The Harbor

Lore & Background

Le Port was reproduced in the first major text on Cubism entitled Du 'Cubisme', written in 1912 by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, and subsequently in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations by Guillaume Apollinaire, published in 1913. At the Salon des Indépendants of 1912, Apollinaire noted the classical Ingresque qualities of the painting and suggested it deserved to be hung in the Musée du Luxembourg's modern art collection.

Reader's Guide

The painting depicts a complex harbor scene with sailboats, surrounding buildings and shuttered windows. Metzinger used a 'mobile perspective' to portray the subject from a variety of locations and angles at various moments in time. The topology chosen resembles that of a higher-dimensional Riemannian manifold of constant positive Gaussian curvature. The reconstruction of the total image was left to the creative intuition of the observer.

Did You Know?

• The Harbor was exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants alongside works by Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp, Roger de La Fresnaye, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Juan Gris.
• The art critic Olivier-Hourcade wrote that Metzinger with his Port, Delaunay with Paris, and Gleizes with his Baigneuses were close to creating a new French school of painting.
• Roger Allard reviewed the 1912 Salon des Indépendants and noted Metzinger's 'refined choice of colors' and the 'precious rarity' of the painting's 'matière'.