movement is extraordinary.”25 Souriau knew of the scientific investigations of Marey and Muybridge and even referred to them in his writings, although it is worth noting that he was entertaining similar ideas over a decade before them. Indeed, Souriau seems to have been the first to recognize the importance of chronophotographic experiments for the fine arts. Duchamp also seemed to refer directly to this method: “It was a formal decomposition; that is, linear elements following each another like parallels and distorting the object. . . . The lines follow each other in parallels, while changing subtly to form the movement, or the form of the young man in question. I also used this procedure in the Nude Descending a Staircase.”26 In talking about the 1912 Futurist exhibition in Paris, Duchamp reportedly found Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio, 1912, Albright- Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo) an exciting experience, as it also showed the static poses that followed on from one another, in this case the dog’s legs and the leash.27 In actual fact the painting was not included in the 1912 exhibition (it was only later that it became a defining image of Futurism), which unfortunately shows that sometimes artists’ memories require verification. Even as the Futurists took Cubist elements and quickly adapted them to meet their own needs and ideas, the group became an inspiration for artists all over Europe. Futurism received particular acclaim in Russia, where it was transformed, in combination with Cubism, into an independent movement known as Cubo-Futurism. It became a formative influence on Suprematism, as Malevich emphasized in 1915: “In Cubo-Futurism the totality of things was destroyed, they were broken apart and taken to pieces: it was a step towards the total destruction of representation. . . . Through academic forms Futurism strives towards dynamism in painting, while Cubism, through the destruction of the object, achieves pure painting. And both fundamentally strive towards Suprematism in painting.”28 On December 17, 1915, the so-called Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings ‘0.10’ opened in St Petersburg. For the first time Malevich showed what he called his Suprematist works, including Black Square, which was hung in the corner near the ceiling like an icon. For the exhibition he also published the pamphlet From Cubism to Suprematism in Art, to New Realism in Painting, and with it a new dimension in art was born. All other protagonists of abstraction, as much as they had accompanied their works with theory, had up to this point stayed more or less within an art-intrinsic frame of reference: they reacted to already existing works and progressed in stages towards their goal. Malevich, however, created a new language and was conscious of it. “The square of Suprematism and the forms that result from it are comparable with the primitive strokes (symbols) of the savage, who by placing them together was not creating ornament but rather the sensation of rhythm.” The Black Square was for Malevich the “zero form,” the “naked, unframed icon of my time,” the “first expression of an objectless sensitivity: the square represents sensibility, the white background the nothingness outside of this sensibility.”29 This ‘zero form’ can be expanded upon: “The square changes and creates new forms whose elements are ordered, in one way or another, according to one’s sensibility.”30 By rotating a square a circle is made, by dividing a square, two rectangles are made, from which in turn a cross can be made, as well as triangles and trapezoids which are developed and combined arbitrarily. The ideas of the Futurists are also to be found in fig. 34 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (Nu descendant un escalier [n. 2]), 1911, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 40 the manifesto of Rayonism, in which the Russian artists Natalia Gontcharova and Mikhail Larionov proclaimed, “Rayonism is a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism and Orphism.”31 “The style of Rayonist painting that we have created is concerned with spatial forms emerging through the intersection of reflected rays from various objects. . . . A ray is conventionally represented on the surface by a line of color. . . . Painting in a way slides, gives the sensation of existing outside of time and space, creating the impression of what might be called ‘the fourth dimension’.”32 The striking analogies to the ideas articulated by the Futurists in the foreword of their 1912 exhibition catalogue, such as “force lines that define an object,” as well as the “abstract rhythms of every object,” are not coincidental but rather were consciously chosen. After his Nude had been rejected by the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, Duchamp turned his back on painting in favor of new ideas. From the end of 1912 to May 1914 he worked as a library assistant at the Sainte-Geneviève library in Paris. Some of his writings, a number of notes (some of which he printed as facsimiles33), and his remarks made during this period reveal that he took this opportunity to study mathematics, studies on perspective and scientific papers.34 Herbert Molderings points in particular to the writings of the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré, whose “fundamental doubt concerning the possibility of objective, scientific observation” became “the center point of Duchamp’s work.”35 Poincaré’s thesis was that “Everything that isn’t thought, is pure nothingness.”36 It is not the things themselves that are real and tangible but only our idea of these things. “It is not nature that forces upon us terms of space and time but we ourselves that force them upon nature because we find them convenient. . . . All these rules, all these definitions are only the fruit of unconscious opportunism.”37 In defense of the urinal, with the title Fountain, that he submitted for exhibition in 1917 under the pseudonym R. Mutt (in contrast to the first ready-mades Bicycle Wheel (fig. 37 ) and Bottle Rack, which were not presented publicly until the 1930s), Duchamp made a clear reference to Poincaré’s distinction between things themselves and our idea of things: “Whether Mr Mutt has made the fountain with his own two hands or not is not important. He has chosen it. He has taken an everyday item and positioned it in such a way that its functional appearance disappears beneath a new title or point of view—he has created a new idea for the object.”38 Duchamp later said, when questioned on his relationship to the sciences, “Ultimately we must accept these so- called laws of science because they make life more comfortable, but that says nothing for their validity. . . . As everyone knows, science is a closed cycle but then every 50 years or so a new ‘law’ is discovered that changes everything.”39 Bicycle Wheel could almost be a commentary on this phenomenon. While movement can be suggested on a picture surface, with the Bicycle Wheel this movement is concretely apprehensible because, once set in motion, it actually spins. Optical phenomena may also have been important for Duchamp, as Ulf Linde has recognized, examining notes by the artist written in the context of his Bicycle Wheel.40 The individual spokes of the wheel are, if not in a strictly scientific sense, one-dimensional. However fig. 35 (above) Marcel Duchamp, color reproduction on paper of his Bicycle Wheel (1916 replica) placed side by side with Trap (Trébuchet), 1917, from the Box in a Valise, 1941 (cat. no. 6) fig. 36 (left) Marcel Duchamp, color reproduction on paper of his In Advance of the Broken Arm (En prévision du bras cassé), 1915, from the Box in a Valise, 1941 (cat. no. 6) 41 when they are set in motion they appear, particularly at high, approximately steady speeds, to form a plane and therefore become two-dimensional. When commenting on his works Duchamp often used the term ‘demultiplication’. When later discussing the origin of this unusual expression he said, “It seems to me that that the expression démultiplicateur de vitesse used in relation to bicycles can have many different translations.”41 This statement was made in relation to the question regarding the meaning of the term démultiplicateur du but that Duchamp explained as such, “Demultiplication gives the impression of cutting up the ‘target’ into several pieces (sub-targets) while multiplication implies multiplying them without changing the value of each piece.”42 Linde applied this to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel: a turning, two-dimensional plane that through demultiplication decomposes into several one-dimensional spokes. Bicycle Wheel is thus a continuation of images of movement, which by demultiplication, the cutting up of the whole figure into several pieces (sub-figures), produces the desired effect. The spokes can however also be seen another way: in their displaced arrangement they form as a whole a three-dimensional entity if the wheel is then set in motion and expanded by a further dimension, namely time; but it also reverts to a two-dimensional plane. This plane expansion leads in the first case to a multiplication of dimensions whilst in the second we see a reduction. In this way we are confronted by the questionable nature of scientific observation and by the impossibility of verification. fig. 37 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, New York, 1951 (after lost original of 1913), metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool. Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection 595.1967.a-b 42 Notes 1 Émile Bernard, “Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne et lettres inédites,” Mercure de France, Paris, 1907, p. 400. 2 Louis Vauxcelles, “Exposition Braque. Chez Kahnweiler, 28 rue Vignon,“ Gil Blas, Paris, 14 November 1908; quoted in Edward F. Fry, Cubism, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 50. 3 Gelett Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,“ The Architectural Record, New York, May 1910, p. 405; quoted in Fry, op. cit., p. 53. 4 Pablo Picasso in an interview with Marius de Zayas, The Arts, New York, May 1923, quoted in Fry, op. cit., p. 168. 5 Jean Metzinger, “Note sur la peinture,” in Pan, Paris, October–November 1919, pp. 649–51; quoted in Fry, op. cit., p. 60. 6 Princet was not a mathematician by profession; he worked as an actuary (secretary) in an insurance firm. He lived in Montmartre where he regularly visited Picasso’s studio, and was also friends with many other artists in the Montmartre area as well as with Duchamp in Puteaux. See Fry, op. cit., p. 61. 7 Roger Allard, “Die Kennzeichen der Erneuerung in der Malerei,” in Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds., Der Blaue Reiter, Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1912; quoted from the revised edition by Klaus Lankheit, Munich: Piper 1965, p. 79. 8 Jean Metzinger, “Cubisme et Tradition,“ Paris-Journal, 16 August 1911; quoted in Fry, op. cit., pp. 66–67. 9 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes, 1913, quoted in Fry, op. cit. pp. 115–16. 10 See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 11 Peter Demaniovich Ouspensky, Tertium Organum. A Key to Enigmas of the World, 1911, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1922, p. 108; quoted in Henderson, op. cit., p. 251; see also Anthony Parton, “Avantgarde und mystische Tradition in Rußland 1900–1915,“ in the exh. cat. Okkultismus und Avantgarde. Von Munch bis Mondrian 1900–1915, Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle 1995, pp. 193–215. 12 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme, 1912, Frankfurt: R.G. Fischer Verlag, 1993, p. 84. 13 It seems that his collaboration with Mikhail Matyuschin and the poets Alexey Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov on the opera Victory Over the Sun inspired Malevich to create a new series of paintings in styles that he called ‘Transrational Realism’ and ‘Alogism’ respectively, which were important steps on his way to Suprematism. See Wolfgang Drechsler, “Das schwarze Quadrat, die Mona-Lisa und das Thermometer,” in Ingried Brugger, and Joseph Kiblinsky, eds., Kasimir Malevich, Wien: Kunstforum 2001, p. 37–51. 14 Quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson 1971, p. 24. 15 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," 1909, in Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, London: Tate Publishing, 2009, p. 21. 16 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters," 1910, in Apollonio, op. cit., p. 25. 17 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, "Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto," 1910, in Apollonio, op. cit., pp. 27–8. 18 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, "The Exhibitor to the Public," 1912, in Apollonio, op. cit., pp. 45–50. 19 Christa Baumgarth, Geschichte des Futurismus, Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1966, p. 77. 20 Robert Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, Pierre Francastel, ed., Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N 1957, p. 60. 21 Ibid., p. 97. 22 Quoted in Michel Sanouillet, Duchamp du Signe, Paris: Flammarion, 1975, p. 171. 23 Quoted in Cabanne, op. cit., p. 30. 24 Margit Rowell, František Kupka, 1871–1957, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1975, p. 147. 25 Paul Souriau, La Suggestion dans l’art, Paris, 1893, p. 126; quoted in Rowell, op. cit., p. 57. 26 Quoted in Cabanne, op. cit., p. 29. 27 Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, ed., Marcel Duchamp, New York: Museum of Modern Art 1973, p. 258. 28 Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism to Suprematism in Art, to New Realism in Painting, 1915, quoted in the catalogue, Sieg über die Sonne, Berlin: Fro¨lich & Kaufmann, 1983, p. 136 et seq. 29 Kazimir Malevich, Die Gegenstandslose Welt, Bauhaus-Buch, no. 11, 1927, reprinted, Mainz: Kupferberg 1980, p. 74 30 Ibid. 31 "Rayonist Manifesto," in Magdalena Dabrowski, "The Formation and Development of Rayonism," Art Journal, XXXIV (Spring 1975), pp. 200–7; see also Camilla Gray. Das große Experiment. Die russische Kunst 1863–1922, Köln: M. DuMont Schauberg 1974, p. 129. 32 Ibid. 33 Die Schachtel von 1914, Die grüne Schachtel, 1934, Die weiße Schachtel (im Infinitif), 1966. German from: Marcel Duchamp, Die Schriften, Band 1. Translated, commentary and ed. by Serge Stauffer, Zürich: Regenbogen Verlag 1981. 34 A summary of the possible documents by Jean Clair is to be found in the catalogue Marcel Duchamp, vol. III, Paris 1977, pp. 124f. 35 Herbert Molderings, Marcel Duchamp. Parawissenschaft, das Ephemere und der Skeptizismus, Frankfurt and Paris: Qumran Verlag 1983, pp. 35f. 36 Quoted in Molderings, op. cit., p. 36. 37 Ibid. 38 "The Richard Mutt Case,“ in The Blind Case, no. 2 (New York), May 1917. 39 Quoted in Staufer, op. cit., p. 396. Original in Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, New York 1965, p. 34 40 Ulf Linde, "Cycle: La Roue de Bicyclette," in the catalogue Marcel Duchamp, Abécédaire, Approches Critiques, Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou ,1977, vol. III, p. 35ff. 41 Quoted in Staufer, op. cit., p. 295. 42 Ibid. 43 The Brain Dimensions The Brain and the Fourth Dimension Are Made for Each Other André Blum Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. Oliver Wendell Holmes1 The Cubists Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes considered themselves to be innovators of modern art and were outspoken about their self-perceived role as front runners. In their 1912 ‘manifesto’ on Cubism2 they placed their work within the framework of the fourth dimension and they did so for several reasons. They lived in a period of major scientific breakthroughs and wished to link their own revolutionary art to the latest developments in science. Research into higher dimensions was one of these. With the metaphor of the fourth dimension, Cubists set out to explain how they depicted their subjects: they described them from multiple viewpoints, while classical artists held to only one viewpoint. Furthermore, the fourth dimension challenged hitherto cherished conceptions of absolute truth, making it a powerful symbol of revolt and iconoclasm.3 Three years earlier, the belligerent Futurist manifesto had been published,4 and the Cubists felt a comparable need to make declarations. Thus, their fourth dimension was only in part a physical concept—it was most of all a battle cry of artists who had been belittled for cluttering their canvases with “cubes,” to use an expression by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1908. In Du Cubisme, the two artists claimed that they saw and felt this fourth dimension. This brings us to wonder whether the fourth dimension of physics and geometry is something which can be perceived and felt. Many scientists believe they know the answer: the brain, they assert, is hardwired to a three-dimensional world. Higher dimensions will always remain theoretical constructs, since the human brain is not made to perceive them. In this case, the Cubists were victims of an illusion. In order to approach this conflict, we need to examine the dimensions of the human brain. What are brain dimensions? They are properties— quantities or qualities—which the brain either perceives or constructs. Theoretically, space is perceived and an aesthetic preference is constructed. One may think that there is a fundamental difference between perception and construction, but there is, instead, a considerable overlap. Still, brain dimensions are more or less circumscribed entities. Everybody knows, or seems to know, what space is: a clearly defined dimension. However, each dimension is interlinked with many others. Some dimensions, such as space and time, are so closely interconnected that they form a unity, a single dimension of space-time. One out of twenty people carry a condition called synesthesia, in which stimulation of one brain pathway leads to automatic experiences of another pathway. Vasily Kandinsky, who painted Impression III (Concert) (1911, fig. 38), was such a synesthetic: he saw colors when he heard sounds.5 Brain dimensions determine human behavior. Most importantly, the areas where the brain handles dimensions can be measured, usually by neurophysiological techniques. Neurophysiology also sees how centers interconnect and how a dimension, such as space, interacts with another dimension such as time or self-consciousness. Even the most ‘objective’ of brain dimensions, such as space and color, are subjective—your color red is not like my color red.6 Thus, we will not talk about space in general but about your space, your world. This indicates the limitations of neurophysiology and also its strength: it describes what happens in the real brain, your brain, and not in the imagination of a painter, poet or philosopher who assume to know your brain. Many people fear neurophysiology because it may steal their individuality, but bear with us: we will not transform you into a zombie. To the contrary you will detect new forms of liberty. 44 Non-Euclidean scientists and artists Physical dimensions need first to be examined in order to understand the scientific basis of the Cubist ‘manifesto’. “If we wished to tie the painter’s space to a particular geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean scientists; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann’s theorems.”7 This was one of the proud statements made by Metzinger and Gleizes, but to whom were they referring? Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematical genius who died in 1866 as a young man, shortly after having laid down the foundation for a revolutionary, multidimensional geometry. It is unlikely that Metzinger and Gleizes studied his difficult theorems and equations—rather, these complex formulas were related to them by some popularizers of the fourth dimension who worked directly in the ranks of the Cubists. All of them, painters and second rank mathematicians alike, were under the spell of the towering figure of higher dimension in France—Henri Poincaré (fig. 47). Think of any modern development in mathematics and theoretical physics and you will come upon Poincaré’s name. He developed, at the same time as Einstein, a theory of relativity.8 He was the founding father of what later became known as chaos theory. Higher dimension geometry and mathematics were integral parts of his work. Poincaré’s success with artists may be explained by his character. Logic, he said, limits creativity and only helps to structure what has been discovered by intuition. He was compared to a bee flying from flower to flower because he refrained from spending too much time on any single problem. The unconscious, he said in one of his psychological lectures, continues to look for solutions when the will has been withdrawn and problem solving continues even during sleep. Poincaré had, one could say, an artistic mind: he was the living proof that the subjectivity which the Cubists held in high esteem was at the base of any type of creativity, artistic or scientific. We will return to this later. The basic idea of non-Euclidean geometry is quite simple. Euclid drew parallel lines on a flat surface where they never meet. Cut them out and paste them on a European football—or even worse on the American variety—here you will have to wrinkle your paper to fit it to the curved surface and, most likely, the lines will meet somewhere in space. Therefore, Euclid’s geometry of a flat surface with its quasi absolute truth is only one of countless truths. An amusing way to enter the world of dimensions was offered, twenty years before Poincaré, by the English writer Edwin Abbott. In his novel Flatland (1884, fig. 39),9 the hero is a Square living in the two-dimensional world of Flatland, where women are simple line-segments. After having been taken to Spaceland by a Sphere teacher, the Square raises the possibility of the existence of even higher spatial dimensions. Offended and incapable of comprehending, the Sphere relegates the Square back to Flatland where the authorities persecute and even kill anybody raising the mere possibility of higher dimensions. Could a dweller of Flatland ever see three dimensions? Yes he could, particularly if he looked at a hologram. Take your VISA card, for example, and look at the vignette with the little pigeon which, thanks to a holographic technique, beats its wings and hovers in space. Thus, it is possible to produce three-dimensionality in a two dimensional picture, and it is even possible to have an impression of four dimensions by drawing a four-dimensional hypercube. In the end, you can move into any dimension with your multiple cube construction (fig. 4010). Thus, even a Flatland dweller—and a painter working on a canvas—is not limited by two dimensions. One hundred years after Flatland, the string theory—based on ten dimensions—was developed in an attempt to explain all of the elements and fundamental forces of nature. Along the same lines, a recent theory comes to eight dimensions, provided that space is compressed into one dimension.11 Thus, the vision of the Square of Flatland has come true. Were the Cubists the first artists to conquer this novel territory of the fourth dimension? Not really. Some Renaissance painters, whom the Cubists criticized for being the slaves of perspective, experimented with alternative visions of space, such as Lorenzo Lotto (fig. 41).12 Others, such as Michelangelo, may have attempted to grasp even higher dimensions.13 Some centuries later, Cézanne’s still lifes often depict the same object as seen from different angles and perspectives (fig. 68). Amusingly, it has been claimed that painters with a squint, unable to see the world in true perspective, are more at ease when painting higher dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas. Whether true or not, this suggests that by changing the ‘normal’ view we may perceive aspects which are otherwise hidden. We live in a multidimensional universe, and should cease to behave like ants crawling on a football.14 Your space and its perception In the context of perception, the number of dimensions of the cosmos is of little interest. Theoretical physics is one thing, perception of the world another. Does one perceive the world fig. 38 Vasily Kandinsky, Impression III (Concert) (Impression III [Konzert]), 1911, oil tempera on canvas. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich 45 as it is? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. When the properties of the world—its colors, distances, surface textures, and movements—are measured, there is (with important exceptions to be mentioned later) a correspondence between these measurements and your perceptions, which is, however, anything but obvious. We have mentioned the projection of Euclidean parallel lines on a football, where they follow the laws of non-Euclidean geometry. Now if you were to replace the football by the retina of your eye, the inner lining of an almost-sphere, you would understand why non-Euclidean geometry has been used to describe the shapes of retinal images. When the same lines enter your perception, they are again Euclidean—your visual system is capable of rapidly switching between the two systems, forward from Euclidean to non-Euclidean and back again. The major mystery is yet to come. Your visual world seems to you—your consciousness—to be extensive and continuous across time. However, the manner in which you sample it is neither extensive nor continuous.15 Just one example: at irregular intervals your eyes perform rapid side movements, so called saccades. Try to see, while you read a text, your own saccades in a mirror: you cannot do this, but an outside observer can. Why? Because you are blind to your own saccades, that is perception is interrupted during a saccade.16 This is one of the many mechanisms which protects your brain from too much information. The stream of visual information undergoes massive weeding in the brain. Of 1000 pieces of information, 999 or more are eliminated. The rest of the stream—still a large quantity of data—is divided in two:17 one half, the ‘what’ part, flows through the bottom of your brain, where the question is asked: “what is this?” Let’s assume that the answer is: “It is a bicycle.” The other half of the stream, the ‘how’ part, rises to the top of the brain which remembers your past bicycle rides, recognizes saddle and pedals, and enables you to avoid a lamppost. In the frontal part of your brain, the two streams meet again, visual images are constructed and the question is asked whether, in this lousy weather, it would not be wiser to take a bus. Where are the three dimensions in all this? For your brain this is not an interesting question, because your brain wants to get you safely to your destination, by bike or bus, and not to end up in the hospital. Three dimensions, four, or more? Anything goes. The images you perceive are, anyway, a construction. When you want to cast a glimpse behind the curtain and catch the brain committing errors, you may use geometrical-optical illusions.18 Of the two examples here provided, one shows the famous parallel lines of Euclidean geometry (fig. 45), but the short lines crossing the longer lines at an angle fool your brain into seeing the parallel lines at an angle to each other. The other illusion (fig. 46) shows four discs, each one with an inner segment lacking, where your brain projects a white square into the figure. The explanation, described by an Italian psychologist in the same year as fig. 39 Cover of Flatland designed by the author, Edwin A. Abbott, and published in Oxford by Basil Blackwell in 1884 (detail) fig. 40 Salvador Dalí, Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), 1954, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of The Chester Dale Collection, 1955 46 Du Cubisme, is the so called ‘Gestalt effect’, the form- generating capability of your senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of entire figures—instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves—for your brain ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’ In spite of all these daring constructions and occasional errors, your brain provides you with a convincing illusion of an extensive and continuous visual world. Fortunately: imagine the need to decipher an urgent message, delivered in bits and pieces, while an enraged mammoth is running towards you. The survival of humanity has, from its beginning, depended on multidimensional illusions and constructions. An almost perfect imitation of the world has turned out to be the solution which suits us best. Your self and your space One of the authors in this catalogue (E.W.) had a personal experience with higher dimensions when he underwent chest surgery. While under general anesthesia, he left his body and rose to the ceiling of the operating room. From there he watched the surgical team and heard them exchange technical remarks and jokes. Since his downward view was partly blocked by the operating lamp, he crossed the ceiling and arrived at a tunnel. At its end was a sun-filled opening. Arriving here, he heard a male voice saying in a foreign language something like: “Now I know, and I also know why so far I could not know what it’s like”. After waking, he wanted to tell other people what he had learnt, but refrained because he did not remember the exact words he had heard. However, when he later saw Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Ascent to Heaven (fig. 42) he felt comforted because somebody else had witnessed before him what it was like to enter higher dimensions. The second part of this event, the vision of the tunnel, frequently occurs in so-called near-death experiences. Thousands of patients with cardiac arrest who have been successfully reanimated have similar stories to tell, but Bosch’s painting is evidence that one need not be near death to have such a vision of a tunnel. Particular brain areas are responsible for this event.19 The first part of the event—the rising to the ceiling and looking down on one’s own body—is an out-of-body experience, which may also occur in near death situations (fig. 43). Out-of-body experiences can be produced by electrical stimulation of circumscribed brain areas.20 Could you have an out-of-body experience? Yes, such experiences can be provoked in the laboratory by robotic technology. As a consequence, healthy subjects locate themselves in a virtual copy of their own body and, most importantly, report an altered first-person perspective.21 Again, the same brain areas as in near death experience and brain stimulation are implicated. The altered first-person perspective implies that in order to be yourself you have to be able to locate yourself. Without proper location—you in your body and your body in space— you cannot be self-conscious in the classical sense. Add to that all other physical spaces—odor space, tactile space, temperature space, to name a few—in which you live, and you will understand that your self is embodied. No body, no self. This then describes the limitation of entering higher dimensions. Your brain would not have problems in constructing—for a change—higher dimension worlds, but you would have to learn new types of self-location and of self- consciousness. Well, do not give up so easily. Mystics and spiritualistic mediums do it all the time, and why not you?22 Your space-time On another occasion, the same E.W. fell on the ground, while repairing a roof, from an altitude of 5 meters. As he began to fall, his first thought was related to his position—like a figure from a Wilhelm-Busch cartoon he would hit the ground with his buttocks first. He next remembered his collaborators who needed him: what would they do after he was severely injured? If only he could slow down his body so that the tiles arrived before him. Could he perhaps learn something from his past experience? First, he saw a film of his childhood events, but it was not helpful for his actual predicament. As an adolescent, he had almost fallen from a cliff, but did not hurt himself in the end. This was not helpful either. As an adult, he had had a bicycle accident, but again there was no help in reviewing this. How ridiculous to be so helpless. While he started to laugh, he hit the ground. He remained fully conscious and came away with minor injuries. fig. 41 Lorenzo Lotto, Madonna del Rosario with Saints, 1538, oil on canvas. Chiesa di San Domenico, Cingoli 47 Many who survive falls in the mountains report that during their fall they have seen their past life like a movie. What is impressive in the above account is the short distance, and thus the short duration, of the fall. In a couple of seconds, E. W. was able to see the film of his past life and to ponder his present situation from several points of view. This shows how much the brain can pack into one instant and how malleable is subjective time: ‘an instant can last an eternity’ or ‘time flies.’ The body handles time according to these idioms. Since life functions are rhythmic, the body is full of clocks, from single clock molecules regulating cell functions to a full grown precision instrument sitting on the nerves of the eyes. These clocks adjust rhythms according to the present needs. The centers which evaluate time in the brain work similarly: when salient moments occur, the number of registered emotional moments increases and, as a consequence, subjective time dilates; the contrary happens during dull periods.23 This means that the brain centers receive inputs from at least three dimensions simultaneously: one’s time, one’s emotions, and one’s self-consciousness. The brain centers do not even try to separate the mixture—unless, of course, you hold a stopwatch in your hand during a bicycle race. The brain has some centers which measure absolute time24—thus you will, in the end, while looking at your stopwatch, know how much time the winner needed for the race course—but relative time-keeping is much more important for your life. To understand relative time, take a quick glance at the second hand of your clock: the tick will pause momentarily, and appear to be longer than the subsequent ticks, yet, all ticks last exactly one second.25 Perceptions of time and space interact closely. Take the simple fact that most words describing time derive from the world of space. Originally the word time (tempus) referred to space. Time is long or short, events are ahead of us or behind. You live in space-time, your perception of time is influenced by space. Conversely, space perception is influenced by time,26 but to a lesser degree, because time is an abstract concept while space speaks to all of your senses. Furthermore, many space centers inside the brain handle time as a sideline job and time, in the end, has its centers a little bit everywhere and nowhere. Time fares better when the brain raises questions of causality: it considers two events which follow each other to be causally related.27 However, this is one of the most frequent human errors, to assume that an event is caused by another simply because it happens afterwards. Since the human brain lives in space-time, it is astonishing, even amusing, to consider the problems encountered by Einstein’s theory of special relativity early last century. People had difficulties in coming to terms with it, although nothing should have been easier to comprehend fig. 43 William Blake, The Soul Hovering Over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life, 1808, etching. Illustration from The Grave. A Poem by William Blake, engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Paul Mellon Collection fig. 42 Hieronimous Bosch. The Ascent to Heaven (L’ascesa all’Empireo), 1500. Palazzo Ducale, Venice 48 for their brains. Even the forerunners of progress were not enthusiastic about space-time: for Metzinger and Gleizes the fourth dimension was geometrical. Boccioni included some aspects of time in his progressive view and wrote: “The unique dynamic form that we proclaim is nothing other than the suggestion of a form in motion.”28 His Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913, cat. no. 2) is a magnificent illustration of his intentions. Marcel Duchamp, together with later artists, completed the artistic conquest of the space-time dimension (fig. 44).29 Your moving world Boccioni’s statement on motion was based on an idea of the influential French philosopher Henri Bergson (fig. 23), who claimed that space was filled with ether and that matter “resolves itself into numberless vibrations all linked together in uninterrupted continuity.”30 Though the ether hypothesis has long been discarded by modern physics, the poetical beauty of the concept, materialized in Boccioni’s “continuity in space,” can still be felt—albeit wrong from a physical point of view. In a physical sense, motion simply implies that matter moves through space and time. Therefore it should be possible to predict the brain’s reaction to motion once you know how it perceives form, space and time. Nothing could be more mistaken. Recognizing movements, particularly of biological objects and even more importantly of human beings, is crucial to our survival. As a newborn, you were already an expert in recognizing facial movements such as smiles. You learnt complex motor actions by observation and imitation. Feeding, courtship, your entire social interaction is based on the recognition of motion. Thus, your brain has developed highly efficient mechanisms to detect human motion. It perceives the slightest hint of such a motion. After detection, the signals enter the two streams of perception mentioned above: the upper stream mainly analyzes kinematics, the lower stream form.31 Thereafter, your large ‘social brain’ takes over32 and evaluates what is there to be learnt, what to be felt, how to profit, how to react. This is a full time job: in your waking state you are immersed in an uninterrupted continuity of motions—too much for your vision, as we have shown. Add to this that you are in motion all the time, and that the autonomy of your own motion33 and of motions which you are observing, is part of your self- consciousness, and it becomes clear that the moving world is a dimension of its own. However, Boccioni’s “continuity in space” does not move, nor does Metzinger’s four-dimensional cyclist move, nor Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (fig. 34).How does your brain recognize movement in a painting or a photograph? Clearly, it has learnt through experience to associate static object snapshots with motion, because they frequently co- occur. A nice achievement, but do not be too proud of it, because monkeys can do it, too.34 Your visions and decisions It should be clear by now that the human brain is not a logical machine. It is not strictly regulated by your conscious self. Its decisions are not objective nor rational, and cannot be predicted by logical reasoning. While everybody agrees on this, views on the truth of human nature vary widely. Metzinger and Gleizes adhered to a subjective view and postulated, in their texts, that there was no reality outside ourselves. Boccioni moved further and declared that “what needs to be painted is not the visible but what heretofore has been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees.”35 Therefore, the higher dimensions (be they real or not) seem only accessible by inward vision, and intuition (not logical reasoning) is part of this inner, true and real world. Poincaré would have agreed to this. In the previous years, Bergson had developed his philosophical system based on intuition. He considered logical, discursive thinking to be hostile to the élan vital, to the driving force of life, to creativity.36 In order to characterize Bergson’s ideas, one is tempted to use the metaphor of the emotional dog and its rational tail:37 it is the dog which wags its tail and not vice versa. Boccioni’s appeal to clairvoyance leads to yet another level of perceiving higher dimensions: mystical thinking. Bergson himself was an advocate of mysticism, and the Czech artist František Kupka (fig. 26) invoked a sixth sense, which allowed him to view the higher dimensions of space together with the dimensions of music and motion. Kupka fig. 46 The Zöllner illusion (1860) fig. 45 The Kanizsa square (1955) fig. 44 Paul Laffoley, The Klein Surface, from The Visions of History, 1977. Courtesy Kent Fine Art LLC, New York 49 was by no means an isolated case: at the turn of the century, spiritism still flourished, and in countless séances the dead and even immortals stepped down from higher dimensions, sharing, through the help of a medium, their experiences with the believers—some of them well-known scientists. Two of the founding fathers of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, quarreled because the former believed that psychological problems residing in the unconscious could only be solved by lifting them into the rational mind, while the latter adhered to mystical—and occasionally spiritistic—beliefs beyond rational understanding. Setting aside the overblown metaphors previously used to describe intuitive, creative, clairvoyant and mystical visions of higher dimensions, twenty years ago researchers dryly analyzed how the brain arrives at decisions when playing games and handling money. People acted illogically: they claimed that they wanted to earn as much money as possible but seemed to act against their conscious intentions. Unconscious tendencies indeed interfered with conscious tendencies, or supplanted them completely. Does this mean that such decisions follow no rules? Not at all, it only means that decisions do not follow conscious logic, and cannot be predicted by using standard probability tests which estimate, for example, the likelihood of getting a six when throwing a dice. For years, better prediction models were sought for and then recently the rules of quantum mechanics were applied to such peculiar decisions. Surprisingly, they predicted the working of the brain more successfully than logic and standard probability tests.38 Quantum events may seem odd to a three-dimensional mind. Imagine having an electron beam passing through a slit and then collecting the electrons behind the slit, then blocking the slit and opening another one and, once more, collecting the electrons. Now try to predict what would happen when both slits are open. The correct answer in ‘your’ world would be: the average of what happened in each of the two one-slit experiments, half left, half right. Wrong. The pattern is very different, a strange interference is taking place and, even odder, the properties of the electrons do not even exist until they are measured. In order to predict the outcome, a model assuming a multidimensional space needs to be developed. Remember this when you open Google next time: the mathematics of its search engines recall those of quantum theory and their aim is, after all, to best suit your brain.39 One may ask where are volition and clear rational thinking in all this. Do a little experiment on your own: lift a finger, prepare yourself and then say ‘now’. Before you decide to lift the finger, this decision has already been taken by your brain. Without asking your conscious self, the brain has given the order of ‘one finger up’. What you consider as your free will and decision is, in fact, not your decision at all, but a makebelieve that your unique self is in command. Does that mean that your free will is just an illusion? Many people, even neurophysiologists, believe this, but such a view is an oversimplification, as wrong as the old view that free will is the master of human existence. Your self can argue with the other players and, in the worst case, veto the plan or interrupt it. That means that decisions are reached by a multidimensional system where the conscious self plays a part, at least sometimes. Back then to quantum mechanics. Your brain is working according to the rules of quantum mechanics and can only be understood by a multidimensional model. Does that mean that it is a quantum computer? No, not for the time being. So far, there is no direct proof for this. But is it conceivable? Erwin Schrödinger, one of the Nobel laureates of quantum physics, speculated that living organisms would do everything they could to block out the fuzziness of quantum physics.40 Recently, however, his view has been challenged. A whole series of biological functions is based on quantum events: metabolism in bacteria, vision in a bird’s eye, and even the sense of smell. And who knows what precisely happens in the synapses, those structures which link nerve cells in your brain and store your memories? There are a quadrillion synapses in your brain, and their subatomic function has not yet been investigated. Whatever will emerge from a future study, it is clear today that brain function is not well characterized by logical and three- dimensional models. To return to the Cubists and their ideas, when one does not impose three dimensional rules on the brain, it will find its way into the higher dimensions. It is built for that. Your aesthetics In the end, nothing of all this really matters when visiting this exhibition. You like it, or you do not—that is what counts for you. Thus we enter the aesthetic dimension. Neuroesthetics deal with the question of how the brain arrives at the conclusion that something—a painting, for example—is beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. Certain brain areas deal with beauty: they are stimulated when one considers a piece of art to be beautiful. The same areas do not react when the work appears ugly. Surprisingly, ugliness stimulates those areas that are responsible for body motions and they convey the message: “Block your eyes, run away, or smash the object.”41 The judgments of the brain are of course biased by prior experiences and expectations,42 but simply knowing that something is art puts the brain into a favorable mood.43 Enjoy this exhibition! Conclusion The human brain is a multidimensional system. Its dimensions are interdependent and influence each other. Some dimensions have non-Euclidean characteristics. Each act, each decision is driven by several, often by all of these dimensions. Thus, to understand the fourth dimension in the work of the Cubists— and maybe in many other domains—should be a relatively simple task for your brain. 50 Notes 1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” The Atlantic Monthly, Boston, 1858. Holmes (1809–1894) was an American physician, poet, professor, lecturer and author. 2 Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, Du Cubisme, 1912, Frankfurt: R.G. Fischer Verlag, 1993. 3 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Reintroduction,” The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. 4 A preview of the first Futurist manifesto was published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the Gazzetta dell’Emilia, Bologna, February 5, 1909. 5 Philippe Junod, Contrepoints. Dialogues entre musique et peinture, Geneva: Contrechamps, 2006. In 1909 Vasily Kandinsky wrote an experimental theater piece, The Yellow Sound (Der Gelbe Klang), later published in Der Blaue Reiter Almanach in 1912. In 1911 he painted Impression III (Concert) (Impression III [Konzert]) after attending a concert by his friend Arnold Schönberg. In Kandinsky’s synesthetic brain, color and sound dimensions were so closely connected that the perception of one always created the experience of the other. 6 Nicholas Humphrey, Seeing Red, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. 7 Gleizes, Metzinger, Du Cubisme, op. cit., p. 84. 8 However, even a genius is not exempt from erroneous judgments. Poincaré considered Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity a blind alley; he died before the evidence became overwhelming. 9 Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions, Oxford: Blackwell, 1884. On the original cover, the cloud extending into the tenth dimension is worthy of notice—a prophetic vision one hundred years before the ten-dimensional string theory. It is no wonder that Abbot’s novel inspired countless readers to become interested in higher dimensions. 10 Salvador Dalí obtained a four-dimensional cube structure by unfolding a three-dimensional cube; the cross in this painting consists of such an unfolding hypercube, called tesseract. Thus, Christ floats in the fourth dimension while the ‘earthly’ pavement consists of simple squares. 11 Amanda Gefter, “Beyond Space Time,” New Scientist, 2011, 6 August, pp. 34–37. 12 Ian Verstegen,” A Classification of Perceptual Corrections of Perspective Distortions in Renaissance Painting,” Perception, 2010, 39, pp. 677-94. Note an amusing detail in the Lotto painting. Three putti are spreading rose petals below the pedestal of the Madonna; one of them, breaking the rules of perspective, throws the petals out of the painting at the spectator. 13 Alessandro Paluzzi, Antonio Belli, Peter Bain, Laura Viva, “Brain ‘imaging’ in the Renaissance,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2007, 100, pp. 540–43. According to the authors, in the Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel (1508-12) the divine cloud descending from the heavenly dimension to earth is shaped in the form of the human brain. The cloud contains correct anatomical details that, according to Paluzzi, could not have happened without Michelangelo’s awareness of anatomical studies. Michelangelo might have concluded that the higher divine dimension entered the human brain during the act of creation. 14 Gerald Westheimer, “Illusions in the Spatial Sense of the Eye: geometrical-optical illusions and the neural representation of space,” Vision Research, September 2008, 48, pp. 2128–42. 15 Benjamin W. Tatler, Michael F. Land, “Vision and the Representation of the Surroundings in Spatial Memory,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011, 366, pp. 596–610. 16 In La Joconde by Leonardo Da Vinci (1503-6, Musée du Louvre, Paris) the eyes of the sitter are turned to an extreme lateral position, typical of a saccade. The saccade blindness would have prevented, had the sitter looked into a mirror, her perceiving the position of her own eye. 17 Dwight J. Kravitz, Kadharbatcha S. Saleem, Chris I. Baker, Mortimer Mishkin, “A New Neural Framework for Visuospatial Processing,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2011, 12, pp. 217–30. 18 Westheimer, “Illusions in the Spatial Sense of the Eye…,” op. cit. 19 Olaf Blanke, Sebastian Dieguez, “Leaving Body and Mind Behind: Out-of-body and Near-death Experience,” in Steven Laureys, ed.,The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004, pp. 303–25. 20 Dirk De Ridder, Koen Van Laere, Patrick Dupont, Tomas Menovsky, Paul Van de Heyning, “Visualizing Out-of-Body Experience in The Brain,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 2007, 357, pp. 1829–33. 21 Silvio Ionta, Lukas Heydrich, Bigna Lenggenhager, Michael Mouthon, Eleonora Fornari, Dominique Chapuis, Gassert, and Olaf Blanke, “Multisensory Mechanisms in Temporo-parietal Cortex Support Self- location and First-person Perspective,” Neuron, 2011, 70, pp. 363–74. 22 We refrain from discussing the question whether religious practices open the way to higher dimensions. 23 A. D. Craig, “How Do You Feel—Now? The Anterior Insula and Human Awareness,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009, 10, pp. 59–70. 24 Sundeep Teki, Manon Grube, Sukhbinder Kumar, Timothy D. Griffiths, “Distinct Neural Substrates of Duration-based and Beat-based Auditory Timing,” The Journal of Neuroscience, 2011, 31, pp. 3805–12. 25 Virginie van Wassenhove, Marc Wittmann, A.D. Craig, Martin P. Paulus, “Psychological and Neural Mechanisms of Subjective Time Dilation,” Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2011, 56, pp. 1-10. 26 Daniel Casasanto, Olga Fotakopoulou, Lera Boroditsky, “Space and Time in the Child’s Mind: Evidence for a Cross-dimensional Asymmetry,” Cognitive Science, 2010, 34, pp. 387–405. 27 Alexander Kranjec, Eileen R. Cardillo, Gwenda L. Schmidt, Matthew Lehet, Anjan Chatterjee, “Deconstructing Events: the Neural Bases for Space, Time, and Causality,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2012, 24, pp. 1-16. 28 Umberto Boccioni, Pittura scultura futuriste (Dinamismo plastico), Milan: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1914; quoted in Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Bruce Clarke, eds., From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 136. 29 Artists of this group are, among others, Theo van Doesburg, the Russian Suprematists, later Surrealists, Irene Rice Pereira, Stuart Davis, Charles Sirato and Paul Laffoley; for further details see Wolfgang Drechsler in this catalogue, pp. 36–43. A nice example of an object of the fourth dimension and its representation in three-dimensional space is the “Klein bottle” (Klein’sche Fläche). A drawing by Paul Laffoley is shown in figure 44. The “Klein bottle” is a non-orientable surface without a boundary; you can move from outside to inside without crossing an edge. Its self-penetration, as seen in three-dimensional space (and of course in a two-dimensional representation), disappears in the fourth dimension. 30 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art. Conclusion,” Leonardo, 1984, 17, pp. 205–10. 31 Jan Jastorff, Guy A. Orban, “Human Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Reveals Separation and Integration of Shape and Motion Cues in Biological Motion Processing,” The Journal of Neuroscience, 2009, 29, pp. 7315–29. 32 Martin A. Giese, Tomaso Poggio, “Neural 51 Mechanisms for the Recognition of Biological Movements,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2003, 4, pp. 179–92. 33 Manos Tsakiris,Matthew R. Longo, Patrick Haggard, “Having a Body Versus Moving Your Body: Neural Signatures of Agency and Body-ownership,” Neuropsychologia, 2010, 48, pp. 2740–49. 34 Zoe Kourtzi, Bart Krekelberg, Richard J. van Wezel, “Linking Form and Motion in the Primate Brain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2008, 12, pp. 230–36. 35 Esther Coen, Umberto Boccioni, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988, p. 239. Similar thoughts were published in 1911 by the Russian mystic Peter Demianovich Ouspensky; see Wolfgang Drechsler in this catalogue, pp. 36–43. 36 For further details see André Blum, David Poeppel, “Intuition,” in Caroline Welsh, Stefan Willner, eds., Interesse für bedingtes Wissen, Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Wissenskulturen, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2008, pp. 379–404. 37 Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: a Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgement,” Psychological Review, 2001, 108, pp. 814–34. 38 Jerome R. Busemeyer, Emmanuel M. Pothos, Riccardo Franco, Jennifer S. Trueblood, “A Quantum Theoretical Explanation for Probability Judgment Errors,” Psychological Review, 2011, 118, pp. 193–218. 39 For more details see Mark Buchanan, “Quantum Minds,” New Scientist, 2011, September 3, pp. 34–37. 40 Michael Brooks, “The Weirdness Inside Us,” New Scientist, 2011, October 31, pp. 34–37. 41 Hideaki Kawabata, Semir Zeki, “Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Journal of Neurophysiology, 2004, 91, pp. 1699–705. 42 Ulrich Kirk, Martin Skov, Oliver Hulme, Mark S. Christensen, Semir Zeki, “Modulation of Aesthetic Value by Semantic Context: An fMRI Study,” NeuroImage, 2009, 44, pp. 1125–32. 43 Simon Lacey, Henrik Hagtvedt, Vanessa M. Patrick, Amy Anderson, Randall Stilla, Gopikrishna Deshpande, Xiaping Hu, Joao R. Sato, Srnivas Reddy, K Sathian, “Art for Reward’s Sake: Visual Art Recruits the Ventral Striatum,” NeuroImage, 2011, 55, pp. 420–33. fig. 47 The first Solvay Conference, held in Brussels in the fall of 1911, was attended by Henri Poincaré (sitting, far right, beside Marie Curie), and also by Albert Einstein (standing, second from the right). In the years before this photograph, both men worked on theories of relativity; for Poincaré, Einstein’s approach was a blind alley. 52 The Anthropological Dimension Childhood, Myth, Ecstasy and the Unconscious: Places without Time? Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, Nina Aydt I shall say to the moment: Linger a while, thou art so fair Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808), Part I, 1375 Joy wants the eternity of all things, Wants deep, profound eternity Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1885 Prologue The internet is changing our conception and experience of time so fundamentally that when it comes to dealing with the everyday hardly an academic or artist can avoid forming an opinion on how we experience time: how does it influence artistic production? how were new experiences of time treated in art and art theory of the twentieth century? in Cubism and Futurism? and how much did these artists know of the dimensions that seem so new to us today? As a whole, the texts in this catalogue work from the assumption, as articulated in the essay “From the fourth to n-dimensions?” that “the visionary, the genius, the inventor, the discoverer and the artist are merely microcosmic participants in a next higher biological dimension” without ever having realized it and that there is a “groping urge to ascend the spiral tower of dimensions.” The artistic act in itself is an act of stepping out of a familiar Space-Time continuum. As a result, one gains access to other dimensions in which we have lived but of which we have never been conscious. It is therefore a case of growing an awareness and gaining access to ‘another realm’—the unconscious. The poet Saint-Pol-Roux, born in 1861, who was an influential figure for the Surrealists, spoke of the “visionary apparatus”’ that the artist (as “magician”) sets in motion as he creates. The changes that the internet has made to the way we experience time seem huge and revolutionary. In many respects they are. And yet the question remains as to whether these changes are subversive for the work of art and for artistic production, or if the deepest point where artistic creation begins, the realm of the imagination, has stayed the same. Jean Metzinger’s experimental approach to life and his enthusiasm for the thrill of speed and various addictive hobbies call for an examination of what ‘time’ really is and how, for example, we try to rid ourselves of it by invoking states of frenzy and ecstasy. To do this let us begin with a child’s experience of time, and how, in the immediacy of the moment, the past and the future shape experience and desires. The child makes himself into a lord of time, just as Metzinger tried to do in various ways, acceleration mostly. Let us then take small steps towards what we call time, looking at what it can be and what potential it has within it. How a child experiences time Time. It accompanies us through our whole life and yet it remains a mystery. We cannot grasp or stay it. There is no ‘opting out.’ It cannot be observed from a distance, independent from ourselves. One moment it seems to drag, it just does not want to pass—we have ‘too much’ time. Boredom and impatience creep in while we wait and we do not know what else to do but count the minutes. Then, at another moment, we feel again that we have ‘too little’ time, that it flies by too fast. Sometimes it simply stands still, like the hand of a clock that has to be wound up again. Children have their own internal clock—not one that measures time by counting seconds and hours. It is divided into short moments and long years. An adult of course deals with time on a daily basis; the child however is not yet familiar with his own temporal existence and that of his environment within societal time structures. At the start of their lives, children do not yet have an inner and exterior time mechanism. A sense of inner time is gradually formed as they grow up, in constant conflict with outer time. Children want to play 53 without ever stopping, even when they’ve been playing for a long time. They live in the immediate present where there is little room for things that have passed. For them the present moment is so overpowering that they do not understand why it should stop. Children see themselves as being at the center of their environment, referring everything back to themselves. They take for granted that those around them are aware of their feelings and needs. They understand only that which they are capable of conceiving themselves. Children’s perception of time is above all characterized by the fact that they are not yet able to detach themselves from their own experience of time to observe what they have experienced in a sequence of moments. The way children deal with time allows them to live a ‘fulfilled’ life. This early developmental stage, in which they still see their parents as superior and all-knowing, is strongly informed by the idea that their parents will live forever. A single year for a child that is discovering its world anew is an important period filled with perceptions that are not to be overlooked, and accordingly the child perceives time as very long. A child’s ability to concentrate exclusively on one aspect within his world of experience—independent of time and space—becomes limited, threatened even, over the years by the demands (in predefined time dimensions) placed upon it by the exterior world. Thus, even the bicycle, once seemingly unattainable and coveted with wide eyes—the embodiment of absolute wish-fulfillment—loses its greatness and magic. The time of beginnings “I have no time:” more truth lies in this colloquial expression than we think. Indeed, we do not have time, but we perceive things that happen as a closely-knit series of events. The limited nature of our perceptive abilities means that rarely do we grasp the ‘totality’, complexity and heterogeneity of the things that happen, and equally rarely do we fully comprehend that which has happened. We break down the entirety of an event (which, in the news, can be stretched out by the media over long periods, and which, even at the end, is beyond the reach of us all) into a sequence of seconds, minutes, hours, days, years and eras. With time periods in the remote past, our abilities of perception are increasingly hampered; and beyond that we talk of a time before time. Is there time before history? and are there places without time? Everyone knows how the rules of time are suspended in dreams. A dream expands in all directions simultaneously, figures are here and there, in yesterday and today—even people who are long dead often make appearances in our dreams alive. In terms of time, there is something disinhibiting about dreams. In other states of disinhibition, in states of ecstasy, states of being out of oneself, an awareness of time is not switched off but merely altered. With ritualistic, shamanistic ecstasy—pre-historical conditions—the separation of Heaven and Earth is overcome by journeying to the other side. Shamans re-establish a connection with the world beyond that was severed in a mythical age. Is that not our natural state? Myths speak of a cosmogonic past, and Hindu teachings from the time of Sat-Yuga tell that millions upon millions of years preceded today’s Kali-Yuga. Our age is characterized by the demise of consciousness and of vitality, by a focus on crude as well as small-format conceptions of time. According to this teaching we have lost our ability to conceive of large, epochal cycles. Myths describe these large cycles and a time before history (historiography), a primordial time, a time of beginnings, which we attempt to renew through cultures and rites. Myths are, according to many different theories, manifestations of primordial thought, unconscious conflicts and human relationships; they can be seen as projections onto outer conditions and onto nature. The physical elements are a fundamental basis of myths— what is necessary for life is deified, such as water, earth, air or fire. Magical powers are conferred upon the elements and heavenly bodies, giving rise to cults of the earth, sun and moon. Common stories in myths deal with the very beginning of individual existence and the entire history of humanity. Myths tell, according to Mircea Eliades’ theory, “how, thanks to the deeds of supernatural beings, reality came into existence . . . so they are always about the narration of a ‘creation’ . . . a myth only talks about what has really happened, about what has truly manifested itself.” This provocative description affirms mythology (in contrast to legends) as “true stories,” about a reality that has comprehensively revealed and manifested itself. The “true,” “holy” story of myths always has a connection to reality: “the cosmogonic myth is ‘true’ because the existence of the world proves it; the myth about the origin of death is also ‘true’ because the mortality of man proves it, and so on.” The language of the Bible, of sayings, of fairy- tales and myths, raises what is thought of and imagined to a timeless realm of immeasurable space. Mircea Eliade describes the Now-Time, “the vestiges of a ‘mythological behavior’ and the desire to retrieve the intensity with which one experienced something for the first time, the distant past, the happy time of ‘beginnings’ . . . the same hope to free oneself from the burden of ‘dead time,’ from time that smothers and kills.” A passion for the “pulsing happenings of the world” and “earth turning points,” for the “image-enamored man” (as opposed to the “disillusioned educated man”) and “subterranean sources” (that Ludwig Klages spoke of)— do these passions exclude a notion of time formed from a historical or historicizing way of thinking? If we separate the historical from the pre-historical, and place them in opposition to one another, then we lose sight of the fact that myths have a societal and historical context and that, as Bronislaw Malinowski said, “myths control and regulate many cultural phenomena and form the backbone of so-called primitive civilization.” The timeless content of myths within historical time has been called upon by peoples to reach resolutions in times of conflict. In relation to the theme of time it is also necessary to mention the definition of the myth as a representation of the “Infinite within the finite.” However one understands the myth, today it is no longer assumed that there a single myth of how the world began and a single original text; every myth, as Claude Lévi- Strauss put it, has “its origin in another myth.” 54 Can we turn the wheel of time? In different ages, but also in different models of experience, thinking and knowledge, we live in totally different concepts of Space-Time. Anybody is free at any time to create a timeless world in their mind’s eye, a time that has also been called “dream time,” “alcheringa” or “before time immemorial.” If one gives absolute priority to the origins of time over the ‘now,’ then historical existence appears as the “second fall of man” (in the words of Mircea Eliade). Can we accelerate the wheel of time as some shamans suggest? It should be possible with enough practice to get a glimpse into the many reflective breaks in time (that one could imagine as tunnels). As some shamans say, with the wheel of time in motion, if one steps away from having only one perspective, one break (that is from our own identity, our ‘I’ and our way of life) then it is possible to put oneself in a position to view all times, from the past to the future, and to draw unfathomable energy from them. Carlos Castaneda talks of a shifting of the point of fitting on which our perception of space and time is mounted. Anyone can recount their dreams and give examples of the art of flying, and lead us to the abyss of knowledge. Castaneda formulated the idea that it was just a question of shifting the fitting point to make it possible to fly. But everyone has experienced time shifts in a familiar context; how time flies by when listening to music, watching a ballet or during an intense nature experience. Are our thoughts and feelings in the end much more oriented towards notions and experiences that appear timeless? To answer this question, we have to ask whether a being kept imprisoned in history, despite sleep and dream phases, despite experiencing trance and ecstatic states—can be kept outside of time and whether memory can recall only moments, or if we arealways, even if we are not aware of it, tracing after our memories. “Great is memory’s power, horrifying in its depth and endless in its complexity” as Augustine wrote in his Confessions7. In his study Thomas Mann und Ägypten, Jan Assmann cites Augustine, writing “I am what I remember.” Myths are among the most remarkable documents of collective memory, which give expression to the timeless ‘we’ feeling and which can be reactivated and ritualized in time over and over again. In this way the mythical time sphere and historical time come into contact with one another in a societal and social context; the timeless life—and with it, what we call secret, inexplicable, transcendental, immense—comes alive in a temporal life. Cultural memory is a place of mediation. We are a product of our continuous reconfiguration of what we remember and our projections for the future. A time without end That such an endless, inexhaustible and horrifying complexity resides within us and at times manifests itself, becomes particularly evident in our dreams. Since Freud, it is said that the unconscious has no sense of time. It was principally Jacques Lacan who questioned the thesis in this form and sensitively modified it. Instead of a chronological progression or linearity in time, he talks of a temporal structure and a synchronous state. Psychoanalysis enables us to focus our understanding of human psychology more on phases of development, temporal, diachronic sequences, or more on structures, synchronous states. The structural term frees us a little from the often restrictive notion of fixed temporal sequences. The modern term of structure refers mainly to linguistics and mathematics. Structure however is not something that lies beyond experience and phenomena; rather it is itself much more present in the field of experience. The idea of a temporal structure has wide- reaching implications: in the psyche, time is not fixed on a progression from the past to the present moment. We can experience time both before an event has happened in a state of anticipation and after it has happened, retrospectively. What we call the past exists in the psyche only as a series of memories that are constantly in flux, constantly being reworked and, in the light of new experiences, reinterpreted. It is staggering to what extent past events influence the present; seen this way, history is not the past. When Lacan spoke of the aim of psychoanalysis as being “the complete reconstruction of the subject’s history,” by “history” he meant “a present synthesis of the past.” In this context, history is a past historicized in the present. The past is therefore a realm of retrospective projections. Psychoanalytical treatment is not interested in the past as something concluded and historical, not even as something factual or real, but rather in how events appear now in memory and how they are recounted. Just as the present influences the past, we also experience anticipation of the future. We all experience this when we begin a sentence without knowing what we are going to say after the first couple of words. However we have already thought of what we are going to say at the start of the sentence. In psychoanalytical terms, one talks of the anticipation of an imaginary, future entirety. Psychoanalysis has unequivocally confronted us with the fact that history—something that has happened to us—is not something that is past or concluded. The psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis put it well with the phrase, “ce temps qui ne passe pas.” For the patient, psychoanalytical treatment opens the door to time that does not pass. Everything we have experienced is stored in us, latently present—that is in the present—and can at any time be shifted into the foreground and dramatically brought back to life. In this sense psychoanalysis is old-fashioned, indifferent to the Zeitgeist, to the normal perceptions of time and the forms it takes, whether they be cyclical or developmental. The time that psychoanalysis thematizes is not the same time that runs like sand through our fingers. When, during psychoanalytical treatment or in a dream or even during a normal everyday event, we are reminded dramatically of a traumatic occurrence in our childhood, youth or adulthood, then we are instantly transported to that point in time, which becomes now-time. There becomes here. Then becomes now. Man as a witness of events, outside of time and space If one must imperatively answer the question “what time is 55 it in the unconscious?,” then the answer would have to be: “everything at the same time.” Eastern spiritual teachings talk repeatedly of the idea of this notion of everything at the same time, of a universal consciousness, the absolute now. In a deeply spiritual sense, there are no temporal structures that are limited by a beginning and an end, by a birth and death. Mankind and all other beings are understood as something of the gods that gives birth to itself. What we call birth and death arise only out of our limited I-structure. What we are in our very essence, must be understood in the absence of time. The idea of time reflects only our limited notion of becoming, development, hopes for the future, desires etc., a ‘time’ mostly connected to fear. Seen in this way, our models of the progression and development of time are only valid in a very limited sphere, and thus we should heed the warning not to be led astray or to allow ourselves to be manipulated by bogus evidence. The Indian spiritual teacher Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj once said, “Live fully detached, as if you were dead.” This teaching, calling for us to live detached from any personal interest in the world, in the body and the mind, in a state completely disconnected from the influence of space and time and phenomena, should lead us to the center of our being. We should learn to understand that we observe events as witnesses situated outside of time and space. Time and consciousness are contemporaneous, and thus consciousness is time. This way of living as if seemingly dead was for a long time an ideal in the formation of theories by figures such as Socrates. He wrote that a true lover of wisdom should be “as dead as possible during his lifetime” in order to “observe transcendental truths face to face.” These are the first references to a self-creation of a pure intellect that is timeless and indifferent, linked to the idea of a state of near death that is beneficial to insight. Theory seems to be inseparable from the practicing approach of the man who is well versed in epoché, a man who exercises a temporary disconnection from the world, an extra-existential (free from Space-Time) neutrality. This anticipation of an elsewhere that the theorist practices lies in the existence of man itself. Thinking has an ecstatic characteristic; indeed Heidegger stressed the affinity between ekstasis and existentia. Let us conclude by mentioning the Pirahã people who live in the Amazon, whom the researcher Daniel Everett recently called “the most happy nation.” They know only an immediate mode of experience, only the now, without any link to the past, not even to a mythical past, without any concept of a creator god. If we only know the now, do we still have a concept of time in its familiar form, as a progression from the past via the present to the future? If a creator god does not exist and if there are no concepts of a beginning or any creation myths, then there is nothing that has to be repeated in compulsory ritual. Might this push open one of the doors to freedom so sought after by mankind? In conclusion, consider this anecdote which deals with a conception of time that is vastly dilated. Three holy men have been living together for forty years in a cramped space in the Himalayas. In the first ten years they do not speak a word to one another. Then one of them says, “The sunset is pretty today.” A further ten years of silence goes by. Eventually the second holy man says, “I wish it would rain today.” Then, after another ten years, the third holy man says, “Can you not keep your mouths shut?” 56 The Third Dimension in Painting: Sand The Race for New Painting Techniques in Synthetic Cubism Sonya Weddigen-Schmid One may paint whatever one likes; with pipes, postage stamps, picture postcards or playing cards, candelabra, pieces of oilcloth, detachable collars, wallpaper, newspaper. Guillaume Apollinaire 1 The artistic application of sand runs like a scarlet thread in twists and turns through the landscape of modern and contemporary art. Indeed even before the twentieth century several solitary figures used sand (Vermeer, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt). Almost every notable art-style, school, or group, from Cubism in 1911 through Surrealism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Action Painting, Outsider Art, Assemblage, Abstract Impressionism, Pop Art, Happening, Land Art and Installation Art, to the present, has used sand as a means of expression. One can list the names of over 300 artists, among them celebrities such as Picasso, Miró, Ernst, Kandinsky, Klee, Baumeister, Dubuffet, Tàpies, Pollock, Bacon, Klein, Kiefer, Beuys and Warhol, all of whom were fascinated by ubiquitous, cheap and versatile, multi-purpose sand. The Cubists deserve credit in that their discoveries expanded the visual arts with a new language and created the prerequisite for images predicated on medium and matter as well as objets trouvés. At our imaginary starting-line the rival teams of the Bateau Lavoir and the Puteaux circle are pitted against each other. Amongst the former, besides the leader Pablo Picasso, are his formidable teammate Georges Braque and the newcomer Juan Gris.2 Their headquarters have been set up behind the pitiable boarded barricades of the Bateau Lavoir. Their deadliest rivals, led by the highest- ranking co-favorite Jean Metzinger and his colleague Albert Gleizes, and including Louis Marcoussis, Henri Le Fauconnier and Roger de la Fresnaye, meet on a regular basis in the garden of the studio belonging to the Duchamp-Villon brothers in Puteaux—to hear lectures by mathematicians and writers and to discuss the most recent trends in art such as the fourth dimension, simultaneity or Futurism.3 As the starting gun is fired Georges Braque, one of the covert favorites, is the first to surge ahead. In August 1911 Braque and his team colleague Picasso worked together in their “summer training camp” at Céret where a short but uncommonly intense exchange took place between the two artists. Both incorporated letters and numerals in their paintings,4 and Braque— midway through the hermetic phase of Analytical Cubism— experimented for the first time with sand in the painting Bottles and Glasses (1911, fig. 48),5 a painterly further development of the dry-point etching Fox of the summer of 1911. In the upper left-hand corner, on a surface of scarcely 25 square centimeters, the artist has applied a thin white primer with fine sand, only over-painted in oil color in areas around the edge and thereby consciously drawn into the motif (fig. 49). Only by standing closely before the painting is the grainy character of the sand perceptible. This is possibly a first tentative attempt to verify how and with what he could make sand adhere, how long it would hold, and what painterly effects could be gained from it. The trial area is intentionally placed by the artist in one of the corners, on the edge, where sand would not be noticeable to the normal viewer and the harmoniously structured lines of the composition not disturbed. For over a year it was to remain the only experiment. After Picasso’s return to Paris, in the autumn of 1911, Braque introduced stenciled lettering and made use of metal combs to imitate wood graining. When he too returned to Paris, at the beginning of 1912, he would have shown Picasso his latest works with the ground-breaking new techniques— stenciled words, wood grain imitation in combing technique— and the latter soon started using them successfully.6 Sand in contrast only appears in Picasso’s oeuvre in the autumn of 1912, after Braque had presented his trail-blazing innovations 57 in arresting fashion. But in spring 1912, both breakaways were overtaken by the innovative Puteaux-team. Already on the final lap for the first large sand painting, Braque is challenged and passed by the leader Jean Metzinger. The small-format study in oils initiated a series of three Racing Cyclists in which Metzinger worked for the first time with sand and incorporated newspaper collage.7 In his first Cyclist (cat. no. 8) he introduced a subtle variety of techniques for applying paint: next to smooth applications of color (flesh tint, and the number “4”) his structural palette ranged from distinct broad brushstrokes (yellow and red background) to slight impasto effects (tricolor) to clearly defined areas with granular sand- oil paint mixtures (jersey stripes, white background). The white, evenly sanded background recalls the sandy track or arena of a stadium. The same is true of the slightly later, second painting, Racing Cyclist (cat. no. 9), in which the artist conjures up the impression of terrific speed with the parallel lines of the track and a staccato-type repetition of the silhouette. As in the oil sketch on board, he incorporated the light brown color of the canvas support into the composition, by leaving small areas unpainted: around the “4” for instance, or in a small triangle with a curved hypotenuse between leg and jersey. In the more restrained coloration of the fresco-like At the Cycle-Race Track (cat. no. 11), the high and final point of the racing-cyclist, inclusions of granular sand are found, in contrast to the study on board, in the sky, grandstand area and broad sandy racetrack of the arena too, where the hard- edged projections and recesses anticipate the rider’s spurt to take the lead in a simultaneity of time and space, just as if the breakneck ride had whipped up the sand. Only the striped jersey and the flesh color retain a smooth surface. Metzinger possibly found inspiration for his choice of theme and the use of sand on his walks through the nearby Bois de Boulogne, where there were several sand cycling tracks to accommodate the fashion for cycling. With his cycle-racing series Metzinger won an important stage victory in the early use of sand, as well as with one of the first uses of collage in art in the twentieth century. In contrast to Picasso and Braque he did not create images using solely papiers collés. Indeed, At the Cycle-Race Track seems to be his only picture with pasted strips of cut- out newspaper.8 Not until August 1912 was the time ripe for Braque to transform his sand experiment, neglected during the previous year, into an impressive series of paintings. One of the first was The Clarinet (cat. no. 3, figs. 50, 51) in which fine to coarser grains of sand are mixed into a thin, white to ochre oil paint and applied directly on to the partially still visible canvas support. Smooth areas of color, lettering and painted imitations of wood were woven into a clear, black system of lines.9 The same painting technique and compositional style were used by him in a series of small, sanded still lifes,10 which relate to the first papier collé created at the beginning of September 1912.11 Braque waited to execute this until his teammate, who profited most from his slipstream, had left for Paris, in order to build up his technical advance sufficiently. From now on sand became one of the most important tools for painting and expression in Braque’s art, used by him for the rest of his life: “. . .sand painting gives me some satisfaction.”12 fig. 48 Georges Braque, Bottles and Glasses (Bouteilles et verres), summer 1911, oil and sand on canvas, Kunstmuseum Bern. Hermann und Margrit Rupf- Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern, Inv. Nr. Ge 010 fig. 49 Detail of the upper left corner of Georges Braque, Bottles and Glasses (fig. 48) 58 Our favorite, Metzinger, could however still score points with another painting: the portrait of his teammate Albert Gleizes (1911–12, fig. 52), which was perhaps dedicated to his friend as an homage and in gratitude for their work together on the book Du Cubisme. It was probably painted shortly after the Cyclist series. The early date inscribed on both its preparatory studies (1911),13 on which the approximate dating of the oil painting as 1911–12 is based, as well as that on the Pompidou study for Au vélodrome (cat. no. 10), are open to question.14 The formal structure, with its vertical planar elisions, as well as its tentative application of color, comparable to Woman with Fan (La Femme à l’éventail, Art Institute of Chicago) of 1913 suggest a later date—the summer of 1912 at the earliest. In both paintings the artist applied oil paint mixed with sand on specifically defined areas: in the portrait of his friend he applied sand to the left half of the hat, the front of the shirt, and similarly in the female portrait the rim of the hat and the blouse, as well as a right-hand corner in the background. The hair is ‘dressed’ into soft curls by combing.15 In any case the portrait of Gleizes seems to have been first exhibited in the autumn exhibition of the Section d’Or (1912).16 The technique of combing, as well as the imitation of wood, pouncing, and addition of sand, appears in two further portraits, Portrait (Fogg Art Museum Harvard) and Cubist Portrait (Hood Museum of Art Dartmouth College, Hanover) of 1912 and 1914.17 Metzinger’s pronounced interest in the textural composition of surfaces comes into its own in the latter, in the areas of impasto structured with metal combs.18 From 1912 to about 1918 Metzinger used sand sporadically, as did Gris, rather than regularly like Braque. Mostly he mixed the fine or granular sand as an addition to the oil paint, which he applied to clearly defined areas. At the beginning of his post-Cubist phase, ca. 1922, Cubist painting techniques such as the addition of sand, imitation of wood, combing and collage disappear completely from his work. Lengths behind the hot favorite, Picasso only turned to the new painting techniques in the autumn of 1912. With disarming frankness he informed his teammate in a letter of 9 October 1912: “I‘ve been using your latest papery and powdery procedures. I’m in the process of imaging a guitar and I’m using a bit of dust [sand] on our dreadful canvas.”19 In Picasso’s initial sand paintings, Guitar on a Table (Guitar sur la table, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover) of autumn 1912, ‘J’aime Eva’ (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio), and Still Life with a Violin and a Guitar (Violon et guitar, Philadelphia Museum of Art), both painted in the winter of 1912–13, the bright, sand- thickened, oil-painted backgrounds resonate with memories of the whitewashed façades of Sorgues where Picasso had experimented with an (al secco) fresco in his rented villa. The paintings developed in Paris consequently represent a reversal in the creative process, as instead of color onto the rough sandy plastered wall, sand is mixed into the color and thereby similar effects are achieved for easel painting. Unlike Braque, Picasso now had no hesitation in enriching his works with bright colors. From 1912 until about 1919 he used sand regularly and in quantity. Later on—unlike Braque—he resorted to it only sporadically, and each time developed a new technique. The motives behind the use of sand The relationship between color and form, that each should appear as separate, occupied Braque and Picasso in particular in 1910 and 1911. They attempted with little dots and brushstrokes (the so-called touches), which thickened increasingly into knobbly areas of impasto, to enliven the surface without the addition of color, which was frowned on at the time. With such new painting techniques, the change from a purely pictorial composition to a material image resolved, at least for the Bateau Lavoir Team, the problem of the relationship between color and form. The wood effect wallpaper—Braque referred to it as the “rectification of color”20—with its tonality and hatching, and the addition of sand with its color and granulation, constituted discrete alien fig. 50 George Braque, The Clarinet (La Clarinette), summer–fall 1912, cat. no. 3, under raking light 59 presences within the painting and were therefore unable to exert any influence on color as an entity. Metzinger too was conscious of the problem: “I knew that color and form belong to two different worlds. . .” And again: “Juan Gris was present when Maurice Princet explained to me that it was clearly nonsense pretending to want to unite in one single system color which represents feeling with form which represents system/order.”21 Some of Metzinger’s paintings of this short experimental period are obviously restrained in color.22 While this brought the further development of painterly analytical Cubism to an abrupt close, it also opened up completely new horizons: the layers of meaning had multiplied. With the new techniques of collage, script and paint media, in particular the numerous applications for sand compounds developed in bizarre combinations a poetry of their own and evoked association with sporting events, spatial experiences or impressions of music. Color gained volume by the addition of sand, which did not have to be induced by illusionistic perspectives or chiaroscuro.23 “By this procedure, according to Braque, space becomes ‘palpable’ or ‘graspable,’ for it makes it possible for him, to ‘bring his fellow men to a stage where they want to touch the painting as well as look at it.’”24 In Synthetic Cubism everything, even space, had to be tangible, as if it could be grasped. Reality was no longer represented by these new materials, it was created anew. Tristan Tzara called these fragments of the real world “proverbs of painting.”25 Moreover the message of a color tint was altered by the addition of sand: “The change of tone takes place in painting exactly as it does in music. The fact that Braque changes the effect of one and the same color by the addition of sand, sawdust or paper, corresponds in the musician to the use of different instruments to arrive at the same tone. Since Symbolism one has known that tones, forms and colors have their counterparts. The Cubistic planes that abut against each other are expressive not only of the subdivisions of the syntax and logic of the writer, but of contrast, pauses and overlapping in music.”26 Metzinger went a step further: according to Gleizes he was: “obsessed by the desire to realize the picture as a whole.”27 To make a complete concept possible, the sense of movement must be added to the senses of sight and touch. He sought a flexible perspective i.e. mobility in space and time. Gleizes commented later on this development as follows: “So between 1911 and 1914 Cubism develops from the concept of the ‘solid’ (volume) to the concept of ‘mobility’ (cinématique), which finally destroys the Renaissance unity of perspective.”28 Yet let us look again at the state of the cycling field. Gris is to be reckoned as one of the strongest in the peloton, a member of both the Bateau Lavoir team and the Puteaux Group, together with whom he contributed to the Salon exhibitions. At the end of 1912 he included stenciled letters and numbers in his now unusually colorful paintings. As early as April 1913 the artist for the first time mixed sand into paint in Playing Cards and Glass of Beer (1913, fig. 53). Like his models (Picasso and Metzinger), he set sand in accurately defined planes of color; smooth areas of the picture plane alternate with pastose layers of paint (e.g. the beer froth) and granular sand-oil-pastes depending on aesthetic need. He seems to have borrowed the compositional idea of vertical gradations set off against displaced strips of painting from Metzinger’s Portrait of Albert Gleizes (1912, fig. 52), just as other procedures of his such as papier collé, wood imitation and combing are adopted at the same time. Gris used sand a great deal until 1919, sometimes extensively over the whole picture, sometimes confined to isolated areas, but always mixed with oil paint. In the end he came to prefer to reproduce collages and structures only in a mimetic fashion with paint. Gleizes follows Gris at a distance. A close friend of Metzinger’s, as painter, writer and theoretician of Cubism, he played an important part in the Puteaux team. He first used sand in his painting in 1915, as in Brooklyn Bridge (private collection),29 an impulsive, independent, almost fig. 51 Details of the central portion (to the left and to the right of the clarinet respectively) of Georges Braque, The Clarinet, cat. no. 3 and fig. 50, under raking light 60 abstract composition, in which Gleizes elaborated the shaded areas with additions of sand. Through ca. 1920 he painted several important works using sand.30 In other new painting techniques, such as papier collé, collage and combing (with the exception of printed letters) he had no further interest. Cubism, once lively, became visibly ossified in the sterile oversimplifications of a deadlocked theory due to Gleizes’ didactic and academic character. Louis Marcoussis gradually shrugged off Braque’s influence ca. 1912 and joined the Section d’Or. In 1914, in two of his pictures, Still Life with Tabacco Scaferlati (Nature morte au Tabac Scaferlati, formerly collection of A. Lefèvre, Paris) and Still Life with Tear-off Calendar (Nature morte à l’éphéméride, private collection) he pasted paper labels, which in 1912, for example in Still Life with Chessboard (Nature morte à l’échiquier, private collection) he had rendered mimetically with paint. Stippled shadows, as in Matches with Byrrh (Le Pyrogène Byrrh, Kunsthalle, Bielefeld),31 wood-grain and stenciled letters in the works of 1914 herald his conversion to Synthetic Cubism, which, linked him stylistically and spiritually to Braque. Only a few paintings by him with sand are known. An example is The Regular (1920, cat. no. 7), an austere vertically designed composition, structured and loosened through combing, imitation of wood and the addition of sand into the color. Marcoussis avoided the hardening of forms and edges which occurred with Gleizes and Metzinger. His paintings after the war have a mechanical effect, a sensitive, almost nervously animated line, and a subtle structure of planes and light. Finally “the exotic visitors” from Eastern Europe and Russia add more interest to our field of artists working with sand. Like their Czech colleagues working with sand Emil Filla and Antonín Procházka, the Russians Nadezhda Udaltsova and Liubov Popova were attracted by the quickly spreading reputation of French Cubism and traveled to Paris as early as 1912 to extend their education at the academy of La Palette. Their teacher, Metzinger, taught them the latest sand- and collage-techniques, which they—sometimes all too slavishly—practiced until ca. 1916–17. By 1913 Metzinger and Gleizes’ text Du Cubisme had appeared in Moscow32 and this prepared the theoretical groundwork for the seminal exhibitions of the Russian avant-garde, Knave of Diamonds in Moscow in 1914 and 1916 and Tramway V and O.10 in St. Petersburg in 1915. Udaltsova and Popova exhibited their latest Cubist works in sand there, and would have had a strong influence on those artists who had remained at home. Both, however, soon freed themselves from the often decorative painting of their French role models, and turned instead to the nascent Russian Suprematist movement led by Malevich. In a closing commentary on ‘the race,’ one must acknowledge that both teams were more or less head to head in the invention of new painting techniques. Braque, it is true, experimented with sand as early as the summer of 1911 but did not create significant sand compositions until a year later, whereas Metzinger was confidently deploying sand and collage in his cycling series in the spring of 1912. Braque on the other hand, by introducing stenciled script, combing and imitation wood-grain, gained a length’s advantage. Our hot favorite Picasso only introduced these procedures in fig. 52 Jean Metzinger, Portrait of Albert Gleizes, 1911–12, oil and sand on canvas. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Paris Auction Fund and Museum Works of Art Fund 66.162 fig. 53 Juan Gris, Playing Cards and Glass of Beer (Cartes à jouer et verre de bière), 1913, oil, sand and collage on canvas. Columbus Museum of Arts, Ohio. Gift of Ferdinand Howald 1931.061 61 the autumn of 1912 and so is relegated into third place. In spite of this he is acclaimed by art historians as founder and innovator of Cubism,33 which he certainly deserved, but such acclaim is unjustly carried over to the introduction of new painting techniques. As early as 1916 Kahnweiler attested (not without ulterior motive) that Braque and Picasso were: “. . . the first and greatest Cubists . . . the contributions of the two were closely intertwined,” “[their paintings] often almost indistinguishable,”34 whereby the methodical shifting of attention and devaluation of the other Cubists began and continued in the writings of, for example, Douglas Cooper and Alfred H. Barr.35 In 1911 Ardengo Soffici, poet, painter, critic and joint editor of the leading Futurist journal Lacerba, differentiated forcefully between the works of Picasso and Braque and the Salon Cubists.36 In an article in the journal Nord-Sud 1917 Pierre Reverdy distanced himself vehemently from the painters of the ‘School’: “The first Cubist painters found their own methods. Those who followed in their footsteps did not make enough effort in this. They took over the outward appearance of works which already existed; they have worked in a particular manner and considered in this way that they were beginning a new type of art on their own account. It is time that this was recognised.”37 A mutual flow of influence between the bande à Picasso and the stylistically less coherent, almost bourgeois Sunday circle in Puteaux can be ruled out with a fair degree of certainty, since around 1912 they had scarcely any contact. This was not due to their different circumstances, but rather to their opposing attitudes to exhibitions and concepts of art. The Salon Cubists seized every chance to put their latest works before the public in the Salons and the group exhibitions of the Section d’Or which they organized, while Gleizes pointed out that “Braque and Picasso only exhibited in the Kahnweiler Gallery where we took no notice of them.”38 In the meantime let us close with a positive statement by Apollinaire in his essay Les Peintres cubistes in 1913: “Metzinger, going off to meet Picasso and Braque, founded the city of the cubists.”39 Marcel Duchamp—who was present at the meetings in the family house in Puteaux—reckoned later: “When Cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about.”40 62 Notes 1 Guillaume Apollinaire on Picasso in Les Peintres cubistes, Paris 1913. 2 Others who felt they belonged were Max Jacob, André Salmon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Wilhelm Uhde, Kees van Dongen, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Maurice de Vlaminck, Maurice Raynal and Pierre Reverdy. 3 František Kupka, Fernand Léger, André Lhote, Gris and Francis Picabia also frequented the Sunday Circle in Puteaux. 4 For example, Braque in The Candlestick (Le Bougeoir, 1911, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) and Picasso in Still Life with Fan (L’Indépendant), (Nature morte à l’éventail [L’Indépendant]), summer 1911, private collection). 5 Also called Bar Table (La Table de bar). 6 For example in Still Life on a Piano (Nature morte sur un piano, 1912, Heinz Berggruen Collection, Berlin) or Souvenir of Le Havre (Souvenir du Havre, spring 1912, private collection). 7 On the chronology of the three cycling pictures, see Erasmus Weddigen, pp. 84–97, in this catalog. 8 It is possible that the lettering “CHOCO[L]” in the 1912 painting The Harbour (Le Port, Sara Lee Corporation Collection, Chicago) is also a pasted newspaper clipping. See pl. 15 in Fritz Metzinger and Daniel Robbins, Die Entstehung des Kubismus, eine Neubewertung, Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1990. 9 Although The Clarinet is close in theme to the music-paintings of autumn 1911, especially Clarinette, Bouteille de Rhum sur une Cheminée (Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece, Tate Modern, London), the likely date of the painting is summer-fall 1912: see Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1985, pp. 126–30. 10 Compotier, verre et raisin (Fruit Dish Glass and Grapes, George L. K. and Suzy F. Morris Trust), Compotier, bouteille et verre (Sorgues) (Fruit Dish, Bottle, and Glass [Sorgues], Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and Compotier (Quotidien du Midi) (Fruit Dish [Quotidien du Midi], private collection). 11 Compotier et verre (Fruit Dish and Glass, private collection) and Le Compotier (Fruit Dish, private collection). E. A. Carmean points out that the papier collé Le Compotier and the sand painting Compotier, verre et raisin not only have almost the same measurements (48 x 62 and 50 x 65 respectively) but that the artist has copied the black linear outline of the sand painting exactly. Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, E. A. Carmean Jr., eds., Braque: The Papiers Collés, exh. cat. (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 31 October 1982–16 January 1983), Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1982, p. 90. 12 Statement of 27 September 1912. See William Rubin, Picasso and Braque. Pioneering Cubism, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p. 404. 13 Illustrated in Joann Moser, ed., Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, exh. cat. (The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, 31 August–13 October, 1985), Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985, p. 55, pls. 45-6, with the date 1911–12. 14 On both drawings, the signature and the date below are placed over an erased or threadbare spot on the lower right picture edge and, as is not unusual in Metzinger’s drawings, added later. The undated Johnson charcoal The Cyclist (fig. 65) must be contemporaneous. See Sonya Schmid, Erasmus Weddigen, “Jean Metzinger und die ‘Königin der Klassiker‘, eine Cyclopädie des Kubismus,” Wallraf- Richartz Jahrbuch LIX, Cologne: DuMont, 1998, p. 235 and Rudenstine, op. cit., p. 533. See also E. Weddigen in this catalog, pp. 84–97, n. 73. 15 Illustrated in Moser, op. cit., p. 53, pl. 38. Picasso was already ‘combing’ in the summer of 1912 in his picture Le Poète (The Poet, Kunstmuseum, Basel): the head and moustache of the poet are rendered using the ‘combing’ technique. 16 According to a conversation with Božena Nikiel, a second, now lost, portrait of Albert Gleizes existed. Which of the two pictures was exhibited in the Section d’Or Exhibition 1912 is not known. Furthermore, the authenticity of the image in Rhode Island has been questioned by Nikiel as well as by Metzinger’s widow, who had it removed during a presentation in a Paris gallery. 17 Illustrated in Moser, op. cit., p. 61, pls. 59, 60. 18 Between 1916 and 1918 Woman in the Mirror (Femme au miroir, 1916–17, private collection) and several still lifes such as Fruit and Jug on a Table (Fruit et jarre sur une table, ca. 1918, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) can be designated as representative of other sand pictures where again additions of sand and subtle techniques of applying paint (smooth surface of paint next to parallel broad brush- strokes) enliven individual parts of the picture, yet are not a direct reference, more a reflection of the subject, as exists in Landscape Through an Open Window (Paysage à la fenêtre ouverte, 1915, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes) or The House of the Gate- keeper (La Maison du garde-barrière, 1917, location unknown): with a similarly applied sand and oil mixture Metzinger imitated there the roughcast plasterwork of a room or house façade. 19 “. . . je emploie tes derniers procédés paperistiques et pusiereux. Je suis en train de imaginer une guitare et je emploie un peu de p[o] us[s]ière contre notre [h]orrible toile.” Monod- Fontaine and Carmean, op. cit., p. 41; also in Rubin, op. cit., p. 407. 20 Bernard Zurcher, Georges Braque. Leben und Werk, Munich: Hirmer Verlag 1988, p. 102. 21 Metzinger and Robbins, op. cit., p. 195f. 22 For example Portrait of Madame Metzinger (Lucie Soubiran, 1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art), or Tea Time (Women with a Teaspoon) (1911, fig. 18) and somewhat later At the Cycle-Race Track (cat. no. 11), Portrait of Albert Gleizes (fig. 52), Cubist Composition with Clock (cat. no. 12). 23 See also Rubin, op. cit., p. 58, note 71. 24 Dora Vallier, ”Braque, la Peinture et nous,” Cahiers d’Art, October 1954, no. 1, pp. 13–24, reprinted in L’Intérieur de l’art, Paris: Le Seuil, 1982, p. 16; also in John Richardson, Marilyn McCully, Picasso Leben und Werk 1907–1917, Munich: Kindler, 1997, p. 117. 25 Peter Klaus Schuster, ed., Das XX. Jahrhundert, Ein Jahrhundert Kunst in Deutschland, exh. cat. (Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 4 September 1999–9 January 2000), Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1999, p. 457. 26 Fauchereau 1988, p. 18. 27 Metzinger and Robbins, op. cit., p. 108. 28 Albert Gleizes, Souvenirs, le Cubisme 1908–1914, Lyon: Association des Amis d’Albert Gleizes, 1957, p. 17. 29 Illustrated in Guillaume Apollinaire, Dorothea Eimert, Kubismus, London: Parkstone International, 2010, p. 40. Real and simulated granulation alternate. There is a somewhat later variant in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 30 For example, all of 1917, Stunt Flying (Voltige aérienne), Building Construction (Naissance d’un building), and Clowns (Les Clowns, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris). 31 Byrrh is a French aperitif which was advertised with boxes of playing cards. The title Matches with Byrrh is a word play alluding to the nature of Byrrh as ‘igniting’. 32 In Prague in 1913 extracts of the book had 63 already appeared in the journal Volné Smery (Free Ways) and an English edition was published in London. 33 Even in 1964 Pierre Cabanne wrote: “the time for adventuring had passed, there began the methodical classification of the knowledge acquired by the pioneers, the time of the researchers and evaluators. . . . and they [the Salon-Cubists] only adopted what was superficial, they followed in Picasso’s footsteps but did not concentrate enough on the methods.” Pierre Cabanne, Die Heroische Zeit des Kubismus, Berlin and Stuttgart: Paul Neff Verlag, 1964, p. 286. 34 Rubin, op. cit., p. 45. 35 Rubin, op. cit., p. 46, and Uhde 1928, p. 39. Rubin corroborates this with a bibliography (idem, p. 61, note 117). 36 So-called, as the Puteaux Group exhibited in the Salons des Indépendants and d’Automne. 37 From the first publication of the journal Nord- Sud, “Sur le Cubisme,” by P. Reverdy in April 1917. 38 Albert Gleizes, Bauhaus Buch 13, 1928, reprinted Berlin: Mann, 1980, p. 19. 39 Guillaume Apollinaire 1913, quoted in Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, eds., A Cubism Reader. Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 497. 40 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson 1971, p. 25. 64 Media and the Arts From the Fourth to Nth Dimension? Erasmus Weddigen Recently a physicist told me that in physics they have now discovered that the old third dimension, the mathematical definition of an object according to its Cubist dimensions which up to now has been seen as flawless, is scientifically untenable as long as the fourth dimension of time, of a point in time, is not recognised. By all accounts this fourth dimension has the potential to be adopted, but how is still unclear. It throws all previous mathematics out the window. We are on the edge of something entirely new. Franz Marc1 In 1997, during the restoration of Jean Metzinger’s Cyclist (Le Bicycliste, cat. no. 8), I began to research its historical background. It was necessary to explore the daily and sports newspaper archives in Paris to find historical information on French cycling and in particular the Paris-Roubaix race. Nowadays, instead, in the time of this exhibition, iconographic analysis takes place under totally different circumstances. Search engines and data storages, such as Google, Wikipedia and Wikimedia, make accessible a flood of information. Instead of queuing at library counters, waiting for a book to be delivered, copying the text after finally locating it, with chance discoveries amidst the shelves of the reference library and the often ambivalent contact one has with people when looking for an expert, we are now faced with an overwhelming choice from an abundance of material. The globe has become one swollen udder of an intellectual milking station. The idea of storing information originated at the turn of the fifth century B. C., when Simonides of Cheos developed a system of mnemonics based on images, which later helped Cicero and Quintilian reach the heights of their oratorical skills. Vestiges of this technique were rediscovered by the Humanists in the Renaissance, most notably by the colorful figure Giulio Camillo Delminio (1480– 1544)2 who tried in vain to convince Francis I of France to finance his Teatro della sapienza, a complicated construction in the form of an amphitheater which had different tiers of knowledge that could be rotated and thousands of note compartments (with over 100 million possible combinations), and which was supposed to be able to store the entire world’s knowledge and make it accessible for recall. The conceptual step from the ramified wooden drawer system to our modern networked computers is relatively small; the transformation lies in the fact that now all can digitalize their culture and their knowledge. If one departs from ways of explaining the world through mathematics, physics and n-dimensions as found in the research of today and the past, then one is tempted to place intellect, knowledge, intelligence, memory and conceptualization in another realm of a further, perhaps human biological dimension. Could they be placed in their own drawer so to speak? After the initial attempts made over a century ago by mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and historians3 to explain the fourth dimension as time, duration, movement, force lines, speed, dynamism or simultaneity, we are now, today, faced with fundamental questions about neurobiology and psychology as well as research into consciousness and cognitive function. Just as the painters of Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Rayonism and Vorticism believed that by using the existing three artistic dimensions it was possible to bring a fourth into being, today we are using the extensive ‘terrestrial’ tools of technology at our disposal to find an opening in the field of abstract cognitive ability: does Hieronymus Bosch’s visionary image of the afterlife in Ascension to Heaven (1500-4, fig. 42) depict a portal to a higher dimension? Do we become part of the universal consciousness when we leave a data trail behind? Is the world a pataphysical scramble for the trophy of infinite wisdom? Is the palmarès of the intellectual cyclist the dissolution in the unfathomable primordial soup of divine being? Is the fruit from the tree the proof, or is it actually the dawn of the twice-blessed sapiens sapiens,4 when it is yet to be seen whether it will bring good or evil to mankind? Are we like animals that sense rather than understand the supremacy of the human species? that have an awareness of a future dimension but cannot conceive of it? Is Nietzsche’s Übermensch soon to be a reality, or are the visionary, the genius, the inventor and the discoverer as well as the artist merely microcosmic participants in the next higher biological dimension without realizing it? Does this explain the groping urge to ascend the spiral tower of dimensions? Does its remoteness locate it in another world, closer to the hyper rationality of the next stage of a future, cerebral and genetic evolution?5 Would then the old question “what is art?” be answered with speculations that are oriented towards its own actual 65 qualities, or rather would it not be answered? Were the discoverers, patrons and collectors, the Steins, Kahnweilers and Apollinaires of 1912, gifted with as brilliant a prophetic vision as the artists they supported? Were the -isms that were given to the maieutic contractions of artists simply labels that helped pacify the incomprehension of the masses, who back then just as they do today suspect anything new of charlatanism? Was the fourth dimension only a science fiction dream like Star Wars?6 In the meantime physicists have been rattling at the gates of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which has been one of the foundations of twentieth century knowledge. The latest experiments at the CERN in Geneva and in the caves of the Gran Sasso in the Apennines seemed to challenge the sidereal constant of the speed of light: if the results are really shown to be valid, then all conventional Time-Space concepts would be undermined. Might this perhaps be a keyhole to the next dimension, or was it only a black hole funnel to another human error, simply an error? A fifth dimension was already being described in 1999 by scientists of the Randall-Sandrum model, but they were not able to produce, let alone prove a comprehensible ‘theory of everything.’7 If the many scientists working on fundamental science agree, then the fifth dimension is supposedly smaller than the nucleus of an atom, which could fit the earth and the universe in it together, and so for the average citizen of this planet another paradox is created. Today string theorists reckon there are perhaps as many as ten possible dimensions8 and thereby come unwittingly close to the ten primal powers, or Sephiroth, of the millennia-old Kabbalah. Edwin Abbott’s Flatland romance, a ‘mathematical satire’ from 1884, went as far as a tenth dimension which rests atop of a cloud shown on the original frontispiece (fig. 39). Ian Stewart satirized this in 2001 in Flatterland, in which not even the latest quantum mechanics were spared. Ordinary mortals can hardly imagine a fourth, let alone a fifth or higher dimension (as many as twenty-six according to string theory). So yet again artists are needed to lead the way with picturesque breaches into a higher dimensionality. The pioneer in this field was certainly the Italian Lucio Saffaro (1929–98),9 who, as an artist-mathematician with his graphic theorems and treaties, tried to break down the confines between metaphysics, perspectival geometry and surreal abstraction. Alongside Tony Robbin (b. 1943, see fig. 54),10 there were others that went further such as Paul Laffoley (b. 1940, see fig. 44),11 who in his work The Number Dream (1968) envisioned the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers and arrived at the seventh dimension. Others, such as Manfred Mohr (b. 1938)12 and Frank Richter (b. 1963),13 have tried with their works to progress beyond the third dimension. Although they work on the fringes of the esoteric mostly using electronic media, they have worked with a flat picture plane, barely getting beyond the achievements of the ancestors of the hypercube, the Cubists. The problem of how to depict space for now remains unsolved and awaits new possible means of depiction.14 Since mathematicians cannot replace philosophers, not to mention poets, a painting such as Cézanne’s The Black Marble Clock (fig. 68) will never touch the heart of the observer with the wiry weave of a tesseract or a hypercube, but moves us directly, just as music does. With At the Cycle-Race Track (cat. no. 11) Metzinger had arguably gone beyond painterly perception but subsequently reverted to a haptic and picturesque style of salon painting. But is the inconceivable concept of a fifth dimension ultimately nothing other than the confession of the Faustian fool, “Now here I am, a fool for sure! / No wiser than I was before!”? (Goethe, Faust, I, Night, 358). No. The paths of our thought as we speculate about what we can hardly imagine are the routes we must follow. To plumb the depths of our intellectual endeavors has been our aim, not to explain the world. It is the race that propels the champion, not the victory alone. To return then to the bicycle inside our great theme of ‘Time, Space and Speed’ (pace J.M.W. Turner’s celebrated Rain, Steam and Speed), we present a real cycle moving with its characteristic name of Aria as a vision of the future: a carbon fiber prototype designed and built by Marco Mainardi from Scorzè (in the Veneto), which won the 15th International Bicycle Design Competition in Taipei in 2010 (fig. 55). In riding conditions it weighs no more than 6 kilograms, the weight of the Pavé trophy for the victor of the Paris- Roubaix. Maximum streamlining and a new type of steering system as well as an easily accessible axle connection are all part of this literally breath-taking aesthetic invention. Its beauty is a function of the craftsman’s perfect combination of utility and the designer’s talent for beauty. This is a principle as old as antiquity. A well designed automobile could be “more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”15 fig. 54 Tony Robbin. Fourfield, 1980-81, acrylic on canvas with welded steel rods (detail). Collection of the artist 66 Notes 1 Franz Marc in a letter to Maria Marc, 24 January 1916, from the field before his death at Verdun, on 1 March 1916; in Franz Marc, Briefe aus dem Feld, Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1982, p. 62. 2 For more on this, see Giuseppe Barbieri, “Un segreto europeo: il ‘teatro‘ di Giulio Camillo” in Venezia e l’Europa, l’eredità della Serenissima, Cittadella: Biblos 1998–2011, vol. I, pp. 125–40. 3 Inspiring: Götz Pochat, Erlebniszeit und bildende Kunst, in C. Thomsen and H. Holländer, eds., Augenblick und Zeitpunkt ; Studien zur Zeitstruktur und Zeitmetaphorik in Kunst und Wissenschaften, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984, pp. 22-46. 4 The familiar term homo sapiens sapiens was reformulated in 2003 on the grounds that we are not closely enough related to the Neanderthal. It is perhaps still fitting as a term for when a doubly intelligent human will be resurrected in the future as a computer scientist. 5 A brilliant essay on this topic is Rupert Riedl, Die Strategie der Genesis, Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1984. 6 Falko Blask and Ariane Windhorst, Zeitmaschinen, Mythos und Technologie eines Menschheitstraums, Munich: Athmosphären Verlag, 2005. 7 Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth. Dramatic Discoveries that Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. 8 Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang. A State-of-the- Universe(s) Report, New York: Simon & Schuster 1997; Joseph Silk, The Big Bang, New York: W. H. Freeman & Co. 1989; and Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. From the Big Bang to Black Holes, New York: Bantam Books, 1988. 9 Lucio Saffaro, I luoghi segreti dell’essere e del tempo, Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2011. 10 On Tony Robbin see www.tonyrobbin.net and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non- Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 351–52. 11 Paul Laffoley, American artist and architect, has collaborated in designs for the World Trade Center Tower II. His paintings, combining words and images to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, have been classified as either visionary or outsider art. He explores concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind. 12 Manfred Mohr is considered a pioneer of digital art. After discovering Max Bense’s information aesthetics in the early 1960s, Mohr’s artistic thinking radically changed and, within a few years, his art moved from Abstract Expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer- music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. 13 On Frank Richter see www.4d-screen.de/art-gal/ index.htm. 14 See also Hannelore Paflik-Huber, Kunst und Zeit, Munich: Scaneg Verlag, 1997. 15 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 20 February 1909, in Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, London: Tate Publishing, 2009, p. 21. fig. 55 Marco Mainardi, Aria, 2009-11, Mainardi Design, Scorzé 67 The Astrophysical Dimension Hanns Ruder The relativistic effects are still incomprehensible intuitively, but at least now one can see them. Hanns Ruder In Bern, 107 years ago in 1905, Albert Einstein, an employee of the Swiss patent office, published a paper with the title “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” in the Annalen der Physik1 which formed the basis for the theory of special relativity. In it he broke radically from traditional notions of time and space. Absolute time and space as postulated by Newton were no longer applied in Einstein’s special relativity and so, in one stroke, all the problems stemming from the idea of “luminiferous ether” (the theory of an invisible medium that carried light, popular in the late nineteenth century) were solved: ether simply does not exist. The central statement of special relativity is: in empty space, light travels at a constant speed, independent of the state of motion of the light source or the observer. Together with the principle that no point and no direction in space is special in any way, these fundamental properties of time and space can be deduced: time dilation: moving clocks run more slowly, length contraction: moving rulers are shorter. It is the central statement, however, that is the reason why we are unable to understand the effects of special relativity on a purely intuitive level. They are confusing and contradict our everyday experience of the world. If I am walking towards a ray of light at 90% of the speed of light and measure its speed, I would expect a result of 1.9 times the speed of light and 0.1 times the speed of light if I were walking behind it. In both cases, however, my measurements would always result in the speed of light. Today, after measurements of several different kinds, special relativity has been scientifically proven. We are not familiar with relativistic effects since it is only near the speed of light that they become apparent. At speeds that are relatively low in comparison to the speed of light, the effects are tiny and hardly noticeable. Even speeds as high as 250 km/h (a speed at which most cars are unfortunately electronically capped, and roughly the world speed record for a bicycle) are too slow. The speed of light is 1,080,000,000 km/h (300,000 km/s) and the effects vary as the square of the ratio speed to light speed, so in the above mentioned case, the deviation from our experience is 0.00,000,000,000,005. This is where the idea of the Einstein bicycle comes in. Even with the means available to us today and what might become available to us in the future, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to travel at anywhere near the speed of light. However, computers are becoming increasingly better at creating simulations of what it might be like. So if we create a virtual 3D environment for ourselves and reduce the speed of light to 30km/h then we can cycle through Tübingen, or another bicycle-friendly city such as Bern, almost at “the speed of light.” To explain these strange distortions it is necessary to make the distinction clear between measuring and seeing. To determine the length of a moving stick, readings with a ruler must be taken simultaneously at both ends of the stick. The image that we see, however, is made up of the light that reaches us in the same instance. Therefore we see the beginning and the end of the stick at the moments when the light had to start its journey in order to reach us at the same time. The light from the far end of the stick has a longer distance to travel to us than the light from the near end. Therefore it had to start travelling earlier and, due to the fact that the stick is moving, at this moment the far end was even further away. If the stick is moving towards us close to the speed of light then it appears considerably elongated. (Astonishingly, physicists did not consider this effect although we have known since 1679 that light has a finite 68 speed. It was only in 1959 that Roger Penrose2 and James Terell3 pointed it out and calculated for the first time what fast moving bodies might look like.) In addition to geometric distortions, physically accurate simulations must include the Doppler and Searchlight effects, that is, the picture in the direction of motion is shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum and appears very bright. That leads me lastly to make an almost philosophical observation. If one were really to move close to the speed of light, one would be able to see only big objects comfortably. A flight past the earth would last only a thirtieth of a second; a flight past the sun, barely five seconds. Due to gravity all large objects in our universe are spheres. If, for the sake of simplicity, we wanted at least spheres to always look like spheres, regardless of how quickly one is moving towards them, past them or away from them, then this demand alone would be sufficient to deduce that space-time must have properties consistent with the theory of special relativity. If a science fiction author wants to describe a civilization which covers an area larger than, for example, the solar system, he will immediately be confronted with issues such as the great distances and thus longer duration required for travelling and the transmission of messages. While the ancient Romans were quite able to handle time spans on the order of weeks, we are now talking about years and millennia! This only applies to those staying at home. For those travelling in a space ship to and from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, the journey can be easily managed in 40 years thanks to the special relativistic time dilatations. In the meanwhile 50,000 years will have passed on Earth! The problems due to lack of synchronicity could pose great challenges in creating an interstellar civilization—just consider the implications for a pension insurance system or the implementation of national referendums! The last comment has brought us back down to earth. As sad as it might seem that the fantastic possibilities of space travel, according to the theory of relativity, will likely never become reality, it is all the better that modern computers and high-performance telescopes give us the opportunity to at least enjoy the visual impressions of such a journey. Not only are the resources required for this incomparably lower, but the opportunity is available to everyone, not just a few crew members of a space ship. fig. 56 The relativistic bike and relativistic ride through Tübingen (left) and Bern (right) at 99% of the speed of light, 2004, Color-Physics GmbH, Tübingen fig. 57 Special relativistic visualization of moving and rotating wheels 69 Notes 1 Since 2005, marked as the anniversary year, there has been a permanent exhibition about Albert Einstein in the historical museum of Bern. The flat, located in the Kramsgasse 49 where he lived from 1903 until 1905 during the annus mirabilis, is open to the public. 2 Sir Roger Penrose (b. 1931) is an English mathematical physicist and cosmologist. He invented the Penrose triangle made of three straight beams of square cross-section that meet pair wise at right angles at the vertices. This construction, which in reality is impossible, inspired Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher for his paintings Waterfall (1961) and Belvedere (1958). Penrose also published numerous articles about philosophical themes in popular science literature. An essential finding in the field of cosmology is credited to him and Stephen Hawking, namely the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorem according to which there are no solutions for Einstein’s field equations without singularities (e.g. the Big Bang, the Black Hole). 3 ‘Terrell rotation’ is the name of a mathematical and physical effect. It is the distortion that a passing object would appear to undergo, according to the special theory of relativity, if it were travelling a significant fraction of the speed of light. This behavior was described independently by both James Terrell and Roger Penrose in publications in 1959. Due to an early dispute about priority and correct attribution, the effect is also sometimes referred to as the Penrose- Terrell effect. fig. 58 Albert Einstein at the house of Ben Mayer, Santa Barbara, California, 18 February 1933. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ 70 Forgery and Doping Erasmus Weddigen . . . How I a skillful ape of nature was. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno1 Many a racing cyclist finds himself cheated of a ranking in the palmarès (prize-listing), or suddenly upgraded because a rival has been disqualified: perhaps a competitor has secretly boarded a train at the beginning of the Paris-Roubaix race, or sworn at his race director, or taken an illegal shortcut in a cyclo-cross race, or, nowadays, been caught taking dope. Since cycling began at the end of the nineteenth century those taking part competitively had a record of playing dirty tricks when scrambling up a ranking list. The sports press plays an important part in this; one has only to recollect the unfounded, even absurd rumors of an electrical motor supposedly concealed in Cancellara’s cycle in his Paris- Roubaix victory of 2010. Similarly, in the competitive struggle between artists of brush and easel, little has changed from the Renaissance to the present day. As in the North with imitators of Cranach, Holbein and Rembrandt, so in Venice, in the sixteenth century, artists such as Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese courted influence, precedence and commissions from their ‘sponsors’ in the same way as representatives of modern ‘-isms’ have courted ‘pole position’ among collectors, galleries and exhibition curators for their originality and innovation. Their patrons came from very different social castes: that which earlier the church-going bourgeoisie or privileged families or secular and religious potentates considered important for their self-image is nowadays the material of commerce, critics, curators and public patronage. The era of Cubism offers a fine example of the skirmishes surrounding the palmarès, the question of “who first did this? or that?”—like sprint races in the art world. For a time, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso suspected one another of spying on each other’s work,2 before they peacefully created paintings that were so similar as almost to be attributable to either. In the beginning they jealously concealed their compositional techniques such as collage or combing experiments even from friendly visitors and artists, refusing to take part in exhibitions such as the Section d’Or and disassociating themselves from the Futurists, Orphists, Dadaists and others. Metzinger (or his executors) sometimes pre-dated works, as in one of our Racing Cyclists sketches, in order to claim precocity and priority. Such manipulation continues to the present day: when attributions, especially those of old masters, promote a painting to the oeuvre of a more highly valued artist, or when a work receives higher accreditation through a more favorable dating, or when the dull childhood of fledgling artists’ biographies are excavated for indications of talent and ambition. The forger’s handiwork sometimes brings archaized prototypes of a famous composition to light, to drive competition as high as possible. Disputes over the invention of video-art (Nam June Paik) or of concrete-poured sculptures between Wolf Vostell and Arman have still not been resolved. Lawsuits concerning the originality of prints, whether signed, pre-signed or unsigned, whether by Salvador Dalí or Andy Warhol, have become legion. Nowadays the arena of dispute about patents and primacy of products has moved into the court room; the auto industry only allows its “disguised Erl-kings”3 to take the fast bends at night in unlit streets, and a cold war of the consumer continents of Asia, Europe and the USA still lurks in the spy-like data processing of the Internet. Cycling in the mud of cheating Dante condemned fraudulent alchemists and forgers to the tenth and lowest bolgia of Hell, the most unbearable pit of the Inferno: “Down tow’rds the bottom, where the ministress / Of the high Lord, Justice infallible, / Punishes forgers, which she here records,”4 where only Lucifer in person received those to be punished with leprosy and scabies. The Divine Comedy was written at a time of the most cunning falsification of documents, forgery of reliquaries, and profiteering in indulgences by the most Christian West. Its author was well aware of the lack of morality in the faker’s art.5 71 Probably the first forgery in which the representation of a bicycle played a part was the manipulation of a sketch attributed, if not to Leonardo da Vinci, at least to the master’s pupils Melzi or Salai. This exists in a manuscript page of the Milan Codex Atlanticus (fig. 59). The deception, meant perhaps as a joke, supposedly occurred in the 1960s at the hand of monastic restorers at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.6 This led to several sensational wooden reconstructions of the conveyance (fig. 60), with claims for primacy of which Italy is proud even today.7 In the autumn of 2010 a storm gripped the newspapers of Germany, and to a lesser degree the international press.8 According to these reports a quartet of forgers, the ‘Beltracchi Gang’, had for about twenty years been channeling paintings ostensibly by Cubists, Fauves and German Expressionists into the art market from a geographical area incorporating Cologne, Krefeld, Freiburg im Breisgau and Provence, deceiving numbers of museums, art connoisseurs and gallery owners. The victims were said to have been private collectors, galleries, auction houses: Lempertz, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Henze, Trasteco and others. Though the accused were remanded in custody and, in October 2011, received a mild sentence, as of writing the scale and skill of the supposed deception has perhaps not been fully appreciated: provenances from non-existent collections were created, those of ‘Jägers’ or ‘Knops’; paintings were dated to a time prior to an artist’s celebrity, or when they were shunned or persecuted; titles of documented but unpublished or lost works were recycled; lesser known artists of the second rank were preferred; gallery labels, including one with the woodcut design of the Flechtheim gallery, were forged, and materials artificially aged. Only color analyses, radiography, dendrochronology, and provenance research have brought the hoax to light. The alleged masters went by the name of Heinrich Campendonk, Kees van Dongen, Max Pechstein, Max Ernst, André Derain, Fernand Léger, Louis Marcoussis, Andre Lohte (with a Course cycliste à Bordeaux), and last but not least Jean Metzinger (with two incriminated works, two in oils and one on paper derived from At the Cycle-Race Track, cat. no. 11).9 The gravity of forgery in the art world is matched by that of doping for cyclists. Athletes in antiquity are known to have gorged on questionable stimulants, yet we first learn of chemical drugs from Alfred Jarry in his Supermale (1902), where the 10,000 mile race from Paris to Irkutsk (Russia), between a locomotive and a five-seater racing cycle, was promoted to prove the efficacy of ‘Perpetual Motion food’, a solution of strychnine and alcohol. The murderous stretch over the notorious cobbles of the Paris- Roubaix race established in 1896 might have been an inspiration to Jarry, who in his five-seater race satirized the mania for record-breaking and the adulation of the cyclist as Supermale, as well as the dominance of engineering over the authenticity of life.10 It was not an absurd fantasy if one considers that Toulouse Lautrec was commissioned to design a celebrated poster of a new type of bicycle chain for the manufacturer Simpson (fig. 4),11 and traveled for this purpose to Catford, south London, 26 May 1896, to be present at the race that Simpson organized in order to promote his new invention, to which the press responded by claiming that Simpson had unfairly provided his riders with dope. (Indeed Arthur Linton, one of the Simpson riders in 1896, was likely to have been the first cycling champion to die from ingesting stimulant drugs.) In 1924 the Pelissier brothers reported to a journalist that they were taking drugs: chloroform, cocaine and so-called ‘Dynamite’ pills were found in the jersey pocket of Henri Pelissier. If in the first cycle races the use of chemical substances was rare, trickery of other kinds was common: helpers pushed, pulled, transported hidden cyclists, or enabled cyclists to travel short distances by rail (1904) to gain a time advantage, or they splashed soapy water behind their idol, or dropped tintacks on the route causing riders to crash from punctured tires. In one instance it is said that a well-known champion was disqualified when his drink was sabotaged with poison. Nowadays racing cyclists routinely undergo obligatory checks on physical health and doping. Fortunately the authenticity of our three Racing Cyclists by Metzinger. Is not in question, but their ‘health’ requires monitoring. fig. 60 Model based on the Codex Atlanticus supposedly manipulated drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (fig. 59). Museo del Ciclismo – Madonna del Ghisallo, Como fig. 59 Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus, 133 verso, drawing, not inscribed. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan 72 Notes 1 Forger and necromancer Capocchio, in the tenth bolgia of Hell, executed in Siena on 15 August 1293. “. . . com’io fui di natura buona simia,” Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, XXIX, 139; trad. H. W. Longfellow. 2 See Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, pp. 57–64 in this catalogue. 3 Erl-king, as the name for a disguised car-prototype, originates from a ballad by Goethe written in 1782 and set to music by Schubert. 4 “. . . Giù ver lo fondo là ‘ve la ministra / de l’alto Sire infallibil giustizia, / punisce i falsador che qui registra,” Dante, op. cit., 55-57. 5 On this, exhaustively, the nine volumes by Karlheinz Deschner, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1986-2008. 6 According to the research of the historian of technology Hans Erhard Lessing, presented in August 1997 at the 8th International Cycling History Conference, “The Leonardo da Vinci Bicycle Hoax,” www.cyclepublishing.com/history/leonardo da vinci bicycle.html. 7 Two can be seen in the Museo del Ciclismo, Madonna del Ghisallo, Magreglio (Como). Others are exhibited in museums of technology and touring exhibitions of Leonardo as inventor, such as that currently in the church of San Barnaba, Venice. 8 To be read extensively in the reports of Der Spiegel under the heading “Art Forgeries” of 12 March 2012, 5 March 2012, 27 October 2011, 24 October 2011, 27 September 2011, 29 August 2011, 11 June 2011 and further online texts. The anomalous Flechtheim labels were brought to light by Ralph Jentsch in 2010 (who published a monograph on Alfred Flechtheim in 2008). 9 The Metzinger works are analyzed and illustrated in extenso in www.erasmusweddigen.jimdo.com, under the heading “modernere Kunst.” 10 Alfred Jarry was a keen cyclist and suggested to artists that sporting events, not biblical events, be their inspiration. He rode a Clément de luxe 96 bicycle that he had bought in November 1890 at the steep price of 525 Fr. francs and this remained his trademark until his early death from meningitis in 1907. The journalistic cliché of representing a sporting contest as a biblical ‘Way of the Cross’ led to Jarry’s blasphemous satire “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” (1903). 11 Anna Gruetzner Robins, “Toulouse-Lautrec in Catford: new information about La Chaîne Simpson,” The Burlington Magazine, cliii, September 2011 p. 572-73. 73 At the Cycle-Race Track: A Non-Invasive Investigation of Materials and Pictorial Technique Ferruccio Petrucci, Paul Schwartzbaum Paola Artoni, Davide Bussolari, Lucia Caforio, Maria Elena Fedi, Piero Andrea Mandò, Eva Peccenini, Virginia Pellicori1 Introduction It has been one hundred years since the critical essay Du Cubisme was published by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, and today we believe we have a reasonable understanding of the Cubist movement and how its proponents transformed our perception of reality. However, there is still much to learn about how these ideas found concrete expression in the works of the Cubist masters; for example, which materials were chosen and what criteria were used to determine how space would be represented in these paintings? In Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track (cat. no. 11) the central focus is movement. This not an image of static objects, nor a posed portrait, nor a landscape, but rather a dynamic depiction of an actual event, that was also chronicled in photographs in the magazines and newspapers of the day. Although press photographs may have been the basis for the work, and newspaper clippings are included as collage elements in the piece, Metzinger’s work is his own interpretation of a Cubist reality. The aim of this recent scientific investigation was to gather new information on the technical realization of the work. The materials and pictorial techniques of the artist were investigated using only non- invasive techniques of analysis. No samples were taken of the materials and no physical contact was made with the work of art itself. Brief Technical Description The support of the painting is a fine-weave linen canvas. The paint layer has numerous raised areas of impasto where particles of varying dimensions (from a fraction of a millimeter to several millimeters) were mixed into the oil paint and applied by brush. ill. 1 At the Cycle-Race Track in raking light 74 Observations in natural light: photography in raking light, diffuse light and macro-photography Images taken in raking light make clear that both the particles in the impasto and their distribution are clustered in specifically designated fields of color (ills. 1, 2). With few exceptions (ills. 4, 5) the granules are the same color as the brushstrokes in which they are found (ills. 2, 3, 6, 7). This suggests that the particles of the impasto were mixed into the paint and applied with the artist’s brush, without adhesives. ills. 2 (left), 3 (right) Details in raking light ill. 4 (left) Detail of the viewing stands in the top left of the painting, showing a brownish granule on an area of red paint, in diffused light ill. 5 (right) Enlargement of granule in ill. 3 ill. 6 (left) Detail in raking light ill. 7 (right) Granulometry of dark painted area 75 Macrophotography was carried out to investigate the nature of the aggregate of the impasto. The shape of one of the larger granules is rounded (ill. 8). In other granules, left partially uncovered by paint, the aggregate appears stringy and brown in color (ill. 9), almost as if the material were ‘spongy’. In a radiographic image the granules appear dark at the center (ill. 10). This indicates that they are less dense, and therefore less opaque to X-rays than the paint into which they are incorporated. The examination identified three distinct methods used by the artist to apply paint: - a granular impasto paint, clear examples of which can be seen in ills. 2, 3, and 6; - large, rough brushstrokes of a single color, as seen in the central part of ill. 6; - finer, sometimes dry brushstrokes that do not contain impasto, as seen in the dark edges of the face in ill. 3. Cracking of the paint layer (found mainly in the lower half of the painting, ill. 11) is seen to have originated in the preparatory paint layers, as these cracks traverse areas of different colors On the bicycle handlebar (ill. 12) and in the central area of the painting (ill. 13), significant cracking is visible. These localized zones, which show up white in radiography, appear to be related to corrections or ‘cancellations’ done by the artist in white lead (a very dense, x-ray opaque material). The two collage newspaper clippings show deformation (ill. 14), due to dimensional movement in response to changes of relative humidity at the interface between the paper and the painting surface. A pentimento, a change of composition by the artist, is visible with the naked eye in the fork of the front wheel. The fork was originally meant to be wider (ills. 15 and 16 document this in diffused light). ill. 8 (left) Macro-photograph of a granule in the upper part of the painting ill. 9 (right) Macro-photograph of a granule in the stripes of the stands ill. 10 (left) Radiographic image of granules ill. 11 (right) Detail in raking light 76 ill. 15 High contrast photograph in natural light, pentimento visible in the mechanism of the front wheel ill. 12 (above) Detail of the handlebar in raking light ill. 13 (center) Detail of cracking in central area in raking light ill. 14 (below) The newspaper clipping, on right hand side of the painting, in raking light ill. 16 Detail of the front wheel mechanism in diffused light 77 Ultraviolet fluorescence Fluorescence induced by ultraviolet light was used to examine the surface of the painting and was effective in highlighting some irregularities in the large yellow areas in the center of the work (ill. 17). Several areas fluoresce orange, brown, or green. These probably correspond to retouches done by the artist, especially since they do not correspond to any lacunae in the paint layer. On the other hand, two miniscule retouches on the cyclist’s elbow and leg, covering small lacunae visible in x-ray radiography, are the result of restoration at a later date. ill. 17 Photograph of ultraviolet fluorescence 78 Infrared reflectography and X-ray radiography The photograph taken with infrared light (in the low end of its spectrum) shows a high degree of contrast (ill. 18). In particular, the blacks appear denser and more diffuse than they do to the naked eye in natural light. One of the properties of the black carbon-based pigment used by the artist for much of the painting is a weak reflection in the infrared band. The pigment is applied pure in some parts of the painting, such as when used for the mechanical parts of the bicycle. In other areas it is used mixed with different pigments, as in the series of horizontal bands and the graduated shading at their edges. The photograph also shows many demarcation lines separating areas of different colors that have been retouched or added by the artist in the final stages of his process. ill. 18 (left) Infrared reflectography ill. 19 (right) X-ray radiography ill. 20 (left) Infrared reflectography, detail of the face ill. 21 (right) X-ray radiography, detail of the face 79 A comparison between infrared reflectography and x-radiography (ill. 19) demonstrates that black carbon-based pigments (charcoal and vine black) have a tendency to absorb infrared light but are transparent to x-rays. Thus in radiography they show up dark, if not covered or underlaid by other paint layers of a more x-ray opaque material. Dark lines are present in both the x-radiography and the infra-red reflectography images. This indicates that these lines date from the very beginning of the layout and were never covered with another layer of paint. Dark lines that show up in the reflectography but not in the radiography are brushstrokes that must have been applied only in the final stages of work. Examples of this are seen clearly in several areas: around the edges of the cyclist which border the sky (ill. 20), in the outlines of the arms where they cross the handlebar (ills. 22, 23), and in the matte brushstrokes that articulate the foot holder of the pedal at the bottom of the composition (ills. 24, 25, 26). The two collage newspaper cuttings offer a similar interpretation. Under radiography (ill. 27) they appear dark, indicating that the areas in which they were affixed were not primed with a radiopaque paint (usually lead white) which is present at the edges of the painting. On the other hand, the paper elements reflect infrared light well and show up clearly in reflectography (ill. 28). In addition we are able to read part of the script on the reverse side of the paper clippings, which are distinct in ills. 22, 23 Detail of the handlebar in radiography (left) and infrared reflectography (right) ills. 24, 25, 26 Detail of the foot holder in infrared reflectography (left), radiography (center), and raking light (right) 80 reflectography taken with infra-red light. One can recognize the name of the winner of the Paris-Roubaix race in 1912, even though it is partially covered by a black border painted directly onto the clipping (ill. 29). On the other newspaper element (ill. 30), reflectography shows some names that would have been well-known to sports newspaper readership in 1912. These may be useful in identifying exactly the original publication. Under infrared light it is apparent that the signature of the artist (signed in very thin paint) has been retouched. The artist reworked a few letters, including the initial “M” which shows a smudge in its central part (ills. 31, 32) ills. 27, 28 Thw newspaper clipping in radiography (left) and infrared reflectography (right) ill.29 A high contrast photograph of the newspaper clipping, rotated and flipped to identify the script on the reverse (above); reconstruction of the large script in the paper (center); reflectography of partially obscured script, from the line at the bottom; reconstruction of the script (below). ill. 30 A high contrast infrared reflectography of the second newspaper cutting, flipped to identify the script on the reverse (above); and superimposed reconstruction of the script (below). ills. 31, 32 Signature in infrared reflectography (above) and raking light (below) 81 Conclusions The results of the investigation lead us to the following hypotheses. The original layout of the forms in space by the artist is suggested by the dark lines, visible in the radiography images which document the use of dark, x-ray transparent pigments (ill. 33). By studying all the lines that we can see under the different means of visual investigation, but which do not correspond to the currently visible outlines, we can reconstruct a possible earlier version of the composition that is slightly different, varying subtly in the body of the cyclist (ill. 34). In the final version of the painting, all the lines that delineate spatial composition have lost their dark color and are evident only through contrast with other colors. However, the dark outlines are not only preserved, but they also display graduations of tone in the relief of the figure. The artist has used diagonal lines to construct the polygonal body of the cyclist, as well as to describe his power and movement. In contrast, rectangles and polygons developed with horizontal lines are found only in the static background. The main figure, the bicycle, and the racetrack are modified and developed together with the same lines that outline the forms. The background remains almost like its photographic source, and is visible through the transparent body of the main subject. Speed is represented with horizontal lines on the racetrack and the circular lines on the wheel of the second cyclist. The artist links his composition to reality by including actual newspaper clippings that reported the event and simulating the gravel of a racetrack by adding the granulated impasto. ill. 33 Layout lines and outlines visible under radiography. In red, the dark lines visible only in the radiography image; in green, the dark lines visible also to the naked eye; in blue, the lines formed by the border between two contrasting colors ill. 34 Reconstruction of the composition of the painting. In orange, the composition of space; in green, the composition of the figure. 82 The colors of At the Cycle-Race Track To study the artist's palette, x-ray fluorescence (XRF) was used, a technique widely practiced today to detect the presence of chemical elements without the need to take physical samples. With the exception of organic compounds, most mineral pigments can be identified by detecting only one or two of their elemental components. The analyses were taken at 68 points on the painting, selected based on the above investigations. A summary of the analysis provides the following qualitative information on the palette that Metzinger used for At the Cycle-Race Track. mixture of Zinc White and a small amount of Lead White was used in the overall preparation of the canvas, while the white details, like the banners in the background, were painted with Lead White alone. : for the intense black colors, an organic carbon- based pigment was used, which was also mixed with Zinc White to create shades of gray. : three yellows – Zinc, Cadmium, and Mars – were mixed with white to form the wide central fields of the painting. The intense yellows of the background details were shown by UV fluorescence to be almost pure Zinc Yellow. : the various shades of orange, seen in the flesh of the cyclist, were not obtained with a pure orange pigment, but rather with a mix of Red Cinnabar (also known as vermillion) and one of the aforementioned yellows, in most cases probably Cadmium Yellow. : Red Cinnabar, used almost pure in all the vibrant red details in the background, is distinguishable from the other reds because of the presence of mercury in the composition of the pigment. By contrast, the large building in the background owes its red brick color to a change by the artist. The initial version included eleven windows, recognizable in radiography and faintly visible to the naked eye. They were most likely painted with Zinc Yellow, but then their shapes were filled in with Red Cinnabar. An iron based red (either Red Ochre, Red Earth, or Mars Red) was used to cover the previous version and unify the appearance of the building. : for blue pigments, since neither copper nor cobalt was detected by analysis, Azurite and Cobalt Blue can be ruled out. Because of minimal traces of iron, Prussian Blue must be excluded from consideration as well. Therefore Ultramarine Blue and Indigo remain as likely candidates for the pigments used. : the dark green of the cyclist’s shirt is a compound made of copper and arsenic, most likely Emerald Green. The other bright green, used on the bicycle that precedes the main figure, is probably Guignet Green, a compound of chromium and zinc. Addendum: dating of canvas At the end of the investigation of the paint film, a 0.5mm x 0.8mm sample of the un-painted canvas of the tacking edge, was taken. It was subjected to radiocarbon dating. The fragment was divided into two parts, which were subjected to the chemical preparation needed to extract the carbon content and to measure the isotopic composition. The two samples thus obtained were measured with Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) at LABEC, laboratory of Florence. The measurement of Carbon 14 allows us to date vegetable or animal samples in relation to its concentration in the atmosphere by comparison to established tree ring data. The concentration of Carbon 14 in the last two centuries is usually characterized by great uniformity. However because of the large increase in the concentration of radioactive Carbon 14 which resulted from the short and intense period of nuclear testing in the atmosphere, we can differentiate between organic material produced before or after 1955. Thus we can determine whether a painting was made before 1955. Indeed based on the concentration of Carbon 14 measured, the samples of canvas from At the Cycle-Race Track were consistently attributable to the calendar period 1665-1952. This obviously is consistent with the historical dating of the painting to the early twentieth century. 1 Ferruccio Petrucci of the Dipartimento di Fisica, INFN and Laboratorio TekneHub, Ferrara; Paul Schwartzbaum of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York; Paola Artoni, Laboratorio analisi non invasive Arte antica, moderna e contemporanea, Università di Verona; Davide Bussolari, Diagnostica di opere d’arte Fabbri, Modena; Lucia Caforio Laboratorio LABeC, Università and INFN, Firenze, and Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Ferrara; Maria Elena Fedi, Laboratorio LABeC, Università and INFN, Firenze; Piero Andrea Mandò, Laboratorio LABeC, Università and INFN, Firenze; Eva Peccenini, Dipartimento di Fisica and Laboratorio TekneHub, Ferrara; Virginia Pellicori, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università Ferrara. 2 “La tavolozza di ‘Au Velodrome’ di Jean Metzinger,” to be published in Progetto Restauro, Ed. Il Prato, Padova. 83 Metzinger’s Racing Cyclists The Race of 1912, and Its Protagonists Erasmus Weddigen Futility was a novel by the American author Morgan Robertson (1861–1915) published in 1898, describing the sinking of the steamer Titan, built for breaking records and considered unsinkable, when in the month of April it rammed an iceberg in the North Sea. On Easter Sunday, 7 April 1912, the Titanic, an ocean-going giant lies peacefully in Dock 44 at Southampton, taking on coal for its hopefully record-breaking maiden voyage on the 10 April. The American copper magnate Benjamin Guggenheim (1865–1912), 47 years old, will have been thinking on that very day of the presents to be packed for his journey to New York, where his 13 years old daughter Marguerite, later to be called Peggy, is waiting for him. At six o’clock that morning the still comparatively unknown 25 year old French racing cyclist Charles Crupelandt with “13” as his starting number was preparing in Chatou for his cycling competition, the ‘Hell of the North’, to Roubaix. At six o’clock in the morning of Palm Sunday 2012 Fabian Cancellara is preparing for his Tour of Flanders, as a sunny palmares prologue for the Paris-Roubaix race, but. . . . Futility obliges. The Swiss study The restoration of Jean Metzinger’s Cyclist (Le Bicycliste, cat. no. 8) provoked interesting iconographical (its sporting subject) and iconological (its place in systems of thought and avant-gardist painting in Paris at the time) questions surrounding all of Jean Metzinger’s paintings on the subject.1 This was all the more so as the author was a Cubist painter to some degree emarginated by history and criticism owing to the prominence given instead to Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. This small painting was in some ways a first attempt by Metzinger to unite Futurist theories of movement in painting, new ideas of pictorial simultaneity, and the representation of the fourth dimension, together with Cubist principles of the organization of the picture plane and the relations between space, volume and color values. Before a shallow background of yellow, white, orange and red geometric fields of color, a racing cyclist (identifiable as such by his helmet,2 by a horizontally striped jersey, and by the number “4” on his back), is seen in profile on a partially visible bicycle with slightly downward-curving handlebars. That the artist presumably applied roughly the principles of the Golden Section to the vertical division of the planes is natural considering his interest in mathematics3 and geometry, his earlier efforts as a pointilliste and, in the final analysis, his membership of the Section d’Or group. A rising diagonal on the left, reinforced in black, and two flags in the French national colors indicate a grandstand. A similar flag appears in At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome, cat. no. 11)4 but in a spatially realistic context. A further topographical indication is the white plane in the background, accentuated by a granular admixture, that evokes with literalness the sandy track of an outdoor stadium or an indoor arena.5 While Metzinger facets the body planes of the racing cyclist in a Cubist manner, the figure’s contours remain realistic, and even the bicycle is depicted (with an indication of wheel spokes) in a realistic, non-Cubist manner. The champion gives the impression of being static, although his backward glance suggests that he is being pursued, and the hatching of the spokes and the forward bend of the body imply forward motion. Metzinger endeavored to enliven his surfaces with subtle variations in the application of color: adjacent to smooth sections of paint (flesh tint, numéro du dossard), discernible brushstrokes (yellow and red background) and areas of light impasto, the application thickens to textured surfaces with admixtures of sand (jersey and light-gray background). The white, thinly applied ground stops short of the upper corners of the picture edge. The paint color and the signature lie directly on the board support, the initial bright beige tone of which Metzinger uses to advantage, as he does the fibrous, unvarnished surface. The rather murky but characteristic black signature, “JMetzinger,” damaged by framing, is childishly stiff. Compared to At the Cycle- Race Track the use of transparent or overlapping planes, and emphatic contouring is tentative, serve mainly to divide and mark out the individual facets of color without any dynamic intention. The image is dominated by the cyclist’s body. The black lines of the cycle are incidental and at best constitute, graphically, a stable triangular base on which the rider is placed. A look at the grid lines in the diagram in figure 62 corroborate this. The thin blue lines are the halving and quartering of the picture plane in units, overlaid with intersecting orthogonals.6 The yellow lines are based on the Golden Section. The tentative approach to the way the rider is configured convinces us that Metzinger was analyzing here a racing cyclist’s pattern of movement for the first time. 84 At the Cycle-Race Track in Venice In the Guggenheim’s At the Cycle-Race Track (cat. no. 11) the intention becomes clear of making the sportsman’s final spurt and victory a direct experience. As proposed by the Futurists, the viewer is placed “in the center of the picture,”7 where one has indeed the sensation of being about to be run over by man and machine. The alignment of perspective of the arena at the cyclist’s shoulders is a vector for channeling, even for accelerating the apparent speed of the rider, whose representation make uses of half impressionistic, half Cubist solutions. The flutter of a tricolore emphasizes both the direction of the race and offers a narrative note: the following wind will help the rider to victory. Whereas in the studies in oils (cat. nos. 8, 9) our cyclist conveys more the impression of a lone rider, in At the Cycle-Race Track, by the addition of a rival’s rear wheel on the left picture edge, Metzinger has us witnessing a duel. Until moments ago the cyclist, in second place, was saving his strength by staying in the lee of the leader, enabling him in the last meters of the race to make a Herculean effort to pass his opponent. All that can be seen of the leader in At the Cycle-Race Track is the spinning wheel and his green racing shorts. The surface on which the challenger is overtaking is a fleeting blur of the irregularities of the terrain, except for the area in the background with its broad stretch of sand, its sharp-edged ins-and-outs anticipating the overtaking movements of the cyclist’s spurt in simultaneous time and place. The speed of the prospective victor is such that head, neck and right arm flash past with schematic transparency before the crowds of spectators in the grandstands, the rider’s flat oval face retaining little individuality despite the description of wavy hair, with central parting, beneath a close-fitting, ‘pudding basin’ helmet. The introduction of black in the wheels and rider has both graphic and descriptive intention. The hard lines count as anti-impressionist contour and add emphasis to the depiction of automation: the hard, tactile edges of the bicycle and the blurred rectilinear contours of the rider, with his fleeting lack of volume, look like a trespass on Italian Futurist territory. At the Cycle-Race Track illustrates the strain of this finale in the ghostly, simultaneous rendering of a second curved handlebar and in the emphatic contouring of the clenched fists: a sprinter, making maximum effort against his protagonist, rises off his saddle, hurling his bike in rocking movements from side to side to hold his body bent forward without loss of strength or stability, allowing him fig. 61 Structure analysis of Jean Metzinger, Cyclist (Le Bicycliste), 1912, cat. no. 8 fig. 62 Structure analysis of Jean Metzinger, Racing Cyclist (Coureur cycliste), 1912, cat. no. 9 85 to concentrate exclusively on his pedaling. Let us look more closely at how Metzinger accomplished this. Metzinger appears to have used grids (fig. 63) not as a rigid diagram but as guidelines for fixing the angles of the arms, the locations of the wheel hubs (at one eighth and one quarter of the height of the canvas), the location of the cyclist’s head forward of the vertical axis and his torso behind. The dotted green lines drawn between the front and the rear wheel hubs are, correctly, parallel to the main axis of the bike from handlebars to saddle, and in turn parallel with the white arena barriers. However the rear wheel tilts away from this axis. If one reconstructs the deflection angle of the second handlebar (the thick white lines with the arrow) and compares it with the incongruous oval of the rear wheel, one discovers that its divergence is specular (the acute angle that marks the axial difference between the two handlebars is equal to the acute angle that would be created when the axes of the two wheels, the white dotted lines, intersect). In other words, while the forward wheel is aligned with the upright handlebars, the rear wheel is deflected in the opposite direction to the second, silhouetted, swiveled handlebars. The dotted red arrows at the wheel hubs confirm this lack of alignment. (Such deformations are particularly astonishing because Metzinger can hardly have been aware of a famous photograph taken by Jacques-Henri Lartigue at the Grand Prix de la Seine in Paris on 26 June 1912—a Delage, with its wheels warping into ovals and the spectators tilted in the opposite direction.) Handlebars and wheels are portrayed in a displacement of time-space; the physical transparency of the rider is superimposed on the stands, because in the meantime he has moved forward by a span of space-time. Sand is painted into both the sky and grandstand area, as if whipped up by breakneck speed. The number “4” that was attached to the rider’s back in the Swiss study has migrated to the grandstand fence, presumably indicating the number of laps to the finish. The drawings for At the Cycle-Race Track Both of Metzinger’s drawings of cyclists are preparatory to At the Cycle-Race Track. The one now in the R. Stanley Johnson Collection (fig. 64) with its charcoal shading, focuses on a geometric rendering of the stadium and its track, and on the localization of areas for the application of real sand. Places for the future collages (“PARIS-RO” and “PNEUM”) are already assigned. fig. 63 Structure analysis of Jean Metzinger, At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome), 1912, cat. no. 11 fig. 64 Jean Metzinger, Study for At the Cycle-Race Track, 1912, charcoal on paper. R. Stanley Johnson Collection, Chicago 86 The drawing in the Centre Pompidou, Paris (cat. no. 10), in its mise en page, sets up the vertical format similar to that of the painting. The date 1911 is written in pencil below the signature in the lower left. If authentic and accurate, this would contradict the dating of the preparatory drawings and of At the Cycle-Race Track (see below). However both this and the signature are written over an abrasion or erasure in the lower right hand corner and, as is not infrequent in Metzinger’s drawings, seem to have been added later,8 a circumstance that has also led to unjustifiable doubts being cast on their authenticity. The texts once again are in place where one reads “PARIS [RO]” but also the nonsensical “PNEON[M]ATIQU”). A plausible, even charming hypothesis may explain this. At the Cycle-Race Track remained in Metzinger’s atelier until it was shipped to New York, where it had its first public showing in early March 1915 in the Carroll Galleries. Recent X-rays of the painting (see p. 79 in this catalogue) reveal that the second racing cyclist was added, like an afterthought, during the last phase of the work. Thus the sketches would have shown the forward moving cyclist without the other. The seemingly clumsy ‘additions’ to the Paris drawing are limited to the script, the otherwise ‘missing’ spokes of the wheels, and the crooked outline of the rival’s back wheel as he speeds ahead. The hand that was making these additions would have had the completed painting to refer to, although instead of writing “PNEUS,” it wrote the misspelt “PNEONATIQU” up to the margin of the sheet. Who might have done this? The script is clearly in a childish hand. Metzinger’s daughter Odette was born on 25 December 1909 and between April 1912, when the painting was finished, and winter 1914— when it was transported to the USA—she was three to five years old. Allowing for a certain artistic talent, she may have ‘annotated’ sketches lying around in the atelier: a wheel is missing, wheels must have spokes! and as for “Pneumatiques,” newspaper scraps in the studio would have included similar advertising. Perhaps she even ‘signed’, something which someone later rubbed out, to provide a proper authentication. That Odette, when she grew up, drew fairly well, and that she ‘assisted’ Metzinger in his atelier, is confirmed by Božena Nikiel. The Helft Racing Cyclist In addition to our Swiss Cyclist and At the Cycle-Race Track in Venice, there exists a recently rediscovered Racing Cyclist (Coureur cycliste, cat. no. 9), in oil on canvas, larger than the former and smaller than the latter. It belonged formerly to the collector Jorge S. Helft, Buenos Aires, whose father bought the painting in New York in 1940,9 and is now in a private collection. The state of conservation is, like At the Cycle-Race Track, astonishingly good, despite the use of a rather fine and fragile canvas; furthermore it is stretched with inflexible battens with a crossbar in the middle. An adhesive label on the crossbar identifies the subject as “un cycliste no. 2”. It shares with the Venice painting a dark brown border running round the edge, as well as the use of sand in the pigments. The diagonal grandstand wall is composed of white, vertical slats covered with gaily colored posters advertising fig. 65 Jean Metzinger, Nude (Nu à la cheminée), 1910, oil on canvas, dimensions and location unknown fig. 66 Jean Metzinger, Still Life (Nature morte), dated “4-18”, medium, dimensions, location unknown 87 various products (a cycle wheel10 with the inscriptions “MEILLEUR” [best] and “[INCRE]VABLE” [unpuncturable],11 a green poster with “CY[CLES]”, and the numbers “125” over “145”12 and finally in the background on the right “PNEU” (missing either “S” or “MATIQUES” followed by a brand of tire). The “4” on the grandstand post in the Venice painting and on the cyclist’s back in the Swiss study is seen here on the upper right arm of the cyclist, as was normal in indoor races (which are run anticlockwise) so as to be visible to the public. The nomadic number, which appears in all versions of the Racing Cyclist, leads a sort of triple life, as reality, anecdote and symbol. In any case it is evident that Metzinger attached special significance to it, perhaps even ironically applying Jarry’s pataphysics.13 Nikiel has observed that the Helft version and the Guggenheim version take place in different locations: in the one an indoor-race track, perhaps the covered Vel d’Hiv in Paris, often the preferred venue for national racing, and in the other the open-air vélodrome of Roubaix. This explains, in the former, the closer proximity of the grandstands, the steeply sloping wooden floor with shadows cast by the arena lighting, and the accumulation of advertising posters, but also the different postures of the cyclists: the one that of a relaxed victory lap, the other manifesting the sweat and strain of the last stages of a duel. In the Helft painting the handlebars have almost lost the inward curve visible in Cyclist and more nearly resemble those in At the Cycle-Race Track. The pedal and toe-strap can now be seen. The hunching of the back, the more vertical positions of the arms and legs, the streaked lines of the arena, and the dynamic of the cycling motion all lie midway between the first oil sketch and the Venice version. There is now a tentative transparency of the cyclist’s head, on which the letters “CLES” from the poster behind are imprinted. This, the shaded semi-circles of the wheels, and the track-colored stripes on arm and thighs and on a part of the unusually finely patterned jersey, reveal Metzinger employing transparency and Cubist intersecting planes to represent speed. The angle of the cyclist’s head is somewhere between the awkward turn of the earlier version, and the focused, forward gaze of the cyclist in At the Cycle-Race Track. It is as if we are looking at a lap of honor. There is no hint of pursuit. The vivid coloration of this painting would also seem to place it chronologically between the first sketch on board and the Venice painting. Compared with the earlier version the cyclist has gained in proximity and speed. As with the Swiss study the thin blue grid (fig. 62) does much to determine the location of the cyclist on the canvas, but the axis of the now more prominent bicycle, as visualized by the dotted green line, is clearly parallel to the streaked wooden floor, and the upper and lower edges of the arena barrier, introducing the components of a higher viewpoint (we have become spectators of the race) and of swift passage. Formal complexity and multiplication of forms in At the Cycle-Race Track, caused by the rocking of the bicycle in pursuit, emerges now not only as an enrichment both of the iconography of the series of Racing Cyclists (the illustration of a sprint) and of their iconology (a profounder illustration of space-time as the fourth dimension). On 10 February 1916 the American collector John Quinn acquired both At the Cycle-Race Track and the Racing Cyclist, after both had been on view in the Carroll Galleries, New York (8 March–3 April 1915). The purchase was preceded by a lively correspondence between Quinn, the gallery manager or secretary Harriet Bryant, and the artist, or rather his brother and agent Maurice Metzinger.14 Drawings or earlier studies were not mentioned, and nor is there any indication of their existence in the catalogue of John Quinn’s collection. fig. 67 Paul Cézanne, The Black Marble Clock (Le Pendule noire), c. 1870, oil on canvas. Private collection fig. 68 Structure analysis of Jean Metzinger, Cubist Composition with Clock (Composition cubiste à l’horloge), ca. 1912–13, cat. no. 12 88 The dating of the Cyclists The formal and iconographic evolution of the Helft canvas with respect to the Swiss study, and its affinity with the Guggenheim painting, allow one to suggest that the Swiss study in oils, Cyclist, preceded them both. It was signed by Metzinger on the obverse, and the date “1912” was added subsequently (probably in the early 50s), when the Swiss collector (who died in 2005) acquired it from a Parisian dealer: Metzinger wrote his authentication on the verso in blue ballpoint pen: “Je certifie que ce tableau / a été exécuté en 1912 / Metzinger”. (The Biro Brothers stylo à bille first appeared on the market in the 50s.15) The Guggenheim painting has provided until now no clear evidence for its date. In 1985 Angelica Rudenstine hesitantly dated it “ca. 1914 (?)” and wrote: “The dating of Au Vélodrome presents problems that are characteristic for Metzinger. Few of his works were dated at the time of execution, and a satisfactory chronology of his oeuvre remains to be undertaken.”16 She then hazarded the following: “By retaining three dimensional modeled forms and traditional perspective in parts of the composition while suppressing them in others, as he did in his landscapes of ca. 1913–14, Metzinger suggests the degree to which he continues to be drawn to traditional modes of representation.”17 Evidence emerges from an examination of the two small pasted papers, with both the naked eye and with photo-analytic and radiographic images carried out by Ferruccio Petrucci and Paul Schwartzbaum, and published for the first time in this catalogue. The pasted newspaper cutting in At the Cycle-Race Track worded “PARIS-ROUB” refers us to the famous, annual one-day race Paris-Roubaix. From Paris (the starting line was in Chatou in the outskirts of Paris), the approximately 266 km long course led via St. Ouen, Beauvais, Breteuil, Amiens, Arras, Henin, and Seclin to the northern French industrial town of Roubaix on the Belgian border.18 The race, originated by directors of the Roubaix winter racing track (Théodore Vienne and Maurice Perez), dates back to 1896 and grew in fame into the ‘Queen of the Classics’ of professional cycling. Its popularity—for the 17th anniversary of the race in 1912, 10,000 sports fans are said to have crowded the stadium —was attributable not least to the murderous stretches of 60km of cobblestones and unsurfaced roads. Newspaper reports from the pre- Easter period of that year (as they do still) call the notorious ride the ‘Hell of the North’, for its numerous punctures, drop-outs, casualties due to falls, and tire damage. A delirious, flower-throwing public lined the streets, where dust would fill the riders eyes; even worse were the hundreds of tacks (‘les hideux clous’) strewn by the ‘bandits de la route’ near Doulens, causing devastation to inner tubes on a catastrophic scale. Metzinger plays on these ‘difficulties’ in a second newspaper collage “PNEUS” on the grandstand barriers. The sand-textured track and the gray streaking may describe either the unmade roads or the optical blur of cobbles at high speed. As observed by this writer in 1997 and published in 1998,19 the words “1er CRUPELANDT, sur LA FRANÇAISE”, fig. 69 (Above) Verso of Jean Metzinger, Cyclist (Le Bicycliste), 1912, cat. no. 8 fig. 70 (Right) Verso of Jean Metzinger, Racing Cyclist (Coureur cycliste), 1912, cat. no. 9 fig. 71 Jean Metzinger, Still Life at the Café (Nature morte à la cafetière), 1912, pencil on paper. Musée national d’art moderne centre Georges Pompidou, Paris fig. 72 (Opposite page) Octave Lapize, with n. “4”, crossing the Tourmalet Pass on foot, La Vie au Grand Air, 30 July 1910, no. 619, p. 550 89 though partially obliterated by the black border, can be read below the words “PARIS-ROUB[AIX]”, a clipping that will have originated from a sports periodical such as L’Auto or L’Aéro (fig. 73). The racing cycle manufacturer La Française, unbeaten for many years, is recommending its star product, the Diamant model “à direction tricolore”’—the last word in advertising phrases that conjures up the fluttering national tricolores in each of the versions of Metzinger’s racing cyclists.20 Charles Crupelandt was the victor of the Paris- Roubaix in both 1912 and 1914. He was clean-shaven and wore his hair like a dandy, wavy with a central parting— characteristics which are visible in the painting. He rode a racing Diamant by the cycle manufacturer La Française (his tires were supplied by Dunlop). As revealed by Petruccio and Schwartzbaum, the words “NOUS OFFRONS” are printed on the verso of the “PARIS-ROUB[AIX]” clipping. This would seem to be a fashion advert, which is only interesting to the degree to which it may help to identify the source of both clippings (which has not been possible as of writing). More important is the fragment with “PNEUS”. Printed on the verso of this are the names of the “Administrateurs” Robert Coquelle21 and Fernand Bidault22 as well as that of the tennis player André Gobert, all of them prominent sports personalities in 1912. Gobert (1891–1954) was a champion French tennis player (on the verso of the “PNEUS” clipping also appears a fragment of a heading “[T]ENNIS”). He achieved his first great successes in 1911. He was the doubles tennis and indoor singles champion of the May 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, but soon after was defeated by the great Max Decugis in the French Open (now the Roland Garros), June 1912. On 9 April 1912, two days after the Paris-Roubaix- race, he won the International Covered Courts tournament against Maurice Germot. The words “. . .redevenir le Gobert. . .”, legible on the clipping, presumably expresses the hope (“nous nous plaisons. . .”) that he might win the following day. Thus the clipping “PNEUS” can convincingly be dated 8 April 1912, when Crupelandt’s Paris-Roubaix victory would have appeared in all the newspapers, and this in turn confirms for us the 1912 dating of At the Cycle- Race Track. The circumstances of the 1912 race (see below) confirm that we have before us the spectacle of Charles Crupelandt about to triumph in the 1912 Paris-Roubaix race. Allowing that one can give credit to the accuracy of Metzinger’s memory a few years before his death in 1956, the Swiss Cyclist provides for us, on the verso of its support, a 1912 terminus post quem. All three works must have been painted at short intervals in 1912 (first the Swiss Cyclist, then the former Helft collection Racing Cyclist, then the two pencil and charcoal drawings, and finally the Guggenheim’s At the Cycle-Race Track)—the first two works preceding, and the others following the Paris- Roubaix race of 7 April 1912. The race of 1912 Each of Metzinger’s cyclists depict spectator grandstands, barrier advertising and, in the case of At the Cycle-Race Track, a duel as lifelike as if Metzinger had used as a source illustrations or reports from a sports magazine (even allowing for the possibility that he himself was present in Roubaix as a sports fan). In 1912, as reported in the sports paper L’Auto, the last lap was a sprint for victory between two riders. On Sunday afternoon, 7 April, the 25-year old Charles Crupelandt (number “13”, figs. 77, 78), the local hero, and Gustave Garrigou (known as ‘Lord Brummell’23 and the ‘éternel deuxième’, fig. 12), raced together round the sandy track of the cycling stadium in Roubaix’s Parc Barbieux, following the dramatic tumble of the earlier leader Maurice Léturgie, to contest the last two kilometers of the contest in six circuits of the 300m long stadium. Crupelandt was one of the youngest participants and won by two lengths from Garrigou after an eight hours and thirty minutes ride that, with an average speed of 31kph, missed breaking the record by only minutes.24 Octave Lapize (fig. 76), winner in each of the three previous races, and record holder, came in fourth place (250m) after colliding with Garrigou, behind third placed Léturgie (200m). Thus the Guggenheim painting chronicles Crupelandt’s sprint to overtake Garrigou ahead of him. In 1914 instead, his victory was a solitary one.25 If for comparison one goes back to the 16th Paris- Roubaix of 16 April 1911, one finds Lapize as solitary leader turning into the sports stadium four minutes ahead of the rest of the field. There was no head-to-head contest: Lapize won convincingly, for the third time. Photographs fig. 73 L’Aéro, 1 July 1912. Bibliothèque national de France, Paris fig. 74 Alcyon advertisement cardboard calendar, 1912. Collection Ivan Bonduelle 91 show Lapize in 1911, wearing the no. “1”, with a pronounced moustache. Considering the meticulous rendering of the rider’s hair in At the Cycle-Race Track, Metzinger would hardly have included such a striking hirsute detail as the moustaches in the Helft Racing Cyclist without intention. Thus we can identify the cyclist here as the triumphant Octave Lapize. Known jocularly as ‘le frisé,’ he remained, despite his defeat in 1912, a celebrated winner in many of the national races between 1909 and 1913 until his tragic death as an airman in the war in 1917.26 Lapize’s most famous palmares was accorded to him in 1910, when as winner of the Tour de France he triumphed over the murderous Tourmalet Pass on foot.27 This was the only race for which he was assigned the starter-number “4”, placed on his hip, something which could have given Metzinger the inspiration for the Swiss study28—even before the fourth dimension held him in its spell. The photograph taken from behind Lapize as he pushed his bike, published in every newspaper of the day (fig. 72), became a cult object (even reused on a book cover in 2010).29 Lapize, characteristically moustachioed in his epic 1910 Tour, was clean-shaven in 1912 and there would seem to be a case for identifying Lapize in the otherwise less strongly characterized cyclist in the small early study in Switzerland. The question remains as to whether the Swiss study was intended to represent an indoor or outdoor cyclist. The cyclist’s whole left side is permeated by green, which is not therefore a local color. There is a possible explanation for this: the Vel d’Hiv indoor track was celebrated as being among the first stadiums to have electrical light—shining from columns in the center of the track. The orange-yellow light emanating from these would plausibly induce the complimentary color of green on the racing cyclists as they speeded by in the anti-clockwise sense. While in Cyclist the no. “4”, the numéro du dossard, appears on the hip of the cyclist, the same number in the Helft Racing Cyclist is in the customary position for a vélodrome cyclist, on the upper right arm. In the Guggenheim’s At the Cycle-Race Track it is given a new meaning as signaling the laps, on a pole next to a grandstand in the stadium (in Roubaix six laps were possible). As victor in 1912, Charles Crupelandt (no. 13) was not wearing the number 4. Its meaning must be another, pointing to the fourth dimension, that of space and time. The result To summarize, it may be speculated that the national cycling hero Octave Lapize is represented in the small Cyclist as the winner of the 1910 Tour de France, conqueror of the Pyrenean Tourmalet Pass (when he wore the no. “4”), but also as winner of the Paris-Roubaix race in 1909, 1910 and 1911. In the Helft Racing Cyclist, his features are clearer, but the image is now that of a victor on his lap of honor in a covered vélodrome, such as the Buffalo or the Vel d’Hiv. The armband fig. 75 Alcyon racing bycicle, 1912. Collection Ivan Bonduelle. Long term loan to the Musée Régional du Vélo “La Belle Echappée,” France 92 with “4” now has a double meaning. The Guggenheim cyclist instead celebrates Charles Crupelandt, in his victorious pursuit of Gustave Garrigou. The “4” on the grandstand post has finally cut loose from the racing cyclist and alludes unequivocally to the fourth dimension. Escape from the peloton: the chronometric missing link to the fourth dimension Artists of the Section d’Or were ambiguous about whether the fourth dimension was a projection into the realm of the conceptual, as Metzinger primarily saw it, or a foray into simultaneity, movement and dynamism, as the Futurists intended. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude descending a staircase of 1912 (fig. 34) was not well-received by his Puteaux colleagues and was excluded from the Salon des Indépendants that year. This induced Duchamp’s resolve to end his group activities, and in turn precipitated the disbandment of the artists’ meetings which were the essential forum for the discussion of such matters as non- Euclidean geometry, time, and the fourth dimension. The three Racing Cyclists were Metzinger’s only attempt to unite a Cubist treatment of form and space with concepts of time and movement. However, to this may be added a kind of swan song, a Still Life (Fourth Dimension) (Nature Morte [quatriéme dimension]) of 1912, which was exhibited as no.19 in the Exposition: Metzinger, Gleizes and Léger, from 17 January–1 February 1913 at the Galerie Berthe Weill, and which is generally considered to be lost. This may no longer be so if a painting that has recently come to light, Cubist Composition with Clock (cat. no. 12), is in fact the lost Still Life (Fourth Dimension).30 This uncluttered still life on a guéridon (a café table, often with a single pedestal) consists of a table clock and a narrow blue vase, analyzed and dissected in the Cubist manner. The center of the circular clock face lies on the vertical center of the canvas (fig. 68) where it is intersected by the Golden Section, which also helps to determine the axis of the blue vase.31 The ‘golden’ vertical division of the composition cuts the dial and the bowl of the vase in similar ratios. Most significantly the bowl of the vase, which could be read as the stylized calyx of a tulip, in fact forms a mathematically expanding logarithmic or Fibonacci spiral. Early mathematicians explored its construction, in particular the famous Italian mathematician Fibonacci (Leonardo da Pisa 1170–1240).32 It has been observed in nature since the earliest times (snail shells, nautili, ammonites, the lily- shape of ornamental cabbages or artichokes, sunflowers, pine cones etc.) and was copied by differing ancient cultures as a magic symbol or decorative motif, culminating most impressively and lastingly in the antique volute. Heinrich Lautensack (1522–1568) and Nikolaus Goldmann (1611–1665) provided popularizing geometric methods for forming the volutes of the Ionic capital. Anyone studying the Golden Section could not avoid reflecting on the Fibonacci sequences and the Golden Spiral. Moreover the volute had been from time immemorial a sign of the sun’s course and re-birth.33 It is highly likely that Metzinger, “with his mad geometric follies,”34 as a central figure in the Section d’Or,35 was creating a symbol of time (“with the clarity of a physicist he understood the basic principles of geometric construction”36). To meditate on time in an image constructed with Cubist mobile perspective is tantamount to meditating on the fourth dimension, which is treated here ironically as a rebus. The clock face is divided just over the Roman numeral III[I] (the persistent “4” of the Racing Cyclists) while the minute hand heads for the hour.37 fig. 78 Charles Crupelandt, 1913. Bibliothèque national de France, Paris fig. 77 Charles Crupelandt, “Winner of the Paris-Roubaix 1912.” Bibliothèque national de France, Paris fig. 76 Octave Lapize, 30 April 1911, Parc des Princes. Bibliothèque national de France, Paris 93 A similar clock appeared in a Nude of 1910 (location unknown, fig. 65), regarded as Metzinger’s first Cubist painting, that was picked out by Roger Allard in a review of the 1910 Salon d’Automne, in which Allard described the motif (the nude and the objects surrounding her) as a “synthesis located in time [la durée].”38 The painting, with the clock face in tact, was reproduced in the October edition of Pan39 and appears again, with the same simultaneous sequence of the moving pendulum, in a still life dated “4– 1918” of unknown location.40 Here, however, it is as if we are looking at our cat. no. 12 as in a picture-in-a-picture, thus quoting the rebus of 1912. It seems no more, in any case, than an allusion to a past experiment. In later paintings, time occurs in Metzinger’s still lifes as merely static. Not only is Cubist Composition with Clock a kind of missing link, a summation of Metzinger’s ability to visualize adeptly in a single image movement in its various guises— temps, espace, durée and simultanéité—but it also signals a programmatic return to the ‘situation picture’ and his original position that higher dimensions belong in semantic time, and can be best expressed by constructs, signs, symbols of the imagination (here represented as the spiral). This would explain why the motif of simultaneity, time and motion (the Cubist clock) is located in the background, and the rather fragile plastic vase, with its clear local color and its theoretical and geometrical ‘manifesto’ (the Golden spiral), is in the foreground. Painted in the experimental year of the Racing Cyclists41 it rejects the Futurist tactic of imaging dynamic movement, which reached its peak in At the Cycle-Race Track as if it were la fin de la course. The ruban d’arrivée is broached but the victory is Pyrrhic. It may be worth considering whether Metzinger’s Cubist Composition with Clock pays homage to the painting of an illustrious precursor, Cézanne’s The Black Marble Clock of 1869 (fig. 67), in which the clock without hands (with an empty vase nearby) expressed a much-debated ‘end of time’. The same still life inspired René Magritte in Time Transfixed of 1938 (La Durée poignardée, Art Institute of Chicago). Such would be consistent with the adulation of Cézanne expressed in Metzinger and Gleizes’s Du Cubisme published in December 1912. Metzinger’s time-parable is one of the few examples of the visible manifestation of the theoretical deliberations and intellectual exercises within the circle of the Section d’Or in Puteaux. A hundred years later Paul Wiedmer offers his interpretation the fourth dimension, with a sculpture (see pp. 102–4) made for this exhibition as an homage to Metzinger’s Racing Cyclists and the enigmatic picture Still Life (Fourth Dimension) that brought the series to a close. Postscript If ever an object has been realized that gives visual meaning to the fourth dimension, then it is, to remain on the shifting sands and in the mists of Venice, that distinctive and picturesque means of travel the Venetian gondola. Its sleek, coiled form is a construct born and refined in a millennial craft tradition, in both senses, shaped according to mathematical and physical principles and realized in a temporal and spatial movement. The boat is propelled by a single rower in the stern, shifting his weight minimally according to the speed, weight and direction of the gondola. The ingenious torsion of the boat’s hull allows it to move forward in the chosen direction, rather than veer to the left. Between prow and stern there is a calculable quantity of applied geometry, dynamic and mathematics, unique to the construction of the gondola. The artistically carved forcola, the notched rowlock of nut wood (usually walnut) serves as the rudder, by extending and refining the possibilities of movement.42 The transformation of the direction and value of the initial propulsion (the gondolier’s pressure on his oar) simultaneously over a span of time and along the physical length of the black vessel, according to ancient math and physics and mysterious non-Euclidean geometry, such as to rectify the gondola’s direction and the value of the gondolier’s thrust, comes closer to a visualization of the fourth dimension than anything this writer has encountered. The gondola was a source of great joy to Peggy Guggenheim. She was almost the the last ‘Venetian’ to own and use a private gondola. In 1979 this was bequeathed by her to Venice’s Museo Storico Navale, where it is celebrated today. According to her memoirs, she exhibited a forcola, which reminded her of a modern sculpture, in her garden at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.43 fig. 79 Octave Lapize, “Champion de France sur la bicyclette ‘La Francaise Diamant’, Pneus Dunlop,” postcard, before 1914. Collection Ivan Bonduelle fig. 80 Charles Crupelandt, postcard, before 1914. Collection Ivan Bonduelle 94 Notes 1 Oil painting with sand on 3mm commercial illustration board. Božena Nikiel, editor of the Jean Metzinger catalogue raisonné, believes the painting was acquired in September 1914 by André Level (creator of the “Peau de l’Ours”, a collection of young unknown artists in 1904). As Level stated in his memoirs, it was acquired from the Berthe Weill Gallery under the title of Bicycliste. It was sold as lot no. 107, on board, size stated as 29 x 21 cm, on 3 March 1927 at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris, as Le bicycliste to a M. Bélier. André Level, Souvenir d’un collectionneur, Paris: A.C. Mazo, 1959. The painting reappeared in the early fifties in a private collection in Switzerland, and underwent conservation by the author and Sonya Schmid in 1997. On the reverse of the painting are the following inscriptions and labels. 1) A full page newspaper article, attached with very yellowed adhesive tape (removed), of 27 February 1953 “Der Kubismus - eine Rückschau” by Franz Meyer (director of the Basel Museum of Art) in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, morning edition. This was a review of the first comprehensive exhibition of Cubism, Le Cubisme 1907–1914, in the Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 30 January–9 April 1953. This may perhaps signal a change in ownership at that date. 2) At the bottom left are the remains of a torn-off gallery label with blue double-lined edging 93.5 x 7.7 mm with lettering beginning “GAL” (possibly “GALERIE BERTHE WEILL” where Metzinger last exhibited in January 1913). 3) Beneath the newspaper cutting no. 1 is a white, longitudinal right-angled gallery label with an accompanying blue double-line identical to the above that is cut in half with a blade and torn off, with the handwritten text in ink: “[printed: No.] 1230 Metzinger / Coureur Cycliste 3F” (i.e. three francs). 4) Oval label, white with three lines with a sparkling, blue, decorative edge. The penciled “91” is crossed out several times in pencil. 5) Four crossed out (partly illegible) numbers- inscriptions with blue crayon, amongst which “case 46” and possibly “1230”. 6) With similar blue crayon underneath written large: “96: 198”. 7) In the middle of the board, in blue ballpoint, the signature and date by Metzinger himself: “Je certifie que ce tableau a était éxécuté en 1912 / Metzinger.” 8) Underneath, upside down, three numbers 85 / 55 / 40 circled with red ballpoint, the last crossed out. 9) Below on the right, oval, the red stamp of an (art materials) supplier (upside down): “THE PARIS AMERICAN ART Co /125 Bould. du Montparnasse /… / Rue Bonaparte, 2 / PARIS” above “FO…10” (perhaps the indication of a standardized artist’s board). 10) Several illegible scattered traces of varicolored letters and numbers. Condition: The board has turned brown and has been scratched repeatedly on the reverse. Pieces of synthetic adhesive tape have penetrated the stretcher, discoloring it. As also lime from a canvas passe-partout adhesive seal, which on the recto and on the edges have detached a layer of paint in small particles. Every corner of the painting is abraded. In the lower left corner there are lacunae in the layers of paint. The surface of the recto (until restoration in 1997) was extremely dirty, especially in the sand-granulation and the grooves of the brush-strokes. In the dark red jersey stripe a few sand particles are missing. There is fine craquelure in this area. Dark spots in the whitish background are grains of sand stripped bare of their layer of paint. About 1cm above the number on the rider’s back and on the right foot there are small lacunae. 2 Racing cyclists wore a protective cap or helmet in the steeply cambered arenas of the vélodromes, which often caused dangerous falls. 3 Jean Metzinger describes in his memoirs Le Cubisme était né his interest in mathematics: “This knowledge gave me a feeling for art. It is number that gives expression to sound and silence, light and shade, form and void. Michelangelo and Bach seemed to me like divinely blessed mathematicians. I already felt then that for an artwork to endure it had to be based on mathematics,” and “Undying art is based on certain mathematical principles”. See Fritz Metzinger and Daniel Robbins, Die Entstehung des Kubismus, eine Neubewertung, Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1990, pp. 167,173. 4 Oil and collage on canvas (unvarnished). It was acquired from the artist by John Quinn through Carroll Galleries, New York, February 1916. It was purchased at the sale of the Quinn collection at American Art Galleries, New York, by J. B. Neumann in 1927 (no. 266, for $70). Peggy Guggenheim purchased the painting from Neumann in 1945. See Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, New York: Harry N. Abrams and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1985, p. 532. For a technical study of Au Vélodrome, see pp. 74–83 in this catalogue. 5 In Roman times the word “arena” described the sandy surface of a stadium or an amphitheatre. See Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, “Vom Sand in der Kunst,” Diplomarbeit, Fachklasse f. Konservierung & Restaurierung, Bern 1996, and idem, pp. 57–64 in this catalogue. According to Schmid’s studies, sand is used by Metzinger apparently for the first time in this painting, not so much in an experimental way but with a clear intention to create a coarse-grained surface. 6 See for example the pencil drawing Still life, 1912 (fig. 71). 7 From the 1910 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting”, in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manfiestos, London: Tate Publishing, 2009, p. 28. 8 See Rudenstine, op. cit., p. 533: “[they] appear to have been added at a later time, over an erased or scumbled area; moreover the handwriting may not be Metzinger’s.” 9 Information from typescript letter from George Helft to Daniel Robbins (Union College, Schenectady, NY) dated 18 May 1988; photocopy in the archives of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. 10 The motif is characteristic of the virtuoso graphic artist Cappiello who used the silhouette of a tire in his advert for “Pneu Velo Baudon” in 1908 or the “Pneumatiques Torrihlon” of 1906. Around 1890–1914 posters of extraordinarily high quality were produced in astonishing numbers. Even today affiches de pub sell for high prices in France, even when printed later and in an altered format. 11 See also Alfred Jarry’s cycling version of the Passion: “Today in the shop windows of bicycle dealers you see a reproduction of the veritable crown of thorns as an ad for puncture-proof tyres. But Jesus’s was an ordinary single-tube racing tire.” In Alfred Jarry, The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race,” (1903), in Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, eds., Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, New York: Grove Press, 1965. 12 Such numbers in the posters of the time refer to the street numbers of cycle stores along the great boulevards. 13 Pataphysics was invented in 1893 by Alfred Jarry who defined it as “the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.” See also Erasmus Weddigen, p. 27, note 18, in this catalogue. 14 The writer is grateful to Anne Jean-Richards Largey, who researched this in the John Quinn Papers in the New York Public Library. 15 Joann Moser refers to incorrect authentications by Metzinger in the early 50s (and in particular shortly before his death), in Joann Moser, ed., Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, exh. cat. (The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, 31 August–13 October, 1985), Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art. 1985 pp. 7-8. Moser named a Landscape of 1913, pp. 44-47, note 12, Village, Eglise, et deux personnages in a private collection in Los Angeles with the same manuscript certification on the verso (Idem, pp. 44, 47 and note 12). Božena Nikiel confirms that Metzinger and later his widow attributed wrong dates on several occasions. 16 Rudenstine, op. cit., p. 533. 17 Idem. Daniel Robbins dated At the Cycle-Race Track to 1912 (in Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger in The Dictionary of Art, London: Grove, 1996, vol. 21, pp. 363f), as he had previously done (“1911/12”) in Moser, op. cit., p. 43. Fritz Metzinger favors an even earlier date in Before Cubism, Frankfurt: R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1994. 95 18 The prosperous factories of Roubaix still manufacture brightly colored cycling jerseys for all the great races and Roubaix is still today one of the sponsors of the race. 19 See Sonya Schmid, Erasmus Weddigen, “Jean Metzinger und die ‘Königin der Klassiker‘, eine Cyclopädie des Kubismus,” Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch LIX, Cologne: DuMont, 1998 pp. 229–58. 20 An appealing interpretation would be that Metzinger originally intended to paint an image of Octave Lapize, at that time the greatest French champion, but that after the unexpected victory of Crupelandt he modified the identity of the rider, even depersonalizing him by transparency and suggesting the fateful inconstancy of victory in itself in the collages “PNEUS” (previously planned “PNEUMA[TIQUE]”). The winner was helped not least by destiny (pneuma as the Holy Ghost, the apparitional champion is literally “a ghost rider”), lungs of steel (pneuma as breath, the ribcage of the bike rider expands tremendously), a kind wind (pneuma as breeze, the fluttering tricolore is just above the tire-advert), and the sound condition of his tire tubes (“PNEUS” of the final version), while Lapize was forced to change tires twice. Metzinger was enough of a classical philologist and, as vouched for by Bernard Dorival, with his “ironic smile”, sufficiently humorous to have inserted such a joke in his vélodrome; see “Jean Metzinger 1883 to 1956,” in Bernard Dorival, ed., Atelier sur l’herbe, exh. cat. (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, 4–26 January 1985), Nantes: Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 1985, p. 9. 21 In 1907 Robert Coquelle (ca.1870–ca.1930) founded with Théodore Vienne of Roubaix a sports stadium inside the Luna-Park near Porte Maillot, as large as the Vel d’Hiv at Passy. He was the sports journalist for Le Vélo, which replaced L’Auto in 1904, and reported the first flight of Wilbur and Orville Wright in Dayton, Ohio. He was co-director of the Vélodrome du Buffalo, founded the Vélodrome de Roubaix in 1893, and organized the first Paris-Roubaix race on 19 April 1896. He wrote, with Victor Breyer, Les Rois du cycle in 1898. 22 Fernand Bidault (1879–1914) was a sports journalist and writer, especially for rugby and tennis, and was awarded a medal of honor in the Paris Panthéon. He also wrote for L’Auto, and in 1908 he published Les Sports Modernes. 23 A reference to the celebrated but unfortunate Regency dandy George ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778–1840). Almost all leading riders of that time had characteristic, sometimes caricatural nicknames. 24 For the fourth time the firm La Française— “Marque à direction tricolore” —was the much acclaimed winner on Dunlop tires, announced in large type on pages of advertising for days on end. Roubaix celebrated its son and his “lutte . . . qui fut tout simplement homérique” with the lap of honor to the sound of the Marseillaise. All four of the leading riders were French, acclaimed as ‘Northerners’, the fifth place went to the Belgian Odile Defraye, Tour-de-France winner in 1912. 25 Famous primarily as the Paris-Roubaix victor in 1912 and 1914, Charles Crupelandt, ‘le taureau du nord’ (the Bull of the North), was a virtual native of Roubaix, born in 1885 in the suburb of Wattrelos, and died in Roubaix in 1955. In 1910 he won the first stage of the Tour de France and came sixth overall. In 1911 he won two stages and came fourth. In 1913 he won the Paris- Tours road-race and in 1914 was road-racing national champion and won the Paris-Roubaix a second time. In 1912 he was still so new to sports journalists that his name was repeatedly misspelt in the newspapers. Between 1911 and 1913 he rode for the La Française- Diamant team. After the war, during which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for heroism, he fell on bad times, both personally and financially. He suffered from intrigues, which barred him from the cycle sport association, and then illness, poverty, blindness, and the amputation of both his legs. He died in 1955. On the hundredth anniversary of his home victory in Roubaix the last 300m before the vélodrome were dedicated to him as ‘Espace Charles Crupelandt.’ 26 Octave Lapize was born in Montrouge in 1887 and died in 1917 in Toul when his military plane crashed. Given the nicknames of ‘Tatave’ and ‘le frisé’, he was one of the most popular racing cyclists in France in the époque héroique of this sport before the World War I. After the spectacular double victory of 1910 (both the Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de France), he only carried off stage victories in the Tour de France, La Grande Boucle, in 1912 and 1914, but his victories in the Paris- Roubaix races of 1909–10 and 1911, the national road- racing championships of 1911–13 and the Paris-Tours in 1911 were never forgotten. For conquering the most difficult of all Pyrenean passes during the Tour of 1910, the Tourmalet (2114m), a monument was erected in his honor in Morocco, a stadium named after him, and for a short time the Lapize-make did well in cycle manufacturing. Lapize rode in the 1910 Paris-Roubaix for the Alcyon team and in 1911 for La Française- Diamant. He also rode for the Alcyon brand and team in the 1910 Tour, which took all four first places (fig. 76). 27 Lapize’s fury at the race management for the severity of the gradients of the Pyrenean passes was given vent in 1910, in his celebrated expletives on the Col d’Aubisque (1709m) “Vous êtes des assassins!”. At the Tourmalet he dismounted from his bike while his rival Garrigou, ‘Lord Brummell’, in third position, remained in the saddle through the pass and received a special prize. Henri Desgrange, editor of the sports paper L’Auto, set up the Tour de France in 1903, which was first won by the Frenchman Maurice Garin (on a La Française), and directed it until 1939. 28 That Metzinger regarded this only as a study or sketch for a larger picture, is proved by the modest price of three francs (then the equivalent of an average lunch from the menu) that he recorded on the label on the reverse; see note 1 above. 29 Jean-Paul Rey, L’Étape assassine: Luchon-Bayonne 1910, Pau: Cairn, 2010. 30 Fritz Metzinger drew attention to the fact that many early paintings by Metzinger changed their original titles between Salon catalogues, dealers and new owners. See Metzinger, Before Cubism, cit., p. 21. 31 The center of the spiral is shifted from the center of the clock face in a cavalier perspectival / diagonal displacement, similar to the slanting view of the clock case, whereby a progression from the abstract of time to one of space might be intended. Does time in space become space in time? 32 When squares are arranged in a row building upon one another, each having the lateral length of a numerical Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.), every time a rectangle is created, corresponding to the Golden Section. By joining the ‘golden’ angles of the squares with arcs, a spiral known as a golden spiral is formed. See Steven Vajda, Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers, and the Golden Section: Theory and Applications, Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood, 1989; also Laura Catastini and Franco Ghione, Matematica e arte: Forme del pensiero artistico, Milan: Springer, 2011. 33 Whether the indistinct paint marks on the three stages of the pendulum are meant to indicate three small skulls is speculation. If affirmative, a memento mori may be implied, or a reference to the ambiguity of death-life. At the very least they allude to the dynamism and simultaneity of the Futurists. 34 According to the critic in La Presse on the 1910 Salon d’Automne. See Albert Gleizes, Bauhaus Buch 13, 1928, reprinted Berlin: Mann, 1980, p. 10. 35 Lisa Werner, Der Kubismus stellt aus; der Salon de la Section d’Or, Berlin: Reimer 2011, pp. 115ff. Others ascribe the name to Jacques Villon (Gaston Duchamp) as a distillation of his study of the writings of Vitruvius, Leonardo and Dürer on proportions. See Germain Viatte, Jacques Villon, né Gaston Duchamp, exh. cat. (Musée del beaux-arts, Angérs, 4 November 2011–31 March 2012), Angers: Expressions contemporaines, 2011, pp. 18, 22f. 36 Gleizes, op. cit. 37 One could speculate that Metzinger ironically illustrated failure of the Futurist representation of movements and said to himself the hour is about to toll for the fourth dimension (l’heure sonne bientôt à la quatrième dimension). And that, by using Futurist methods of representation, he offered the back of the clock face, the flimsy construction of their propositions and prophecies, their weakness in the face of the stable laws of geometry. By painting dabs of illusionistic light reflected on the vase and modeling the shadowed molding and edges of the table, he seems to point to pictorial representation in a more natural or more impressionistic style. 38 The painting was reproduced in Du Cubisme (1912); and also in Moser, op. cit., p. 49, fig. 23, although the clock, located in the upper right corner, was barely visible. Roger Allard, “Au Salon d’Automne de Paris,” L’Art Libre, November 1910, reprinted in Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, eds., A Cubism Reader. Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 84–86. Antliff and Leighten also identify the clock as signifying “normative, quantifiable time” as opposed to the “subjective, qualitative experience of duration nurtured by artists and figured in the multiple views of the sitter [in Metzinger’s Nude]”; idem, p. 81. 39 See Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson. Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, fig. 3. 40 See Moser, op. cit., fig. 94. A further clock face appears in the still life “10-1917”; that of 1919, and the late one of 1927; idem, figs. 88, 103, 220 respectively. The tower clock in the Landscape of 1912 is merely a topographical detail; idem, fig. 125. 96 41 The closeness in composition to our racing cyclists is revealed in the eye-catching diagonals of the guidelines in the picture and the tendency towards octagonal presentation, less dominant in the Guggenheim work. 42 The forcola resembles by chance and in an idiosyncratic way Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (cat. no. 2). For further information see, for example, www.forcole.com. 43 A gift of Alfred Barr, first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. See Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century. Confessions of an Art Addict, New York: Universe Books / London: André Deutsch 1979, p. 354. fig. 81 Peggy Guggenheim in her gondola in front of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, 1960s, Venice 97 The Sportsman’s Dimension Fabian Cancellara interviewed by Erasmus Weddigen Life is like a bicycle. You have to move forwards so as not to lose your balance. Albert Einstein to his son Eduard, 5 February 1930 Might Fabian Cancellara’s answers afford us a fresh way of looking at Jean Metzinger as an artist? Do they do justice to Metzinger’s Cubist intentions? Was he trying to reach a wide or a narrow audience? Are his theories of the depiction of time, speed and dynamism back then any longer applicable? Can uninitiated observers apprehend the theme of the fourth dimension by themselves, or is this aspect anecdotal, even trivial? E.W.: Mr Cancellara, you once quoted Einstein’s bon mot online, as if you had an intuition that one day someone would come to you to conduct inquiries about the psychology of art and theories of relativity. But as someone who is always ‘moving forward’, undaunted, you could never lose your balance! Where did you come across this quote? F.C.: You’ve got me there. It was quite some time ago . . . the quote is remarkably fitting. I still have not found the time to go to the Einstein exhibition in Bern. I think as my personal motto these days I would use instead, “Mühsal ist vergänglich, Erinnern ist für die Ewigkeit” (Pain is temporary, memory is forever). E.W.: What would be your impression if you happened to come across a painting like Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle- Race Track, or any other of his cyclist works, without knowing anything about them? Would they catch your eye more than a landscape, a nude or a portrait? F.C.: The theme by itself jumps right out at you. I would say that in Cyclist you can see movement but there is no speed, in Racing Cyclist there’s speed but no dynamism, and it is only in At the Cycle-Race Track that speed, movement and dynamism are brought together. That one seems to me the most convincing. E.W.: Does the Cubist style of the work, the deformation of the forms, make it hard to understand the work? F.C.: No, but you do need a bit of preparation to be able to understand it; a child would find it difficult to understand the overlapping of forms. E.W.: Could the order in which the paintings were made be the other way round? F.C.: Absolutely not. The first is relatively simple, the second is specifically color oriented and it is not until you get to the third that the idea is fully realized in a rather ingenious way, as you see in the spectators and the sequences of movement. E.W.: In your expert opinion what is different about the cyclists themselves? F.C.: The first is a leisurely amateur, the second a victorious cyclist, and the last one is a sprinter making for the finishing line. E.W.: What do you make of the number “4” which appears in different places? Might it refer to the fourth dimension? F.C.: For a top athlete it is an unlucky number: if you come fourth you get a wooden medal or you are left with a wooden trophy and a bitter taste in your mouth. But in each painting the number has a different significance. In one it’s a banal start number, then an indoor numbering on the cyclist’s upper arm, and in the last it is a lap number which bears no relation to the starting position of the cyclist. Any further meanings, such as the fourth dimension that you mentioned, that’s for the historians to argue over. . . E.W.: As a professional cyclist what is most likely to catch your eye in a painting, the place where it’s happening, what’s 98 happening, the pose of the cyclist, what bike he’s using, the artistic qualities of the picture, or the color and form and how they are used? F.C.: You tend to grasp the situation straight away, but it is the effect of color that jumps out at you first. The dynamism in the way it’s executed is more important than the color. The design however barely interests me at all. E.W.: Did you notice the collaged elements or the painted posters? Did you try to read them, did they interest you or irritate you? F.C.: The billboards act as a blanket of colour which you overlook or ignore, but you cannot help but notice the Paris- Roubaix writing and you start looking for distinguishing features of the velodrome in Roubaix. E.W.: Did you notice that there is sand mixed in with the paint? Did you associate the artist’s specific way of depicting the race track and the characteristics of the track with what he was trying to achieve? F.C.: Sand? I have only just seen that now that you have pointed it out. I noticed that what is underneath the cyclist changes: wooden floors in the vélodrome and sand or concrete track outside; for a cyclist that is an important difference. E.W.: Do you think a professional cyclist would instinctively try to identify with what is depicted? F.C.: In At the Cycle-Race Track you feel like you’re cycling with them. You see yourself in the posture and the way he’s exerting himself. E.W.: Would a professional cyclist hang such a painting of a cyclist, by Metzinger, Gontcharova or Feininger in his own home? F.C.: Not necessarily. But why not? If it appeals. If you can afford it... E.W.: And if so, based on what criteria? How well known the artist is, how true to life the painting is or color and form? F.C.: After color which is the most important thing—I’d like to have that Boccioni most of all, although it is less clear that it is a cyclist as his bike is rather hidden—it is a matter of how well known the artist is. I would not mind having a Picasso, even something minor. Something of lasting value. But when I am buying a painting for myself, price is the last thing I look at. E.W.: Metzinger had Alsace German roots and yet when it came to his art he was a citizen of the world. Having said that, he paid tribute to specific idols of French cycling. You have Italian, or rather Latin roots. Do you see yourself as Swiss, from Bern or Ittigen, as a Swiss-Italian, as a European or a citizen of the world? Who do you race for, who do you win for? F.C.: I feel as if I am a bit of all of those but I am a Berner and Swiss first and I race and win for Switzerland. E.W.: Do you see these cyclists as individuals or portraits, or are they simply generic images of sportsmen? Is ‘the sport’ itself more important than the one doing it? What do they express? F.C.: The one that most resembles a portrait is Racing Cyclist because of the prominent moustache. The others represent types of sportsmen more, and concentrate on motifs of movement and speed. E.W.: In your opinion does Metzinger capture the different situations well? Did he know about what he was painting? F.C.: Metzinger clearly had experience of riding a bike; the style and the expression cannot be faulted. The racing bikes are definitely of their time, that much is clear. The sprint is realistically depicted. E.W.: Do these works from 1912 seem contemporary or antiquated? Are they interesting only from an historic or an artistic point of view? F.C.: They are perhaps stylistically out of date but they have not lost any of their relevance. I find them modern. They stand up well against lots of contemporary paintings of poor quality. fig. 82 Fabian Cancellara in the foreground in Eikenberg, Tour of Flanders recoinnassance ride, 2012. Courtesy RADIOSHACK NISSAN TREK and Tim Vanderjeugd 99 E.W.: Do the names of racers such as the pioneer Charles Crupelandt, or his main rival Octave Lapize, still have significance for you, or do they pale in comparison to giants such as Anquetil, Coppi, Kübler, Koblet, Merckx and Armstrong? Who do you see as your most serious competitor today, who would be your idol? F.C.: Today almost nothing is remembered about those pioneers from a century ago, but the racers from the post- war time that you mentioned are still familiar to us. As for heroes it is tricky to say because the categories of racers differ so much from one to another, such as those who are specialized at doing the tour or those who are climbing specialists: you cannot compare apples with oranges. Certain monstres sacrés cannot be touched. But the Spaniard Miguel Indurain, the Belgians Gilbert and Boonen and many others have impressed me considerably with their achievements and victories. E.W.: Do you race the routes of the Tour de France, the Paris- Roubaix, the Paris Bordeaux or the Giro d’Italia with romantic thoughts of the glorious past of those who have gone before you, or do you seek them out only out of technical interest? F.C.: Both at the same time. An uplifting struggle over the Tourmalet! However today we are cycling these courses with different physiques and technology. E.W.: Do you occasionally visit the many Musées du cycles in France or the transport museums in Europe, like the one in Lucerne, or private collections? Are you interested in the bicycle and its history or as a racing cyclist are you more interested in the technological developments of today’s bikes? F.C.: I have been to Lucerne but not to Ghisallo. I do not have a lot of time to visit museums, but if I do then I’m more interested in technical evolution (of gear systems in particular) rather than names. E.W.: Has the frenetic popular success of cycling changed fundamentally since the turn of the twentieth century? Were there peaks of enthusiasm, or has there been a decline in public interest? v: Absolutely not. Only doping had a negative effect on the popularity of the sport, temporarily. E.W.: The presence of advertizing in cycling reached an unimaginably high peak between 1890 up until the World War I and then again in the period between the two World Wars. Is the lack of advertizing today a result of television media and the armchair consumer? F.C.: Posters have celebrated the events for as long as anyone can remember. They advertized them like travelling circuses. Now the media has diversified and competitors have become billboards on wheels. E.W.: Are the nationalistic aspects of racing still as prominent as they were in Metzinger’s time, or do manufacturers, sponsors, sport media and clubs or the individual cyclists themselves call the shots nowadays? F.C.: As a racer today you still have a strong sense of national pride. When you are racing you just block all the hype out. . . E.W.: Countless monuments have been erected in France to honor the greatest cyclists of all time. How would you feel if they named a stadium like the one for Octave Lapize in Morocco, or dedicated a monumental statue to you on the Tourmalet Pass, or named a pavé section of the Paris-Roubaix route in your honour, as they did for Charles Crupelandt? Perhaps the short lived nature of a winner’s fame is at odds with the longevity of a monument? F.C.: Oh no, I would have nothing against a monument, it would not matter where it was! I would finally be a part of history! E.W.: Nevertheless, they have already named a bridge in Ittigen after you, there has been a fantastic book written about you, and the comedian Massimo Rocchi (who has just been awarded an honorary doctorate) and the author Peter Bichsel count themselves as fans. What would be your next goal? F.C.: To attract the attention of a philosopher of sport such as Gunter Gebauer. As well as the classics I have got my sights set on the Olympics. If they want to erect a monument to me then that would be a fun new experience. But fame is fleeting anyway. . . E.W.: Despite the success that you have had up to now do you feel challenged to crown your achievements by winning the Paris-Roubaix race, especially one hundred years on from 1912, a year that was so turbulent for politics, sport, culture and art? You’re equal with Crupelandt, now all you need to do is catch up with Lapize, who won it three times. F.C.: Of course. What’s a hundred years! E.W.: Lapize was a pilot and did not survive the First World War. Crupelandt, suspended from cycling after 1914, died a tragic figure in Roubaix in 1955. Metzinger died a year later in Paris, having never managed, after the war, to match the heights of what he had achieved with Cubism before the war. Your teammate Wouter Weyland died during the Giro d’Italia 2011, doing what was their passion. That’s along with forty-six other cyclists in the last decade. Is failure, and indeed death itself, or the demise of one’s cycling career, something that is on your mind? F.C.: Which high-performance sport does not have its losers! Many of these young racers who lost their lives I had met or knew personally. It is sad to lose them, especially if it is due to a cycling accident. You try to put them out of your mind especially when you’re so intensely focused and going at such high speeds. Those who have died because of drugs are different, their deaths seem somehow inevitable. E.W.: You have been a world champion several times in time trial racing. Fractions of a second or a couple of centimetres can decide a victory. As you once said yourself, a span of time is like a grain of sand in an hour glass, but weighs as heavily as a pavé, a cobble stone in one’s cycling history. Time can be, but is not necessarily relative. Is it perhaps when you have a crash that the greatest presence of mind is required? It has been proved that hill climbers in accidents have considerably 100 quicker thinking and reaction times. When you crash does your life flash before your eyes like a film? F.C.: Some of us may have experienced it but narrowly escaped danger. However much one is capable of achieving it is always relative to what the next best cyclist is capable of, even if you can think more quickly than your opponents. E.W.: Are the cheers that greet a racer on the finish line comparable with the applause that a musician or any other artist might encounter as recognition of their artistic achievements, or does it increase your self-awareness like it would a poet or composer? How long does that euphoria last and how long does it take to get back to normality after all the commotion has died down? Does a triumph ultimately make you depressed, as a sensitive artist might feel, a feeling that mountain climbers report after having reached the summit, or what women experience after birth? F.C.: The adrenaline levels increase with every victory and require a relentless enthusiasm. Your self-awareness increases even at lower podium positions. When you finally stop at the end of a race you do not exactly become depressed, but you find yourself in an emptiness, you fall into a gap in between two career highs, that is normal. But we are trained to pick ourselves up again quickly and set our sights on our next goal. E.W.: Do you eagerly anticipate future races or are you like a sighing Sisyphus when it comes to approaching challenges? Does your family help keep you calm? F.C.: Planning something in advance is of course something I enjoy otherwise I would stop racing. A caring family is the best thing for keeping you mentally balanced. E.W.: What do you feel about the prospect of your bike from the 2012 Paris-Roubaix race, bearing all the marks of the ‘Hell of the North’, being exhibited in Venice, a city that is impassable for cyclists? F.C.: Curiosity, amusement. Certainly there is something comic about breaching new territory. It is another sort of palmarès. It is another string to add to my bow, a way of standing out from the rest and a way to find a new audience, among art lovers. E.W.: It seems that there is no limit to your ambition and no pavé track too rough. We sincerely hope that you and your family can make your plans become a reality. Your participation in this exhibition is a tribute to your enduring optimism and your boundless energy, something that has long distinguished you as a connoisseur in the art of living. F.C.: We will see, there’s the Paris- Roubaix before Venice. . . Et in Arcadia nos, to paraphrase old Goethe. This interview took place 26 November 2011, in the restaurant ‘Arcadia’ in Ittigen, Switzerland, some months before the Tour de Flandres, 1 April 2012, when 65 km before the end of the race Cancellara crashed out, fracturing his collar bone in four places, an incident that prevented him from competing in the Paris-Roubaix a week later. 101 Paul Wiedmer and the Fourth Dimension Erasmus Weddigen, Elija Rijeka We cannot forget that the swing of a pendulum or the moving hands of a clock, the in-and-out motion of a piston inside a cylinder, the engaging and disengaging of two cog-wheels, the fury of a fly-wheel or the whirling of a propeller, are all plastic and pictorial elements, which any Futurist work of sculpture should take advantage of. The opening and closing of a valve creates a rhythm which is just as beautiful to look at as the movements of an eyelid, and infinitely more modern. Umberto Boccioni, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, 11 April 1912. (Three days before Charles Crupelandt’s victory in the Paris-Roubaix.) Paul Wiedmer and the Fourth Dimension The night before I sat down to write a text on Paul Wiedmer’s Cyclosna, I dreamt of a visit to the wild garden in his backyard between Burgdorf and Wynigen. There was a table with a round surface made of basalt from Bagnoregio in Lazio; not far from the enchanted valley where Paul’s little house ‘La Serpara’ lies. There in his studio grows Cyclosna (to be unveiled in summer 2012), a fire-spewing moondial that seems like it might bicycle through time. From a crystal carafe Paul poured me glistening wine from Civitella d’Agliano, something he always does when he receives guests. When I asked him about how his Etruscan moon goddess Losna-Luna was coming along and about its relation to the fourth dimension, he pointed mischievously to a shelf behind me where all sorts of objects that he had worked on were piled up. Amongst them was a large pipe-knee which had a brass-colored shimmer but a scarred surface of cracked rust “. . . but it’s made of pure gold” said Paul in that laconic, ironic way he has of expressing himself. Needless to say, I was doubtful and awoke. Without lingering on the meanings of Artemidoros’ interpretations, I tried to find the significance of gold in my dream. Of course an artist is the sole cultural alchemist in a position to change lesser materials into works of golden worth. In sport only a fraction of athletes, cyclists for example, are capable of evoking a similar, perhaps even more tangible effect yet without leaving behind any relic of mention for mankind. Gold panning and money laundering have occasionally brought questionable success but it is only the virtual gold of the artist that can survive the corrosion and transitory nature of his craft. Paul’s life-long creative and transformative treatment of found materials, indeed the scrap of our civilization, must be what lies behind the metaphor of my dream. I reflected, well into the early hours of the morning, whether it was necessary at all to write about a work of art. After all a mother doesn’t explain what her children are like but lets them define themselves. The golden pipe-knee reminded me of one of Christian Morgenstern’s Gallows songs, “it is not a tree, it is not a tent, it is a knee and nothing else.” For this reason artists often prefer to say that what they have made is a work and nothing else. A pipe in itself is a means for transporting liquids downwards and airborne materials upwards to the heavens, the latter not dissimilar from the Ascent to Heaven by Hieronymus Bosch, in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice (fig. 42). However, here we encounter a kink in history. Paul’s bent pipe prevents any straight enlightening view through it. To shed any light on it I was forced to take a less direct path, as all artists are used to do. Whereas Heidegger might call it in his logic a ‘Verstellung’ (‘shifting’ or ‘adjustment’), Einstein would need a huge gravitational pull to ‘bend’ our normal way of seeing obliquely through it. If all examinations and insights into creativity were clear and straightforward then historians, critics, journalists, curators and museum staff would be unemployed. The lonely knee that walks with gallows humour through the world forsakes the Heideggerian pathless Holzweg into philosophical wilderness, if it wanders without its maker. The artist and his work move in a sort of Möbius loop, that links back into itself. Thus one’s conception of a work always comes back to its author—in a chiralic twist, referred to in mathematics as an un-orientable diversity. An evolving band, such as a pearl necklace or a rosary, winds itself parallel to the life of the artist in a self-engulfing loop, an Ouroboros (the ancient serpent biting its tail), 102 which distorts its creator if he does not continually stretch and challenge his own creative powers. Self-devouring snakes and dragons have been symbols of eternity and rebirth since the Egyptian Book of the Dead, via Plato, for Asians and Aztecs, from the alchemists of the Middle Ages to Carl Jung’s Archetypus. Perhaps I could persuade Paul to make a Möbius loop out of bent pipes, just as he has already made the most beautiful and labyrinthic clews out of tangled iron from woven-together pipes. Cyclosna waits, while meditations on Möbius and pipe curves has little, almost nothing to do with her, especially as her creator is more concerned with the various ways of looking at, under and around her rather than through her. Cyclosna is a cyclopean steel vitrine construction that inside has been visited by a platonically stiffened Golem, a substraction of the notches and undulations, the folds and indentations of Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (cat. no. 2). Mechanical time is funnelled from the top of the tower: the phases of the moon measured from space and put in to order in a centuries old gear mechanism are divided up into time intervals and converted by drive belts. On the inside, calibrated to moon hours, a pendulum starts up a flame-like rhythm whose beating of time would have pleased even Wilhelm Busch: “. . . time passes and we pass with it.” between past, present and future. Only that instead of merely ticking and beating, it hisses and puffs before going out again. A self-igniter suspicious of eternity. We can come to terms with the death of the phoenix because it is relative. There are three cubes, each one smaller than the previous one, as if mirroring the perspective of a four- dimensional hypercube. As a reference to Duchamp’s ready-made, Bicycle Wheel (and the shadow it casts), the plinth area is crossed by the latest bicycle rims, satirizing the absurd competition of the world championships in time trial racing between 1912 and 2012. Like a hamster in its wheel the rims do not leave the paradoxical tesseract because the measured time is relative to the distance in space from A to B when viewed from the expanding zero point of the big bang. Is that clear? Or must I call upon a cycling colleague of mine who can transfigure the prologue more aphoristically? fig. 83 Paul Wiedmer, Cyclosna, 2012, iron, electronic components, electric motor, tower-clock, gas, and mixed media, 359 x 322,5 x 98 cm. Collection of the artist 103 Cyclosna flammifera Elija Rijeka (winter 2011) You are an un-being quite like mankind is, Hypertrophic as well, an untimely antediluvian lizard Related to the species Dynamosaurus artifex ignis You arose in the carboniferous, Pangaea’s first cephalopod And you may well find in the morning of the Neo- carboniferous Your earthly end, when the last of the cephalomotive species, Homunculus sapiens plus sapiens Due to its top-heaviness breathes its last, as coal and crude oil Have long been wasted by the sapiens irrationalis. Only the invention of the bicycle gave a deadline To the twice gifted, twice failed homo. Cyclosna, Your primeval heart that ticks the phases of the moon, Hides an illogical female soul, yet your brain, Mathematically calculating atomic seconds belongs to male logic, firmly bound to destruction. Cyclosna, You make clear the hours of the lunar day, The nightly moons of the lunar year; Your gear mechanism turns like Saturn in autonomous rings. On dragon foot you stand amidst Toledo, Babylon, Peking, Spitting out ruin here, there luck, as was sung in the legends From Stonehenge, Yucatan to Jaipur. Cyclosna After the sundial and the water clock, The melting candle and the sandglass, The cog driven brass-clock, now only the fire-clock Will accompany our prostration towards hell. The sweet ‘tin tin’ of Alighieri’s paradise vespers Dies away in his decimo canto Muted by Lucifer’s hissing. Metaphoric Cyclosna: In the flames of ecstatic cheer of love, Like death and condemnation you burn, another phoenix, yourself. The eon has been awaiting its ashes since the impulses of time The augurs tested in diaphragms, livers and gallbladders of Tuscan boars and bears, Latins who worshipped the moon goddess Losna, Hellenic Leucothea, Numen of nightly-Hadish seas, Cyclosna, Till this day behind steel cubes barred, Victim of curiosity, in your triple cage, So that you do not reach out into space and time For a consciousness like ours. In vain. Your toothed-wheel motion would be perpetuum mobile, If your Foucauldian pendulum encircled the axis of the world. But clocks on towers renounce on Sol atque Luna. In the iron bowels cascades of space time proceed in levels, From the cosmic mind of your drive in four dimensions, Over axioms of depth, from the plane to the point Down to the monadic material of muonic chaos. Cyclosna, To something found between the present and something forgotten, An engine of chance and genius in contest become Now a talisman for all cyclists and a chronometer of the arts, That constantly wallows in this form of movement. Since the invention of the wheel, homo erectus Has successfully spread freedom by cycling, Quite without causing harm to the heritage of man. So cycle on Cyclosna! fig. 84 Paul Wiedmer in his studio while at work on his Cyclosna, 2012 104 Catalogue 1 Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Dynamism of a Cyclist (Dinamismo di un ciclista), 1913 Oil on canvas 70 x 95 cm Gianni Mattioli Collection Long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice The turn of the century witnessed the transformation of bicycling from an aristocratic pastime to a racing sport. With the founding of the Giro d’Italia in 1909, Italy alongside France became a Grand Tour cycle race nation. The competitive sport established itself as a novel entertainment and passion for the masses, with artists and intellectuals, Futurists among them, becoming loyal devotees. Already in 1907 Umberto Boccioni had submitted drawings of bicycles to the magazine of the Italian Touring Club and had watched cycle races in Italy and possibly in France.1 It is likely that in 1913 an actual race inspired him to tackle the motif of a speeding man on a bicycle: the subject of Dynamism of a Cyclist. The goal was to fulfill the Futurist ideal of dynamic unity, which, according to Boccioni surpassed, Cubism’s ‘decompositional’ aesthetics. Representing a human figure’s fusion with a machine, the painting rather literally embodies Marinetti’s non-human model of the future. Dynamism of a Cyclist was painted following Boccioni’s return from Paris after his June 1913 exhibition of sculpture at the Galerie La Boëtie. Discouraged by the criticism his sculptures received, he started painting again. Disenchanted with what he considered Cubism’s ‘cold image-making,’2 Boccioni set out to prove Futurism’s superiority. It is known that he had asked Gino Severini to obtain for him reproductions of Parisian works on sporting themes, such as The Cardiff Team: Third Representation (L’Equipe de Cardiff, trosième représentation, 1913, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris) by Robert Delaunay and The Soccer Players (Les Joueurs de football, 1912-13, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) by Albert Gleizes.3 It is also possible, as Flavio Fergonzi has suggested, that Boccioni was aware by this time of Jean Metzinger’s At the Cycle-Race Track.4 Dynamism of a Cyclist is a stage in Boccioni’s endeavor to depict a unified dynamic plastic form manifested through the “object+environment” unity. The cyclist becomes alive through his fusion with the surroundings. Physical limits around him melt away and the figure resembles a machine dynamically forging through space, from right to left. It is hardly recognizable, and the shapes—bulky and compact—acquire three-dimensional, nearly sculptural qualities. Following his efforts in sculpture, Boccioni favored the process of solidification to portray dynamism. “The dynamic form,” he wrote, “for its changeable and evolving essence, is a sort of invisible nimbus between an object and action, between relative motion and absolute motion, between the visible and the invisible, between the object and its own indivisible setting. It is a kind of analogical synthesis dwelling on the borders between the real object and its plastic-ideal power and can only be grasped by flashes of intuition.”5 Boccioni, a keen admirer of Bergson, associated forms here with feeling, as the continuity of the cyclist’s movement can only be perceived by our own intuition in assembling the subject. “Our search is for the definitive, through a succession of intuitive stages.”6 Boccioni executed numerous preparatory drawings, in which the trajectory of the cyclist moves toward a virtually abstract fusion of forms, lines and colors. The only realistic detail to survive in the painting is the number “15” on the cyclist’s tabard, depicted in the upper center of the image, indicative of the athlete’s starting number in the race. Yet Boccioni asserted that the identity of the cyclist was not important, but rather that the dynamism of modern life and the sensation of speed, lauded by the Futurists, be epitomized in the work of art: “it is the sensation of the race, not the cyclist that we wish to depict.”7 Alfred H. Barr affirmed that, in contrast to Cubists, for Futurists the subject matter was of utmost significance: “exaltation of the machine and of the noise and confusion of modern life was as conscious a part of their program as the abstract analysis of movements and forces.”8 The excitement and drama of the spectacle are enhanced by the variety of the brushstrokes and the purity of the color hues applied to the yellow ground of the canvas. At this time Boccioni favored “the use of colors with pure tones applied simultaneously and for contrasts, for affinities and for gradations.”9 With its fragmentary application of paint and the illusion of light falling on the cyclist’s figure, Dynamism of a Cyclist is vestigially Impressionist and Divisionist. 1 Bernard Vere, “Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912-13,” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 28, nos. 8–9, May–June 2011, p. 1157. 2 Umberto Boccioni, The Plastic Foundation of Futurist Sculpture and Painting, 1913, published in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, London: Tate Publishing, 2009, p. 90. 3 Flavio Fergonzi, The Gianni Mattioli Collection. Masterpieces of the Italian Avant-garde, Milan: Skira, 2003, p. 181. 4 Ibid. 5 Umberto Boccioni, Pittura scultura futuriste, quoted in ibid., p. 186. 6 Boccioni, quoted in Apollonio, op. cit., p. 90. 7 Boccioni, quoted in Fergonzi, op. cit., p. 180. 8 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Dorothy C. Miller and Ernestine M. Fantl, Cubism and Abstract Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1936, p. 15. 9 Umberto Boccioni in Lacerba 1913, August 15, quoted in Fergonzi, op. cit., p. 184. 106 2 Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio) 1913 (cast 2004–5) Bronze 112 x 40 x 90 cm Private collection Trained as a painter, Umberto Boccioni began sculpting in 1912 in preparation for his June-July 1913 one-man exhibition at the Galerie de la Boètie, Paris. Gino Severini recalled in his memoirs, “it was certainly something of a ‘tour de force’ to prepare ten sculptures or so . . . and twenty drawings in the space of twelve months. Such a desperate display of energy and a pressing sense of immediacy employed for the purpose of a maximum degree of expression, made one wonder if Boccioni might not have felt some premonition of his imminent doom.”1 Characterized by this mature level of expression, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is the last in a series of four sculptures of figures forcefully moving through space. Originally conceived in plaster, and first cast in bronze in 1931, this is Boccioni’s crowning sculptural achievement. Although he rejected traditional sculpture, Boccioni’s careful craftsmanship reveals his familiarity with the anatomy of the human figure in motion. In all likelihood he had seen, in Rome in 1911, Auguste Rodin’s Walking Man, (L’Homme qui marche, 1907, Musée Rodin, Paris) the posture of which is echoed in Unique Forms. Boccioni seems to critique the classical sculptural tradition of the body revealed by drapery, yet the torso’s strength is emphasized in an unprecedented way, rendering the armless figure striding through space a part of the future rather than of the past. With atmospheric forces seeming to shape its outlines and its infusion of aerodynamic features, the figure is the ultimate paragon of Futurism. Boccioni believed that the moving object transforms in relation to its surroundings, which act upon it and give it life. This idea is embodied in his philosophy of ‘plastic dynamism,’2 which he elaborated in 1913 and published as a manifesto at the end of the year: “Plastic dynamism is the simultaneous action of the motion characteristic of an object (its absolute motion), mixed with the transformation which the object undergoes in relation to its mobile and immobile environment (its relative motion).”3 Through motion in space the object’s essence gradually unfolds itself in time. Rejecting the representation of movement through the repetition of forms, Boccioni argued that an image of such dynamic continuity could be achieved only through a single unified form. It is epitomized in Unique Forms. The three-dimensional figure became, for him, a force in the space-time continuum, or the fourth dimension. To quote Boccioni: “With the unique form which gives continuity in space we create a form which is the sum of the potential unfolding of the three known dimensions. Therefore we cannot make a measured and finite fourth dimension, but rather a continuous projection of forces and forms intuited in their infinite unfolding. In fact, the unique dynamic form which we proclaim is nothing other than the suggestion of a form in motion which appears for only a moment to be lost in the infinite succession of its variety.”4 A fervent advocate of Henri Bergson’s ideas, Boccioni emphasized the role of intuition in comprehending the object’s essence. The writings of Linda Dalrymple Henderson give further insight, revealing that an element central to understanding the dynamic continuity of Unique Forms is the invisible ‘ether,’which at the end of the nineteenth century was discussed as a medium that fills all existing space.5 Boccioni considered ether the possible source of matter and believed that all physical manifestations were connected by this invisible energy and should thus be perceived as continuous. “Solid bodies are only atmosphere condensed,” he claimed.6 The physical form he sought to give ether is therefore literally embodied by Unique Forms. The sculpture acquires the aura of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch, which the Futurists considered exemplary for its ‘will to power’ (Wille zur Macht).7 The concept of ‘plastic dynamism’ was put forward by Boccioni in opposition to Cubism’s static decomposition of the observed object. Cubism, for Boccioni, lagged behind Futurism. Yet it was in Paris, when visiting the studios of Cubist painters, that Boccioni became interested in the fourth dimension which later appeared in his writings. 1 Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter. The Autobiography of Gino Severini, translated by Jennifer Franchina, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 125. By “imminent doom” Severini was referring to Boccioni’s premature death. 2 Umberto Boccioni, Plastic Dynamism, 1913, published in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, London: Tate Publishing, 2009, pp. 92-5. 3 Ibid., p. 92. 4 Umberto Boccioni, Pittura scultura futuriste, 1914, quoted in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space,” in Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Bruce Clarke, eds., From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 136. 5 Ibid., pp. 126–49. 6 Boccioni quoted in ibid., p. 135. 7 Terry E. Smith, In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 132. 108 3 Georges Braque (1882–1963) The Clarinet (La Clarinette), summer–fall 1912 Oil with sand on canvas 91.4 x 64.5 cm Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG7 It is likely that Georges Braque executed The Clarinet in the late summer of 1912, when he and Pablo Picasso worked together in Sorgues-sur-l’Ouvèze, France. This sojourn was seminal for the development of Cubism, as the movement’s initial Analytic phase was gradually evolved by an introduction of textural variety and collage elements. The Clarinet captures this transitional period, marking the commencement of Synthetic Cubism. Characteristic of the waning moments of Analytic Cubism, as in The Clarinet, is the oval format that frees the artist from the constraints of corners. The image is dominated by a pale, brownish palette. At a glance, allusions to depth are absent and the pictorial space is shallow. Black parallel lines, slightly tilted towards the right, divide the space into separate, often overlapping planes, in which fragments of musical instruments (clarinet and guitar) can be located, trompe l’oeil imitations of wood (a technique introduced by Braque), and stenciled lettering of printed sheet music (‘VALSE’ by ‘GLUCK’),1 reminiscent of papiers collés.2 Braque also included admixtures of sand, creating rough zones which contrast with smooth ones. This enhances the differentiation of surfaces, already caused by varied brushstrokes, and adds to the subtleties of color tones. Sand here, which brings a tactile component to the image, amounts to a third dimension, giving volume and depth to the flat canvas surface. Braque, before both Picasso and Jean Metzinger, first experimented with sand in the summer of 1911 in the painting Bottles and Glasses (Kunstmuseum, Bern).3 Yet only in August 1912 had he transformed this initial experiment into a body of works, which include The Clarinet. Despite the emphasis on materiality through sand, the image has an ethereal quality, with its thinly primed canvas and nuanced transparent planes. The subject, music, is in its own way also fugitive and intangible. Thematically the painting is close to other works on musical subjects executed by Braque in the fall of 1911.4 It may be that Braque outlined the imagery of The Clarinet during that period, but developed and fashioned the painting at the end of August 1912. Douglas Cooper noted that the seemingly mundane objects that Braque (and Picasso) chose to portray were of intimate and personal significance to the artists: “The daily life of Braque and Picasso is enshrined in their still lifes: things to eat, drink, smoke, read and discuss. Pipes, packets of cigarettes, jugs, fans, newspapers and musical instruments lay around in their studios . . . The violins, guitars and sheets of music are tokens of their personal pleasure . . . Thus even though the artists seem to have neglected the human element, we find on examination that Cubist painting was in fact a very real record of their private lives and experiences.”5 1 The script ‘GLUCK’ has faded. Angelica Rudenstine noted that “A 1912 photograph of the work in the Kahnweiler archives reveals lettering which had almost vanished by 1942. The ‘LUCK’ of ‘GLUCK’ and the strong ‘ET’ above it . . . were probably stencilled in charcoal on the unprepared canvas, a not uncommon practice for Braque at this date. With the passage of time, the charcoal disappears.” Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1985, p. 127. 2 The technique of papier collé was invented by Braque in early September 2012 during the same stay in Sorgues-sur-l’Ouvèze (after Picasso had left for Paris). See Rudenstine, op. cit., p. 128. 3 See Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, pp. 57–64, in this catalogue. 4 Idem, note 8. 5 Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, London: Phaidon, 1971, 1998, p. 64. 110 4 Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) Cyclist through the City (Ciclista attraverso la città), 1945 Oil on board 110 x 75 cm Rovereto, MART – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto Fortunato Depero was a key member of the second generation of Italian Futurists. His first contact with the movement came in 1913: when visiting Florence he chanced upon an issue of the review Lacerba that included an article by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism. In December of the same year Depero moved to Rome, where he saw Umberto Boccioni’s drawings and sculptures at the Galleria Sprovieri. In Rome he met Marinetti as well as Giacomo Balla for the first time. Before long the latter became his maestro and mentor. Spring 1915 marked Depero’s official entry into the Futurist group, with a letter sent to Balla and signed by Marinetti, Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Carlo Carrà. Depero’s first Futurist works revealed the influence of Boccioni’s theories of ‘plastic dynamism’1 (see cat. no. 2). Yet Depero strove to expand the Futurism movement beyond the traditional languages of painting and sculpture, to include theater, costume design, advertizing, urbanism and other fields. It was with the manifesto Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, co-written and signed by Depero and Balla on 11 March 1915, that the extension of Futurist aesthetics to embrace the whole realm of daily life was proposed. Depero lavished his personal pictorial style on all types of decorations: paintings, posters, theater set design, tapestries, costumes, and furniture. Characterized by ornamentation and angular geometric forms, Cyclist through the City, executed in 1945, loosely resembles a publicity poster. A cyclist is progressing at high speed: the figure is multiplied three times in successive states, to suggest the exceptional velocity of the ride. As suggested by the painting’s date (at the end of World War II), the subject could be a military cyclist, resembling an unstoppable war machine. The ancient buildings in the background evoke a Renaissance city, perhaps Florence. The old houses appear to be crumbling, or perhaps about to burn or explode. The past is abandoned, yielding to the new and modern world of technological advancement, as represented by the cyclist. The city seems to be lit by artificial street lights, alluded to by the yellow color. Vibrating metropolitan culture had impressed Depero when in 1928 he had moved to New York for two years. Its feverish city life was both the symbol and reality of modernity. With Cyclist through the City Depero returned, in both theme and style, to characteristic Futurist images of the motorcyclist and cyclist executed mainly in the 1920s. In 1927 he declared his admiration for the new technological and industrial reality: “We Futurists adore electrical power plants, railroad stations, aircraft hangars, tanks, gigantic ocean liners, the factories in their continuously diabolic productive ferment, flying biplanes and triplanes, and bullet trains. We will reconstruct the Universe in the image of these marvels: motorcycle-cows, steel bicycle- horses, artificial suns, colorful trees of zinc and reinforced concrete, surprising mechanical flora, advertising clouds held in check by precise accounting books, theatrical storms in space.”2 1 Umberto Boccioni, Plastic Dynamism, 1913, published in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, London: Tate Publishing, 2009, pp. 92–95. 2 Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista. Dinamo Azari, Milan: Dinamo Azari, 1927, p. 65, quoted in Gabriella Belli, Depero Futurista: Rome-Paris-New York 1915-1932 and more, Milan: Skira, 1999, p. 67. 112 5 Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (Nu [esquisse], Jeune homme triste dans un train), 1911–12 Oil on cardboard 100 x 73 cm Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG9 The turn of the century witnessed a remarkable growth of interest in non-Euclidean geometry and new space-time dimensions, challenging the conceptions of both absolute truth and traditional expression in art. Early on, Marcel Duchamp became one of the main adherents favoring a nonconventional, scientific approach in his practice. Fundamental in triggering this was the stimulation he received from the Cubist Puteaux group gatherings in his brothers’ studios at 7, rue Lemaître, in which Duchamp participated from 1910 (fig. 32). While his initial interest in non- Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension may also have been suggested by the writings of Gaston de Pawlowski and/ or the Duchamp’s brothers’ neighbor František Kupka,1 the real connection was made when in fall 1911 he met the members of the Gleizes-Metzinger circle, who also brought Maurice Princet and Guillaume Apollinaire to the discussions in Puteaux. Given Duchamp’s association with Cubism at the time, Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train, executed in 1911–12, has some clear Cubist features, such as the decomposition of planes, abstraction of forms, the subdued color palette and emphasis on the flat picture surface. Yet Duchamp’s interest in non- Euclidean geometry, even if amateurish in his own view,2 appears central to this work. Nude (Study) depicts a scene combining two movements: a figure walking in a moving train. Duchamp claimed this painting to be a self-portrait, on a journey from Paris to Rouen, his birthplace (he identified his black pipe in the upper center of the painting). Through decomposition and multiplication of forms and lines, he portrays the totality of the figure’s different states of movement over a period of time. Duchamp said of Nude Descending a Staircase (fig. 34), of which he painted two versions and for which the present work may be broadly preparatory: “My aim was a static representation of a movement—a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement.”3 The succession of positions depicted on one plane suggests the presence of an indeterminate and curved space. It seems to allude to a space-time continuum, a fourth dimension. Duchamp described the work in geometrical terms, stressing distortion and elasticity: “there is the distortion of the young man—I had called this elementary parallelism. It was a formal decomposition; that is, linear elements following each other like parallels and distorting the objects. The object is completely stretched out, as if elastic. The lines follow each other in parallels, while changing subtly to form the movement, or the form of the young man in question. I also used this procedure in the Nude Descending a Staircase.”4 Such ideas may be derived from the writings on hyperspace philosophy by Charles Hinton, which Duchamp must have discovered reading Esprit Jouffret’s Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions (Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions) of 1903. Another source of influence on Duchamp was the chrono-photography of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, which presented sequences of successive images of moving figures. “Chrono-photography was at the time in vogue. Studies of horses in movement and of fencers in different positions in Muybridge’s albums were well known to me,”5 Duchamp claimed, adding that “the whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air.”6 Thus kineticism, central to Nude (Study), had for Duchamp a purely intellectual and inquisitive point of departure, which, in his view, stood in opposition to Futurist imitational aims: “Futurism was an impressionism of the mechanical world. It was strictly a continuation of the Impressionist movement. I was not interested in that . . . . I was much more interested in recreating ideas in painting.”7 Yet, Nude Descending a Staircase, (No. 2) was excluded by Gleizes and Metzinger from the Salon des Indépendents in Paris in 1912 as it was considered to have too much affinity with Futurism. Machine aesthetics and suggestion of motion were considered derogatory by Cubists. The nude was also regarded a heretical subject in avant-garde circles, as it was too close to the classical painting tradition. Duchamp stated that “at that time, in 1912, it was not considered proper to call a painting anything but Landscape, Still-Life, Portrait, or Number Such-and-such”8. He was soon to become antagonistic to Cubism, due to its overly theoretical agenda. This comes in contradiction to Gleizes’ and Metzinger’s publication of Du Cubisme in 1912 on the occasion of the La Section d’Or exhibition, as the book and exhibition (to which Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, [No. 2] was accepted) manifested an establishment of Cubism as a school joined by united purpose. 1 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidian Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 122–23. 2 Duchamp claimed that his interest in the fourth dimension was the result of his desire to escape the banalities of routine: “I thought of art on a broader scale. There were discussions at the time of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean geometry. But most views of it were amateurish . . . And for all our misunderstandings, through these new ideas we were helped to get away from the conventional way of speaking—from our café and studio platitudes.” Marcel Duchamp quoted in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney, Eleven Europeans in America, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 13, nos. 4–5, 1946, p. 20; quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Vol. 1, New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997, p. 26. 3 Schwarz, op. cit., p. 20. 4 Elemental parallelism was described as “repetition of a line equivalent to an elemental line (in the sense of similar at any point) in order to generate the surface. Same parallelism when passing from plane to volume: Sort of parallel multiplication of the n-dim’l continuum to form the n + 1 dim’l continuum.” Marcel Duchamp, “A l’Infinitif,” quoted in Henderson, op. cit., p. 127. 114 5 Duchamp in an interview with Sweeney, op. cit., p. 20; quoted in Schwarz, op. cit., p. 19. 6 Marcel Duchamp in an interview with Katharine Kuh, “Marcel Duchamp,” in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York and Evanston, Il.: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 83; quoted in Ibid., p. 19. 7 Duchamp in an interview with Sweeney, op. cit., pp. 20–21; quoted in ibid., p. 19. 8 Duchamp, in an interview with Kuh, op. cit., p. 83; quoted in ibid., p. 18. 6 Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) Box in a Valise (Boîte en-valise), 1941 Leather valise containing miniature replicas and color reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one photograph with graphite, watercolor, and ink additions 40.7 x 37.2 x 10.1 cm Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG10 While Duchamp’s initial work revolved around Post- Impressionist and later Cubist aesthetics, by 1913 he had withdrawn from artistic circles and abandoned traditional painting. Seeking to surpass mere visuality and ‘retinal’ painting, Duchamp strove to create art expressing ideas and contesting the distinction between good and bad taste. In 1913, by mounting an upside-down bicycle wheel on a wooden stool, Duchamp made his first ready-made, Bicycle Wheel (Roue de bicyclette, fig. 37),1 showing that a mundane object became an artwork simply by a virtue of an artist’s decision. Linda Dalrymple Henderson has posited that “Duchamp’s attack on beauty and taste via the ready-mades seems also to have been directed at . . . the Bergsonian Cubist theory set forth in Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du Cubisme. . . . Du Cubisme enshrined the creative intuition of the sensitive artist, echoing Bergson’s belief that the artistic act was an expression of the ‘fundamental self.’ The final chapter of Du Cubisme celebrates the sensitivity of the artist who embodies the operation of taste in his pursuit of beauty. . . . Moreover, Bergson had characterized intellectual and scientific modes of thinking (those preferred by Duchamp) as external to the innate psychic processes of the organic, profound self. According to Bergson, such intellectual ideas, ‘which we receive ready- made [tout fait],’ must remain external to the inner self of artistic creation . . . Duchamp’s detached, mechanical practice . . . places these works [ready-mades] directly in opposition to Bergsonian Cubist theory and painting.”2 With such subversive ideas Duchamp anticipated Dadaism, which later led directly to Surrealism—movements, with both of which he was associated. The symbolic meaning invested in his post-Cubist work is also at the core of Box in a Valise, a travelling case containing sixty nine reproductions of Duchamp’s pre-1935 works (including all of his most important ready-mades). Making the reproductions in a meticulous and time-consuming manner (collotype printing, with colouring applied by hand through stencils), Duchamp sought to abolish the distinction between an original art object and its mechanical multiples. He once more attacked the hegemony of taste and uniqueness in art. Peggy Guggenheim’s Box in a Valise is the first in the ‘de luxe’ edition of twenty original Box in a Valise sets, the travelling case of which was made by Louis Vuitton.3 Made public in Paris on 1 January 1941, the present Box was financed by Guggenheim and bears a dedication to her written by Duchamp on the inside of the case.4 The Box is reminiscent of a salesman’s display case. Made during World War II, just before Duchamp’s move to New York in 1942, the Box may also present a way for the artist to retain and easily transport a selection of his most important artworks (through their reproductions) in a symbolic form of a small portable museum. Rather than having a book format, such as a catalogue raisonné, the Box simulates the environment of a room, perfectly to scale. Duchamp claimed that art does not require approval by the public, yet with the Box he proved that he was concerned with values of survival and remembrance. Among the sixty-nine reproductions of Duchamp’s most significant selected works, we find Nude [Study], Sad Young Man on a Train, 1911–12 (cat. no. 5), Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (Nu descendant un escalier, no. 1), 1911, and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [Le Grand Verre]), 1915–23. The latter, according to Henderson, is Duchamp’s key work in expressing and summarizing his interest in the fourth dimension. She states, it “is a mathematical/scientific allegory of sexual quest, in which Duchamp worked to create an unbridgeable gap between the four-dimensional realm of the biomechanical Bride above and the three-dimensional Bachelor Machine below.”5 In addition, two reproductions included in the Box have the Bicycle Wheel appearing in them. The first one (fig. 35) is a retouched photograph of Duchamp’s first studio in New York (33 West 67th Street). It shows the second, 1916 replica of the Bicycle Wheel placed side by side with Trap (Trébuchet), of 1917, a coat rack screwed to the floor. The spokes of the bicycle wheel were pencilled in by Duchamp, as they were out of focus. The second reproduction (fig. 36) portrays In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915, a snow shovel inscribed with this phrase, surrounded by two wheels: half of Bicycle Wheel, on the left, and the drive wheel of Rotary Glass Plates, Precision Optics (Rotative plaques verre, optique de précision), 1920, on the right. This is a detail enlargement of a photograph taken by Man Ray in Duchamp’s studio at 246 West 73rd Street in New York in 1920. Typically, Duchamp reframed the print, re- photographed, enlarged and retouched it. 1 Duchamp later denied that the creation of this ready-made was purposeful: “The Bicycle Wheel was my first ready-made, so much that at first it wasn’t even called a ready-made. It still had little to do with the idea of the ready-made. Rather, it had more to do with the idea of chance. In a way, it was simply letting things go by themselves and having sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an apartment you live. Probably, to help ideas come out of your head. To see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day.” Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works by Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, p. 442. Bottle Rack (Ègouttoir) of 1914, a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, is considered to be his first intentional ready-made. 2 Henderson elaborated on the word ‘taste’: “As Pontus Hulten has observed, Duchamp’s first ‘pure’ ready-made, the Bottle Rack, or Ègouttoir of 1914, plays on the word gout, or taste, and, I would add, on the Puteaux Cubists’ preoccupation with it (the word recurs almost like a mantra in sections of Du Cubisme). Rather than a generalized challenge to all of art making, Duchamp’s initial ready-mades, including the égouttoir (able to drain drops [gouttes] and to avoid taste [gout]), seem to have been a response to local conditions—specifically, Puteaux Cubist theory and the painted celebration of Cubism’s superior sensibilities in a work such as Metzinger’s Le Gouter (Tea Time).” Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 63. 116 3 In total there are twenty four Box in a valise sets, and between 1941 and 1943 Duchamp added four hors-série (0/XX) copies, which were given to Mary Reynolds, Katherine Dreier, Walter and Louise Arensberg and Kay Boyle. 4 Six further partial editions of the box followed, all including sixty-nine reproductions of Duchamp’s own work, yet only the original ‘de luxe’ edition was placed in a Louis Vuitton leather case, hence making the following versions all Box rather than Box in a valise. The twenty-four ‘de luxe’ versions of the box are bound in leather—standard versions are simply covered in cloth—and all have a hand-colored ‘original’ in the lid. 5 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in the Twentieth-Century Art and Culture”, Configurations, vol. 17, no. 1, Winter 2009, p. 151. 7 Louis Marcoussis (1878–1941) The Regular (L’Habitué), 1920 Oil with sand and pebbles on canvas 161.9 x 97 cm Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG22 Louis Marcoussis was born Ludwig Casimir Ladislas Markus in Warsaw in 1878.1 After attending the Academy of Fine Arts of Cracow, he moved to Paris in 1903. He made his living by selling caricatures to satirical periodicals, including La Vie Parisienne and Le Journal. Circa 1906, frequenting cafés such as the Rotonde, Cirque Médrano and the Ermitage, he met Edgar Degas, whose influence led his painting towards Impressionism. Yet in 1907 he temporarily abandoned painting. It was when he met Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire in 1910 that Marcoussis joined the Cubism movement and began to paint once more. In 1912 he exhibited with the Cubists in the Salon de la Section d’Or at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris. By this time his circle included Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. John Golding wrote that “Marcoussis was a gifted if not very original painter, and his work at the Section d’Or was of some importance since it reflected something of what Picasso and Braque were doing at this time.”2 In particular in 1914, Marcoussis was using collage, stenciled letters and trompe l’oeil imitations of wood in his works. This marked his conversion to Synthetic Cubism and the persistence of the influence of Braque and Picasso. Marcoussis served in the army from 1914 to 1919, and later continued to work in the tradition of Synthetic Cubism and as an engraver. The Regular, of 1920, belongs to this post-war period of Marcoussis’ oeuvre. Douglas Cooper wrote: “Nearly all of those who came back from the front abandoned their pre-war Cubist style . . . while Marcoussis, whose pre-war output of Cubist paintings had been very small and uneven in quality, produced his major work: The Regular in 1920.”3 Portrayed here is a man seated at a café table or guéridon. The composition consisting of solid, vertically elongated planes is predominantly abstract. The figure barely surfaces from the flatness of the image. Yet the protagonist’s facial features (hair, eyes, ears, nose, lips, beard and moustache), the cigar he smokes, and his hands are identifiable, as are the dominoes on a table with green baize, which is decipherable through the imitation wood on the right. The sitter is a ‘regular’, or habitual customer, in a café or bar in Paris, perhaps at night, given the black ground on the left side. This is one of the few paintings by Marcoussis to include the addition of sand to the pigment. The Regular exemplifies how sand, as a volumetric dimension, continued to appear in the later works of Cubist artists, following Braque’s introduction of the technique in 1911.4 Cooper called The Regular “probably [Marcoussis’] most important work,” even if he added that it “shows him once again skilfully imitating Picasso in his later synthetic manner.” 1 About 1911–1912, at the suggestion of Guillaume Apollinaire, he began calling himself Marcoussis, the name of a village near Monthéry. 2 John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis 1907–1914, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1959, 1988, p. 173. 3 Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, London: Phaidon, 1971, 1998, p. 209. 4 See Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, pp. 57–64, in this catalogue. 5 Cooper, op. cit., pp. 133–34. 118 8 Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) Cyclist (Le Bicycliste), 1912 Oil on board with sand 27.2 x 22.2 cm Private collection Cyclist is the smallest of Jean Metzinger’s three known paintings on the theme of the racing cyclist. The relatively broad brushstrokes and thinly applied paint suggest that this may be a preparatory oil on board for the two large-scale paintings of the racing cyclist. The vivid hues of red, magenta, intense yellow and green anticipate the colorful palette of Racing Cyclist (cat. no. 9). The present work depicts a cyclist riding a bicycle with marked strength and determination. Holding the handle bars tight with both hands, he is leaning forward, probably accelerating while competing with his rivals. While the ground his bicycle is touching is not visible, the abstract background, composed mainly of white, yellow and orange blocks of color, alludes to the presence of a wooden cycle- race track, or an open sandy arena, such as Parc des Princes in Paris, a finish line of the Tour de France. The latter option may be plausible, as the cyclist’s racing number “4” is on his back, affirming that this must be a long distance course consisting of several stages. Two French flags waving on the left identify the place as France. The tricolor might be waving on a flagpole in the distance, or it may be held by spectators, which in this reduced and narrowly focused image remain indistinguishable. Attention is drawn exclusively to the cyclist as the protagonist of the scene. He is portrayed in half profile—a position chosen by Metzinger for each of these racing cyclist paintings. Reflecting Metzinger’s Cubist approach, the cyclist’s body and the cycle-race track are decomposed into a variety of geometric planes. This division strategy may be based on the principles of the Golden Section (see p. 84), alluding to Metzinger’s interest in mathematics and geometry, and his association with the Section d’Or Cubist group. Yet, maintaining the contours of the human body, the cyclist’s figure remains realistic. Even the face, although only partially revealed, has identifiable features. Perhaps he is trying to look backwards, since his head is tilted forward, but the facial features are portrayed perpendicularly. This suggests a shift in the head position, and thus possibly depicts successive moments in time—could this be an allusion to a space-time continuum? The most realistic depiction is that of the bicycle, which has a photographic resemblance to the cycles produced at the turn of the century, such as Alcyon (fig. 75) or La Française-Diamant. The rounded shape of the cyclist’s head suggests that he is wearing a helmet holding his hair together against the wind. He is intensely focused on the track. His knees are bent, suggesting forward motion. In addition, the crucial element implying movement and speed are the blurred out and vanishing spokes of the spinning wheels. Even if depicted at a close range, in its composition the painting recalls standard news photographs or poster images of cyclists which Metzinger, an ardent sports fan, must have been familiar with. Indeed Metzinger’s entire racing cyclist series seems to have been painted directly from available media images. Here the body posture resembles that of Octave Lapize (figs. 76, 79), winner of the Paris-Roubaix race in 1909, 1910 and 1911. In particular, “4” was Lapize’s starting number in the unforgettable 1910 Tour de France, which he won (fig. 72). 120 9 Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) Racing Cyclist (Coureur cycliste), 1912 Oil on canvas with sand 100 x 81 cm Private collection The period between the 1890s and 1910 witnessed a radical reduction in bicycle prices and the emergence of the first professional road races organized by newspapers for mass audiences.1 Jean Metzinger, an enthusiast, had attended cycle races, and it may be that an eye witness experience or a specific newspaper article had inspired this version of the Racing Cyclist. The cycle-race track, only alluded to in the small oil on board version (cat. no. 8), is depicted here clearly and realistically. The wooden floor with its parallel planks and the white vertical wall with posters and cycling advertisements affirm this, suggesting furthermore that this may be an indoor cycle-race track. The number “4” on the cyclist’s right armband is proof, as this served for identification by the spectators in the stands. The moving shadows on the ground evoke the illumination of the famous Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris. Images of bicycle wheels and script such as “PNEU…” (a fragment of a tire advertisement) are almost identical to early twentieth century posters of this kind. The cyclist’s shadow indicates an inclined track surface. As he did in his two other versions of the racing cyclist, Metzinger has used sand, probably to allude to the rough arena surface. Spectators are visible in the stands. A French flag is waving behind his back, locating the race in France and reinforcing the nationalistic atmosphere. The focus is on the cyclist, intently observed by the crowds. While the entirety of his body can be perceived within the various contours delineating his form, the figure is nevertheless decomposed into a variety of facets. Parts are transparent and overlapping with the surroundings: the back, left arm and left leg overlap with the wooden floor, while the upper head, side and left shoulder are as green as the advertisement on the wall. The blue and red areas at the body’s center may be an abstracted depiction of the cyclist’s colorful jersey. The same colors occur in the bicycle and the right leg. Realistic human skin color is minimal, visible only in the centre of his face, and fragments of the arms and legs. With such angular and relatively abstract planes, the composition is reminiscent of a collage, a technique Metzinger used subsequently in At the Cycle-Race Track (cat. no. 11). While the decomposition of the figure is an evident Cubist technique, it also pertains to Metzinger’s interest in exploring movement and speed. The body and clothes may be abstracted to suggest the impossibility of discerning a discrete image, given the speed with which the cyclist is moving. Although only partial here, such fusion of figure and surrounding through speed recalls Futurist ideals and especially Umberto Boccioni’s “object + environment” unity.2 The flag behind the cyclist’s back, waving in the direction of the cyclist, identifies the direction of the wind, further implying that we are looking at an image of rapid movement. The cyclist is gripping the handlebars determinedly. The slight curvature of the back, the steep arm posture, the implied fleeting passage of the bicycle across the wooden cycle-race track, and the dynamism of the colors all suggest that Racing Cyclist may be situated chronologically between Metzinger’s other two racing cyclist paintings. The posture and the clearly defined moustache identify the cyclist as Octave Lapize (figs. 76, 79), winner of the Paris-Roubaix race in 1909, 1910 and 1911. Like the other two versions, this painting is reminiscent of a newspaper photograph. Here, however, unlike the small oil on board version, the black contours around the main image provide more visual evidence for such an interpretation. 1 Bernard Vere, “Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912–13,” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 28, nos. 8-9, May--June 2011, pp. 1157- 58. 2 Umberto Boccioni, “Plastic Dynamism,” 1913, published in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, London: Tate Publishing, 2009, p. 95. 122 10 Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) Study for At the Cycle-Race Track (Etude pour Au Vèlodrome), 1912 Graphite and charcoal on beige paper 38 x 26 cm Inscribed “JMetzinger 1911” Centre Pompidou, Paris – Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle This drawing is a preliminary study for Jean Metzinger’s final painting on the racing cyclist theme, At the Cycle-Race Track (cat. no. 11). The representation of the cyclist’s body, with its bent backbone, mighty legs, arms and chest, and hands tightly gripping the handle bars all correspond to those of the painting. The schematic facial features speak of the cyclist’s intense concentration and focus on the track ahead. The cyclist is oblivious of his surroundings. In particular, the determined forward posture of the body can be explained by Metzinger’s intention to depict the strenuous final furlongs of the Paris-Roubaix race, as he does in At the Cycle-Race Track. The planar segmentation, especially in the parallel stripes of the jersey, indicates that Metzinger had carefully planned in advance the composition of At the Cycle-Race Track. Even the angle of the track is the same. Most of the lines in this work, particularly those applied with charcoal, are drawn in a decisive and straightforward manner. It may be that Metzinger used a ruler to lay out the contours of the cyclist’s figure. Yet, several parts of the study, drawn with pencil, betray a more hesitant or more improvised manner. This is visible in particular in the spokes of the spinning wheels. Also, the script “PARIS” and “PNEON[M]ATIQU[E]” (which is rendered with papier collé in the final painting) seem to be written in a childish hand. The wheel of the rival, at the left margin, appears as an afterthought. These apparently clumsy graphite additions contrast so vividly with the resolution and confidence with which the cyclist himself is delineated that one may speculate whether they were added at a later date. Traces of different spelling detectable under the script would seem to validate such a conclusion. In 1985 Angelica Rudenstine expressed similar doubts about the signature and date: “[they] appear to have been added at a later time, over an erased or scumbled area; moreover the handwriting may not be Metzinger’s.”1 Given the terminus post quem of April 1912 for the painting for which this is preparatory, the drawing can confidently be dated in the same year. 1 Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation , 1985, p. 533. 124 11 Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome), 1912 Oil, sand and collage on canvas 130.4 x 97.1 cm Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG18 Portrayed monumentally, the cyclist in At the Cycle-Race Track accrues in sculptural qualities relative to the artist’s previous versions of the theme. In addition, a larger expanse of the cycle-race track is now disclosed. Stands with crowds of spectators that were scarcely alluded to in Racing Cyclist (cat. no. 9) become an important part of the panorama. A banner and an advertisement are now incorporated as papiers collés. The use of dots to portray the crowd, especially towards the right of the painting, reveals the persistence of Pointillism in Metzinger’s oeuvre. The rough surface of the cycle-race track is evoked through the use of sand granules mixed with paint. The body of the cyclist is mostly transparent, with only patches of subdued red and pink to suggest skin color. The black and dark green stripes on his chest are the colors of his jersey. The decomposition of planes to define space, printed-paper collage, and the use of sand are characteristic examples of innovative Cubist technique. Nevertheless, as in Metzinger’s earlier Racing Cyclist paintings, the transparency evoked here may be a Futurist device: the subject is riding with such velocity that the fleeting passage results in a fusion of forms. Furthermore, becoming one entity with his bicycle, the racer resembles a Man-Machine. Combining various influences, Metzinger is in search of a new pictorial language in At the Cycle-Race Track. Allusion to movement and simultaneity is further emphasized in the portrayal of the bicycle. The wheels seem to be moving in opposite directions: the back wheel indicates a turn towards the cyclist’s right, while the front one is slightly shifting to his left. The ‘drop’ handle bars are depicted twice. All this encourages the hypothesis that Metzinger was seeking to depict different, successive positions of pivoting on the same axis. Successive moments in time and the implication of passage through space locate the cyclist in a space-time continuum, the fourth dimension. Number “4”, which appeared on the back and the armband of the cyclists in earlier paintings, is found here in the stands. It may refer to a lap number, but may also refer to the fourth dimension. An important distinguishing feature of this version with respect to the earlier ones is the inclusion of the front-runner’s wheel on the left of the composition. The determination reflected in the protagonist’s body posture and facial features allows us to suppose that he is gathering his forces, in the final minutes of the race, to overtake his rival. As the papier collé “PARIS-ROUB[AIX]” informs us, this is the famous Paris-Roubaix race, nicknamed for its extreme hardship the ‘Hell of the North.’ Given the location in the vélodrome of Roubaix, we are indeed spectators of the final stage of the race. The script “1er CRUPELANDT, sur LA FRANÇAISE” found on the recto of the same newspaper clipping, though partially obliterated by a black border, provides crucial information for the dating of the work in 1912.1 It declares the name of the cyclist, the newcomer Charles Crupelandt, who won the 1912 Paris-Roubaix race riding for the producer La Française-Diamant. His facial features and the central parting of his hair indeed resemble those of Crupelandt (figs. 77, 78). It may well be that Metzinger had seen this race in person, or, at least, had seen a newspaper article on it. The clippings he used were from a newspaper released immediately following the race, which took place on 7 April 1912. 1 In her 1985 catalogue of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Angelica Rudenstine, with some hesitancy, dated the painting ca. 1914 (?) on stylistic grounds. See Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1985, pp. 531–34. 126 12 Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) Cubist Composition with Clock (Composition cubiste à l’horloge), ca. 1912–13 Oil on canvas 41 x 33 cm Collection of Nicholas S. Zoullas This still life has only two elements, placed on a guéridon, or single pedestal table, with a rope molding. The clock is a Napoleon III mantel or table clock. A precariously tall Art Nouveau vase stands in the foreground. Ludwig Oechslin—Director of the Swiss clock- Museum of La Chaux de Fonds—in an e-mail of 19 July 2011 to this writer, described the clock: “it is wood and is, I think, from the second-half of the 19th century. The small dials in the corners might be giving details of the day, of the week, date and month but might also indicate the sequence in which the striking mechanism is to sound and whether it is turned on or off.” The circular pendulum is shown on the near side, outside of its oval window, and is represented in three successive moments of oscillation. The otherwise concealed chimer is revealed to us (the oval shape lower left of the clock face), and the reverse of the clock face (revers du medaillon d’écran) is depicted in the upper left. Metzinger’s stylized vase recalls the delicate glass vases manufactured by Daum Frères, Emile Gallé or Moser around 1900, the transience of which might be evoked by the pendulum behind it. A similar blue but less delicate vase with a rose appears in Metzinger’s Carafe en cristal et lunettes of ca. 1940 (lot 481, Sotheby’s, London, 26 June 2008). The bowl of the vase is seen from above (the circle) and from the side (the horizontal line) simultaneously, reminding us of a remark in Metzinger’s text “Le Cubisme était né: souvenirs” (the penultimate sentence) in which he castigated as a trick of outdated illusionism the representation by a horizontal line of the round aperture of a vase placed at eye-level.1 In particular we see a ‘golden spiral’, an intriguing combination of the Golden Rectangles and Fibonacci numbers that reminds us that Metzinger exhibited in October 1912 with the Section d’Or and belonged to a group of painters and thinkers, the Groupe de Puteaux, that speculated about such issues as mathematics and non-Euclidean geometry.2 In general the various displacements and dislocations, multiple viewpoints and hints of axonometry, make this a typically Cubist still life. The painting also reminds us of Paul Klee’s countless representations of clocks, which treat time in manifold ways. Cubist Composition with Clock was offered for sale at Christies on three occasions (1999, 2002 and 2005, with the date ca. 1913). It is now in a private collection and is exhibited here for the first time in living memory. For the possibility that this painting is identical with a lost painting in an exhibition in 1913 at the Galerie Berthe Weill, Exposition: Metzinger, Gleizes and Léger, no. 19, with the title Nature morte (quatriéme dimension), see the essay by Erasmus Weddigen in this catalogue (pp. 93–94); Alain Clairet and Božena Nikiel authenticated the painting in Paris, 21 December 1989. E.W. 1 Jean Metzinger, Le cubisme était né: souvenirs, Paris: Editions Présence, 1972. 2 For more on this, see pp. 93–94, in this catalogue. 128 13 Mario Sironi (1885–1961) The Cyclist (Il ciclista), 1916 Oil on canvas 96 x 71 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice Gift, Giovanni and Lilian Pandini, Bergamo, 2008, 2008.62 Inspired by the art of Umberto Boccioni, Mario Sironi joined the Futurist movement in late 1913. By 1915 he had moved to Milan, where he took the place of Ardengo Soffici in the core Futurist group, and soon afterwards signed the Futurist ‘interventionist manifesto’ L’orgoglio italiano (Italian Pride), urging Italy to ‘intervene’ in World War I. Together with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, and Antonio Sant’Elia, Sironi served at the front as a member of the Lombard Volunteer Cyclists. Modern means of transportation—such as bicycles, motorbikes, trains and airplanes—were often the subjects of Futurist paintings, representing the new technology that was rapidly changing society. The Cyclist, probably painted in 1916, belongs to this period of Sironi’s oeuvre. Its Futurist component is mainly in the sporting subject. The cyclist’s short trousers, tricot and what may be a black cap, identify him as a racing cyclist, possibly arriving at the destination of a long outdoor race. He is leaning forward, gripping the handle bars with intensity as he approaches a camber in the track. Flickers of white paint are reflections from the spokes of the spinning wheels, and give a sense of the velocity with which he is moving. The close-up, rear view probably derives from photographic illustrations in newspapers such as La Gazzetta dello Sport. Despite the fact that the subject of the painting is motion, this is not depicted through the dynamic fusion of figure and environment typical of Futurist painting such as Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist (cat. no. 1), nor through a multiplication of forms as in Fortunato Depero’s Cyclist through the City (cat. no. 4). Instead, Sironi created space by emphasizing the volumetric forms of each element in the composition: the cyclist’s figure and its various parts, the bicycle, houses in the distance, the road and the grass. Through their compact solidity these constituents are rendered immobile, nearly freezing the cyclist in time. Such a geometrical and de-compositional construction of space, as well as the subdued palette, recall somewhat Cubist techniques. Sironi’s approach to Futurism anticipated the sculptural, plastic forms of his paintings of the post-war metaphysical and Novecento italiano periods. The contained, volumetric forms evoke neoclassical aesthetics. In contrast to the vigor and excitement of the cycle-races portrayed in Jean Metzinger’s works, Sironi’s cyclist is depicted as a solitary figure against the backdrop of a somber modern industrial city. The racing cyclist is anonymous, as a common city dweller would be. The final destination appears desolate, with houses having neither windows nor doors, apart from the red building with its black apertures. The theme of the metropolis, idealized by the Futurists, is evoked here with darker tones, illustrating a bleak urban reality of which the cyclist without a face becomes almost by chance a symbol. By the end of the decade, this theme was to be the subject of some of Sironi’s most imaginative contributions to twentieth century art. 1 We are grateful to Flavio Fergonzi, who suggested the dating of the work in an unpublished note present in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Archives. 130 14 Gino Severini (1899–1966) The Cyclist (Il ciclista) Hand-made tapestry designed in 1956 and produced in 1977 (edition of three, authorized by Gina Severini) 150 x 210 cm Collection of Romana Severini Although Gino Severini was a founding member of the Futurist movement, by the 1920s he had abandoned its ideology and aesthetics, participating instead in the Return to Order phenomenon in Europe. He turned to a calmer mood of figurative art based on classical motifs. Nevertheless, when in the 1950s a renewed national interest in the legacy of Futurism swept over Italy Severini felt prompted to revisit his own past, both thematically and stylistically. During this period, in 1956, he produced a lithograph entitled The Cyclist.1 An edition of three hand- made tapestries based on this work was authorized by the artist’s daughter Gina in 1977 and made in the tapestry workshop of Elio Palmisano. The present tapestry belongs to this edition. In the early Futurist years, in contrast to his colleagues who were attracted to machine imagery, Severini, although he produced paintings illustrating trains, preferred to explore the dynamism of modern life through depictions of dancers and explorations of forms of light. In the 1950s he returned to these themes, but now also further investigated mechanical motion, in subjects such as a cyclist or motorcyclist. In this work Severini invites us to experience the vitality of movement of the cyclist forging ahead. The emphasis is on shapes and forms depicted with geometric rigidity. They are enlivened by a rainbow of colors, ranging from vivid yellow, orange and red to darker shades of green, blue and black. The cyclist is riding through what may be a forest, fields, or any other landscape—as suggested by blocks of green, lighter and darker, dispersed through the composition. Certain brown hues may even refer to tree trunks, or simply the color of earth. Patches of blue may be a clear blue sky, or, around the center, they may stand for water splashing under the bicycle. The figure of the cyclist in the center is defined by black contours, with the rounded shapes towards the lower side of the tapestry alluding to bicycle wheels with spokes (thin black and white lines). The yellow may be sunshine on the cyclist’s body. The fragmentation of the image and the myriad of colors give the pattern its dynamism. Rather than merely depicting a cyclist in motion, the tapestry embodies the sensation of speed itself. Severini wrote in 1913: “Speed has given us a new notion of space and time and consequently of life itself. It follows therefore that the plastic arts of our time should be characterized by a stylization of speed.”2 The question arises whether the cyclist is a racing cyclist, speeding with such velocity that he becomes one unity with the surrounding. His energy seems to explode into his surroundings. While it is evident that the subject matter of The Cyclist is characteristically Futurist, other influences may be present here. The elongation of forms is in the manner of rhythmic abstractions that Severini had begun in the early 1950s. The discomposed forms and the centrality of the motif have kinship with Cubism, while the effect of light penetrating the scene may reference Severini’s earlier Divisionist technique. 1 The lithograph was based on an earlier painting (1954) by Gino Severini depicting a cyclist. 2 Gino Severini, Ecrits sur l’art, edited by Serge Fauchereau, Paris: Editions Cercle d’Art, 1987, p. 43, quoted in Simonetta Fraquelli, Christopher Green, Gino Severini: From Futurism to Classicism, London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 1999, p. 11. 132 THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION INTRAPRESÆ COLLEZIONE GUGGENHEIM Honorary Trustees in Perpetuity Solomon R. Guggenheim† Justin K. Thannhauser † Peggy Guggenheim† Honorary Chairman Peter Lawson-Johnston Chairman William L. Mack President Jennifer Blei Stockman Vice-Presidents Wendy L-J. McNeil Edward H. Meyer Stephen C. Swid Mark R. Walter Director Richard Armstrong Treasurer Robert C. Baker Secretary Edward F. Rover Assistant Secretary Sarah G. Austrian Director Emeriti Thomas M.Messer Thomas Krens Trustees Jon Imanol Azua Robert C. Baker John Calicchio Mary Sharp Cronson Dimitris Daskalopoulos Carl Gustaf Ehrnrooth David Ganek Peter Lawson-Johnston Peter Lawson-Johnston II Howard W. Lutnick William L. Mack Linda Macklowe Wendy L-J. McNeil Edward H. Meyer Vladimir O. Potanin Stephen M. Ross Mortimer D.A. Sackler Denise Saul Michael P. Schulhof James B. Sherwood Barbara Slifka Jennifer Blei Stockman Stephen C. Swid Mark R. Walter JohnWilmerding Honorary Trustee Hannelore B. Schulhof † Trustees Emeriti Robert M. Gardiner Barbara Jonas Samuel J. LeFrak † Seymour Slive John S.Wadsworth, Jr. Trustees Ex Officio Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian President, International Director’s Council David Gallagher Chairman, Executive Committee Peggy GuggenheimCollection Advisory Board PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION FAMILY COMMITTEE David Hélion † Fabrice Hélion † Nicolas Hélion Laurence and Sandro Rumney Clovis Vail Julia Vail and Bruce Mouland Karole P.B. Vail and Andrew Huston Mark Vail Aermec Aperol Apice Arclinea Corriere della Sera Distilleria Nardini Gruppo Pirelli Hangar Design Group Hausbrandt Istituto Europeo di Design Mapei MST-GruppoMaccaferri Oracle Rubelli Swatch Tempini Trend President The Earl Castle Stewart President Emeritus Peter Lawson-Johnston Vice-President Mimi L-J. Howe Honorary Co-Chairman S.A.R. la Princesse Guillaume de Luxembourg Honorary Co-Chairman Rose Thorne Honorary Member Olga Adamishina Luigi Agrati Maria Angeles Aristrain, Condesa de Biñasco Ronald D. Balser Renée Belfer Anita Belgiorno-Nettis Marchese Annibale Berlingieri Giuliano Bianchi Maria Camilla Bianchini d’Alberigo Davide Blei Mary Bloch Susan Burns Ludmila Cafritz Alick Campbell of Lochnell Marco Carbonari Sir Trevor Chinn Giovanni Cotroneo Pilar Crespi Robert Isabella Del Frate Rayburn Stefano Del Vecchio Pietro Luigi Draghi Ulla Dreyfus-Best Gayle Boxer Duncanson John Leopoldo Fiorilla di Santa Croce Nicoletta Fiorucci Giovanna Forlanelli Rovati David Gallagher Anthony Luzzatto Gardner Marino Golinelli Ginny Green Joana Grevers Hans-Christian Habermann Gilbert W. Harrison John F. Hotchkis Leon Koffler Peter L. Levy Samuel H. Lindenbaum Gaetano Maccaferri Lord Marland of Odstock Luca Marzotto Valeria Monti Peter W. Mullin Jacqueline Muzard Ureta Guido Orsi Giorgio Pandini Rose Marie Parravicini Heather M. Podesta Benjamin B. Rauch Elizabeth Richebourg Rea Joanna Riddell Inge Rodenstock Beatrice Rossi-Landi Miles Rubin Denise Saul Brigitte Schuler-Voith James B. Sherwood Massimo Sterpi Robert J. Tomei Carlo Traglio Melissa Ulfane Maria Luisa Vaccari Alberto Vitale Ruth Westen Pavese Emeritus Members Fiorella Chiari Patricia Gerber Jacques E. Lennon Anna Scotti Kristen Venable BSI, Banchieri svizzeri dal 1873 Regione del Veneto PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION ADVISORY BOARD INSTITUTIONAL PATRONS Photo credits by figure and plate number: fig. 1 © RMN-GP / Agence Bulloz; fig. 2 © 2012 Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Firenze; fig. 3 All rights reserved. Toulouse-Lautrec Museum – Albi – Tarn – France; fig. 4 © 2012 White Images/Scala, Firenze; fig. 5 © Erich Lessing; fig. 7 © RMN-Grand Palais/Béatrice Hatala; figs. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 73, 76, 77, 78 Courtesy Bibliothèque national de France, Paris; figs. 14, 15, 16, 33 and pls. 3, 5, 7, 11 © 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo David Heald; fig. 17 and pl. 12 Courtesy Christie’s New York; figs. 18, 34 © photo The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Firenze; fig. 19 © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-GP/Jacques Faujour; fig. 20 © 2012 Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Firenze; fig. 21 © 2012 State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; fig. 22 © 2012 Foto Scala, Firenze/V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London; fig. 23: Private collection/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library; figs. 24, 25, 26, 27 Courtesy Božena Nikiel; fig. 28 Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library; fig. 32 Walt Kuhn, Kuhn family papers and armorey show records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; figs. 35, 36 and pls. 6, 13 © 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo Sergio Martucci; fig. 37 © 2012 Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Firenze; fig. 40 © 2012. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Firenze; fig. 42 © 2012 Foto Scala, Firenze; fig. 43 Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library; fig. 44 Courtesy Kent Fine Art LLc, New York; fig. 47 © 2012 Foto Scala, Firenze/ BPK, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur, Geschichte, Berlin; figs. 50, 51 © 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York; fig. 52 Photo Erik Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; fig. 54 Courtesy of Tony Robbin; fig. 57 © 2002 C. Zahn; fig. 59 © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/DeAgostini Picture Library/Scala, Firenze; fig. 68 Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library; fig. 71 © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-GP/Droits réservés; fig. 72 Courtesy Courtesy Archivio de “La Gazzetta dello Sport”; fig. 81 Photo Roloff Beny/National Archives of Canada; figs. 83, 84 © Alberto Mauro Fabi; pl. 4 © Archivio Fotografico Mart.