Lady at her Dressing Table
Lady at her Dressing Table
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Lady at her Dressing Table

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Lady at her Dressing Table

Lady with a her Dressing Table (French: Femme au miroir) is a painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger. This distilled synthetic form of Cubism exemplifies Metzinger's continued interest, in 1916, towards less surface activity, with a strong emphasis on larger, flatter, overlapping abstract planes. The manifest primacy of the underlying geometric configuration, rooted in the abstract, controls nearly every element of the composition. The role of color remains primordial, but is now restrained within sharp delineated boundaries in comparison with several earlier works. The work of Juan Gris from the summer of 1916 to late 1918 bears much in common with that of Metzinger's late 1915 – early 1916 paintings.

Painted during the spring of 1916, Femme au miroir formed part of the collection of Léonce Rosenberg, and was probably exhibited at Galerie de L'Effort Moderne in Paris. In 1918, the painting was shipped to New York City for the occasion of the Léonce Rosenberg collection auction. For the same occasion, Femme au miroir was reproduced in The Sun, New York, Sunday 28 April 1918. The painting was purchased in New York City (at the auction or afterwards) by the American art collector John Quinn, and formed part of his collection until 1927.

The work was subsequently featured at The University of Iowa Museum of Art in the Jean Metzinger in Retrospect exhibition, 1985, and reproduced as a full page color plate in the catalogue.

Femme au miroir, signed "JMetzinger" and dated Avril 1916 on the reverse, is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 92.4 x 65.1 cm (51 1/16 x 38 1/16 in.). The vertical composition is painted in a geometrically Cubist style, representing a woman holding a mirror in her left hand, standing in front of a chair and dressing table upon which rests a perfume atomizer. The setting appears to be an interior. An angled window appears to the left with an awning above, part of a tree and blue sky beyond.

The woman appears simultaneously clothed and unclothed in an interplay of transparencies, visual, tactile, and motor spaces, evoking a series of mind-associations between past present and future not atypical of Metzinger's earlier works. Her left breast is seen both from the front and from the side simultaneously. Her pose is elegant. Her face is eminently stylized, her neck is tubiform, her hair almost realistic in appearance as if combed onto the canvas; her shoulders, decidedly cubic from which emanate long slender arms superimposed with geometric elements that compose the background. Depth of field is practically non-present. Blues, whites and reds dominate the composition. Greens and ochers serve to delineate elements in the foreground (arms, leg, table).

Metzinger's works from 1915 and 1916 show a more restrained use of rectilinear grids, heavy surface texture and bold decorative patterning. The manifest primacy of the geometric armature strikingly controls nearly every element of the composition, ensuring the synthetic unity of the whole.

"Direct reference to observed reality" is still present, but now the emphasis is placed on the self-sufficiency of the painting as an object unto itself. "Orderly qualities" and the "autonomous purity" of the composition are now a prime concern.

The Cubist considerations manifested prior to the outset of World War I—such as the fourth dimension, dynamism of modern life, the occult, and Henri Bergson's concept of duration—had now been vacated, replaced by a purely formal reference frame.

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