En Canot


En Canot is a Cubist oil painting created by Jean Metzinger in 1913. The work is referred to in various publications as Femme à l'ombrelle, Im Boot, Le Canot, En Bâteau, In the Canoe, The Boat, On the Beach, Am Strand, Im Schiff, V Člunu and Im Kanu. The painting was exhibited in Paris at the 1913 Salon d'Automne. The following year it was shown at Moderní umění, 45th Exhibition of SVU Mánes in Prague, February–March 1914. This "Survey of Modern Art" was one of the last prewar exhibitions in Prague. En Canot was exhibited again, in July of the same year, at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin. The painting was acquired from Herwarth Walden in 1916 by Georg Muche at Galerie Der Sturm.
En Canot was exhibited in the Kronprinzenpalais, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1930, where it had been housed since 1927. The work was acquired by the Nationalgalerie in 1936, where it was placed on display in Room 5. It was later confiscated by the Nazis around 1936, displayed at the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich and other cities, 1937–38, and has been missing ever since.

Description

En Canot is a large oil painting on canvas with approximate dimensions, representing an elegantly dressed woman painted in a Cubist style holding an umbrella while she sits in a canoe or small boat. Water with undulating waves or ripples and two other boats are visible in the background. The vertical composition is divided, fragmented or faceted into series of non-Euclidean spherical arcs, hyperbolic triangles, rectangles, squares, planes or surfaces delineated by contrasting form.
Aimed at a large audience of the Salon d'Automne rather than the intimate setting of a gallery—just as other paintings by Metzinger of the pre-World War I period such as L'Oiseau bleu exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1913—there can be found in En Canot a continuity that transits between the foreground and background. For example, the two boats in the 'background' are smaller than the boat in the 'foreground' within which the model is sitting, consistent with classical perspective in that objects appear smaller as distance from the observer increases. However, to be perfectly consistent one would expect the boat on the top left of the composition to be smaller still than the boat just left of the models head. There is no perspectival fusion between objects close and far, yet the notion of depth perception has not been abolished. Overall, the spatial attributes of the scene are disjointed and flattened to the point where no absolute frame of reference can be determined.
The Chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey had a profound influence on the beginnings of Cubism. These photographic motion studies particularly interested artists that would later form a groups known as the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne and Section d'Or, including Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp.
A predecessor to cinematography and moving film, chronophotography involved a series or succession of different images, originally created and used for the scientific study of movement. These studies would directly influence Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 and could also be read into Metzinger's work of 1910-14, though rather than simultaneously superimposing successive images to depict the motion, Metzinger represents the subject at rest viewed from multiple angles; the dynamic role is played by the artist rather than the subject.
Though not the first painting by Metzinger to employ the concept of multiple perspective—three years had passed since he first propounded the idea in Note sur la peinture, published in 1910—En Canot arguably exemplifies such pictorial processes, while still maintaining elements of recognizable form ; the extreme activity of geometric faceting visible in En Canot is not pushed to the point that any understandable link between physicality or naturalness is lost to the viewer. Yet, what is achieved is fundamentally anti-naturalistic.
The color schemes of other paintings executed during the same period, such as Le Fumeur, Portrait de Max Jacob, La Fumeuse or La Femme à l'Éventail , suggests that at the time of painting En Canot Metzinger had already moved away from the limited palette of 1911 and 1912.
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On the opening day of the 1913 Salon d'Automne, art critic Louis Paillard, in a review published in Le Petit Journal, writes of Metzinger's entry:
Guillaume Apollinaire, in his review of the Salon d'Automne published in , writes of En Canot :

Dimensions

The dimensions of En Canot are undocumented. However, Metzinger's painting is portrayed in a variety of black and white photographs shot between 1914 and 1930, and appears in a film recorded at the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition. Two of these images show the work hanging next to paintings of known dimensions. The earliest is a photograph taken in Prague, 1914, published in the magazine Zlatá Praha, where the painting is seen hanging next to Metzinger's La Femme à l'Éventail , 1913, oil on canvas,, Art Institute of Chicago.
Another image, taken at the Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937, shows En Canot next to Willi Baumeister, Handstand, 1923, oil on canvas,.
A straightforward calculation based on the dimensions of paintings visible in both of these images reveals dimensions for En Canot of. This corresponds to a standard stretcher format referred to as 80 Figure. Chassis sizes in France are based on format P for paysage, relating to the principles of art and the diagonal of Fibonacci; the formats M for marine ; and F for figure, such as En Canot, are based on the Golden ratio. Most, if not all, of Metzinger's works from the period, including his monumental L'Oiseau bleu, are painted on canvases corresponding to these traditional formats; proportioning his works to approximate the golden ratio, in the belief that this proportion is aesthetically pleasing. The golden section and other similar geometric configurations symbolized for Metzinger and his colleagues a belief in order and the significance of mathematical proportions, because it reflected patterns and relationships occurring in nature. Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, the Duchamp brothers, and other members of the Section d'Or, were passionately interested in mathematics.
The golden proportion, upon which En Canot may have been based, represented simultaneously a continuity with past traditions and current trends in related fields, while leaving open future developments in the arts.

History

The year 1913 saw the Cubist movement continuing to evolve, wrote Albert Gleizes:
The changes it had already undergone since the Indépendants of 1911 could leave people in no doubt as to its nature. Cubism was not a school, distinguished by some superficial variation on a generally accepted norm. It was a total regeneration, indicating the emergence of a wholly new cast of mind. Every season it appeared renewed, growing like a living body. Its enemies could, eventually, have forgiven it if only it had passed away, like a fashion; but they became even more violent when they realised that it was destined to live a life that would be longer than that of those painters who had been the first to assume the responsibility for it.
At the 1913 Salon des Indépendants could be seen a very large work of Jean Metzinger's - L'Oiseau Bleu; L'Equipe de Cardiff from Robert Delaunay; two important canvasses from Léger; still lifes and L'Homme au Café from Juan Gris; enthusiastic new work from La Fresnaye and from Marcoussis, and from others again; and finally, from myself, Les Joueurs de Football.
Again, to the Salon d'Automne of 1913 - a salon in which Cubism was now the predominating tendency - Metzinger sent the great picture called En Bâteau, La Fresnaye La Conquête de l'Air, myself Les Bâteaux de Pêche and La Ville et le Fleuve. If the first moment of surprise had passed by, the interest Cubism excited was as great as ever. The anger and the enthusiasm had not changed sides, our enemies held to their guns. It is enough for proof to read the diatribes of Louis Vauxcelles in Gil Blas for that year, 1913, and the panegyrics of Guillaume Apollinaire in L'Intransigeant.

, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1930; works later found in the Degenerate Art Exhibition
En Canot was acquired at the Galerie Der Sturm in 1916 by the artist Georg Muche, whose father was a naïve painter and art collector known as :de:Felix Muche-Ramholz|Felix Muche-Ramholz. The Galerie Der Sturm founded in 1912 by Herwarth Walden in Berlin became the core of Berlin's modern art scene, lasting a decade. Starting with an exhibition of Fauves and Der Blaue Reiter, followed by the introduction in Germany of Cubism and Italian Futurism.
En Canot was exhibited in 1930 at the Kronprinzenpalais, National Gallery, Berlin, along with works by Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer, Rudolf Belling and others.
It was subsequently confiscated by the German Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1936 or 1937 and displayed at the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. The exhibition traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria. The show, mounted by the Nazis, consisted of modern art chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art. Paintings were hung crowded together, some with no frames, alongside racist slogans denigrating the artists for "insulting German womanhood" and revealing "sick minds." It was designed to inflame public opinion against Modernism. The painting was apparently moved to Güstrow by the Rote Armee and has been missing ever since.
Metzinger's Im Boot along with works by Johannes Molzahn and Kurt Schwitters were reproduced in the Exhibition of Degenerate Art catalogue. A sentence on the top of the page reads "Selbst das wurde einmal ernst genommen und hoch bezahlt!"
The Entartete-Kunst catalogue dedicated two pages to Room 5, the largest room of the exhibition, with works exhibited by the so-called Group 9, of which Metzinger's work entitled Am Strand figures. A text accompanying the works singles out Molzahn, Metzinger and Schwitters, summarizing the essence of the entire exhibition:
catalogue, 1937, p. 23. Works from top left to lower right: Johannes Molzahn, Der Gott der Flieger, 1921, oil on canvas. Jean Metzinger, En Canot , 1913. Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild, 1918–19, mixed media, 100 x 70 cm. Johannes Molzahn, Familienbild
The current location of En Canot is unknown and it may have been destroyed by the Germans. After the exhibit, paintings were sorted out for sale and sold in Switzerland at auction. Some works were acquired by museums, others by private collectors. Nazi officers took many for their private use: for example, Hermann Göring took fourteen valuable pieces, including works by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. In March, 1939, the Berlin Fire Brigade burned approximately 4000 works which had less value on the international market.
, Centre Pompidou, Paris
En Canot is listed on the Lost Art Internet Database with the title "Im Boot", inventory number: Museum A II 698; EK 16056. It is also listed in the Degenerate Art Database, with the titles "Im Boot" and "Im Kanu", inventory number 16056. This Internet database documents more than 21,000 artworks condemned as "degenerate" by the Nazis and seized from German museums in 1937.
A preparatory drawing was published in Les Soirées de Paris, no. 19, 1913. :fr:Les Soirées de Paris|Les Soirées de Paris is the title of a literature and art review magazine. They were published in two series: the first series from February 1912 to June 1913 ; the second in November 1913 to July–August 1914. The magazine was founded by :fr:Serge Férat|Serge Férat, Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon, et al. It was in part to facilitate the return of Apollinaire to the literary scene after having been suspected in the theft of the Mona Lisa.
Another drawing of the same subject, now in the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, is signed and inscribed by Metzinger; Dessin pour "En Canot", leading to the belief that the correct title for the present work is En Canot.

Provenance