The Harbor

Lore & Background

Le Port, probably an oil on canvas, depicts a complex harbor scene with sailboats, surrounding buildings and shuttered windows. On the distant horizon can be seen two larger boats; the one on the right perhaps a steam ship, the other with a large mast. Metzinger is almost exclusively concerned with principles of pictorial construction: the interplay of horizontals, diagonals, verticals and curves. The horizon is curved spherically. Rather than depicting The Harbor from one classical point of view, Metzinger has used a 'mobile perspective' to portray the subject from a variety of locations and from different angles at various moments in time. The images captured from multiple spatial view-points and at successive time intervals are all shown simultaneously on one canvas.

In Their Own Story

The forklift groaned as Conker shoved it off the loading ramp, tires crunching over gravel and a discarded pallet. Somewhere behind him, the harbor master's office was already ringing. The rum bottle sat in the forklift's cup holder, swaying gently with every lurch of the engine. Conker grinned, spat over the railing, and aimed the machine at the nearest stack of shipping containers. The first one toppled with a shriek of metal. The second went further. The third—well, the third was heading toward the water, and the water, as it turned out, was full of things that did not appreciate being hit by a two-ton box. The harbor master's phone went dead. Conker poured another drink.

Reader's Guide

The painting was reproduced in the first major text on Cubism entitled Du 'Cubisme', written in 1912 by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, published by Eugène Figuière Éditeurs the same year. The Harbor was subsequently reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations (Les Peintres cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques), written by Guillaume Apollinaire, published by Figuière in 1913. At the Salon des Indépendants of 1912, Apollinaire had noticed the classical Ingresque qualities of Metzinger's Le Port, and suggested that it deserved to be hung in the Musée du Luxembourg's modern art collection.

Did You Know?

• The topology chosen for The Harbor resembles that of a higher-dimensional Riemannian manifold, as opposed to a standard Euclidean 3-space.
• Metzinger and Gleizes wrote with reference to non-Euclidean geometry in Du 'Cubisme', the manifesto in which The Harbor was selected to represent the Cubist methodology.
• The reconstruction of the total image was left to the creative intuition of the observer; the spectator played an active role in the Cubist process.