Jean Metzinger - System Quotes

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Already, a conscious courage is coming to life. Here are some of the painters: Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier... they are highly enlightened, and do not believe in the stability of any system, even if it were to call itself classical art... Their reason is poised between the pursuit of the fleeting and a mania for the eternal.

Jean Metzinger

In fact it is a stupidity, Maurice Princet told me in the presence of Juan Gris, to claim to be able to bring together in a single system of relations, colour, which is a sensation that only needs to be received, and form which is an organisation that has to be understood (14); and, introducing us to the non-Euclidean geometries, he urged us to create a geometry for painters.

Jean Metzinger

Whether it is Juan Gris taking objects apart, Picasso replacing them with objects of his own invention, or another who replaces conical perspective by a system based on the relations between perpendiculars, all that only goes to show that Cubism was not at all born out of an authoritative theory [mot d'ordre]; that it only marked among a few painters the will to be finished with an art that never ought to have survived the condemnation pronounced upon it by Pascal.

Jean Metzinger