In 1911 he created the literary section of the Salon d'Automne in Paris, called Comité d'initiative théâtrale, consisting of public lectures by emerging authors at the Théâtre de l'Odéon.

In Histoire Contemporaine des Lettres Française de 1885 à 1914 (Eugène Figuière), Ernest Florian-Parmentier writes "... M. Mercereau seems endowed with all the qualities that lead almost inevitably to success.

[4][5] The Abbaye de Créteil was a phalanstère utopian community founded during the fall of 1906 by Alexandre Mercereau, along with the poets René Arcos, Henri-Martin Barzun, Charles Vildrac, and the artist, theorist Albert Gleizes.

Albert Gleizes met the artists Berthold Mahn, Jacques d'Otémar and Josué Gaboriaud while in Amiens (1904), as well as the printer, Lucien Linard, who would run the printshop at the Abbaye de Créteil.

At this time, the art critic Jean Valmy Baysse (and soon historian of the Comédie-Française), in collaboration with Alexandre Mercereau, René Arcos, Charles Vildrac and Georges Duhamel were invited to participate on a new journal, titled La Vie.

Gleizes assisted in the formation of the Association Ernest Renan in December at the Théâtre Pigalle, in an attempt to counter the rise of militarist propaganda.

In 1906 Mercereau travelled to Moscow, where he met a group of Russian symbolist and Art Nouveau artists called Голубая роза (Blue Rose).

There worked on a magazine publication and helped organize the French section of a salon exhibition called La Toison d'Or (Golden Fleece, Золотое руно).

[7] A former student at the Académie Julian and a friend of Maurice Denis and Les Nabis, Henri Le Fauconnier was painting in a progressively geometric fashion.

[8] Mercereau founded the Villa Médicis Libre, in Villepreux, under the patronage of Fondation Georges Bonjean, to provide inexpensive accommodations for avant-garde artists living in difficulties.

Participants included the Italian Symbolist poet, and soon principle theorist of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.

That is why Mercereau (as Metzinger noted[12]) shifted his scenes so violently, why Barzun tried to solve the problem of simultaneously developing lines of action by choral chanting.

Similarly Gleizes and his painter friends sought to create a vision free from introverted or obscure imagery which could treat collective and simultaneous factors.

In his preface to the 1911 Brussels Indépendants, Apollinaire wrote: ...thus has come a simple and noble art, expressive and measured, eager to discover beauty, and entirely ready to tackle those vast subjects which the painters of yesterday did not dare to undertake, abandoning them to the presumptuous, old-fashioned and boring daubers of the official Salons.This conception is not based on the studies of Picasso and Braque (what became known years later as the analytical Cubism), which had annihilated subject matter almost entirely and confined it to exceedingly flat space.

Man in a Hammock is testament to the close association between Mercereau, Metzinger and Gleizes, and to their shared social, cultural and philosophical conviction that painting represented more than a fleeting glimpse of the world in which they lived, that by showing multiple facets of a subject captured at successive intervals in time simultaneously, a truer more complete image would emerge.

[20] The exhibition included works by Alexander Archipenko, Georges Braque, Constantin Brâncuși, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Louis Marcoussis, Jean Marchand, Jean Metzinger, Piet Mondrian, Diego Rivera, Edvard Munch, Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso,Otto van Rees,Adya van Rees-Dutilh and Jacques Villon, in addition to Czech artists.