[1] This black-and-white image of Metzinger's painting, the only known photograph of the work, was reproduced in Gelett Burgess, "The Wild Men of Paris", Architectural Record, May 1910.

The work represents at least four nude women (or bathers) relaxing in a highly abstract landscape with vegetation and a small body of water visible through reflections and from the woman on the left whose legs are submerged from the knees down.

The colors of the painting, as well as its dimensions and whereabouts, are unknown Leading up to 1910, the draftsman, illustrator and poet Gelett Burgess interviewed and wrote about artists and artworks in and around Paris.

[5][6][7] Louis Vauxcelles in his review of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants made a passing and imprecise reference to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger and Le Fauconnier, as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes.

[9] Gelett Burgess writes in The Wild Men of Paris of the same exhibition: There were no limits to the audacity and the ugliness of the canvasses.

Prior to the advent of Cubism, Cézanne's geometric simplifications and optical phenomena inspired not just Metzinger, Matisse, Derain and Braque, but the other artists who earlier exhibited with the Fauves.

Cézanne had thus sparked a wholesale transformation in the area of artistic investigation that would profoundly affect the development modern art.

The shift from bright pure colors loosely applied to the canvas gave way to a more calculated geometric approach.

The simplification of representational form gave way to a new complexity; the subject matter of the paintings progressively became dominated by a network of interconnected geometric planes, the distinction between foreground and background no longer sharply delineated, and the depth of field limited.

But by 1906, when they grew more perfervid, more audacious, more crazed with theories, they received their present appellation of "Les Fauves"—the Wild Beasts.

But now, translated into the idiom of subjective beauty, into this strange Neo-Classic language, those same women, redrawn, appear in stiff, crude, nervous lines in patches of fierce color.

Some phase of life suggested an emotion, as that of horror in ‘The Fall of the House of Ushur.’ That subjective idea he translated into art.

In some such way, we, taking out hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiment."

[10] The French mathematician Maurice Princet promoted the work of Poincaré, along with the concept of the fourth spatial dimension, to artists at the Bateau-Lavoir.

He was a close associate of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Metzinger.

He brought to the attention of these artists a book entitled Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions by Esprit Jouffret (1903) a popularization of Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis.

In 1910, Metzinger said of him, "[Picasso] lays out a free, mobile perspective, from which that ingenious mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced a whole geometry".

In light of the fact that Metzinger frequented the Bateau Lavoir since 1908 and exhibited with Georges Braque at Berthe Weill's gallery,[12] introduced to Picasso by Max Jacob and Guillaume Krotowsky (who already signed his works Guillaume Apollinaire),[6][13] and in view of the similarities between the two works, it is probable that Metzinger's Bathers was painted the same year; 1908.

The differences between the two paintings suggest that, while Metzinger may have been influenced by Picasso (unlike Albert Gleizes), his intention was certainly not to copy or even resemble the Spaniard, as would soon Braque (or visa versa).

(Guillaume Apolllinaire, 1913)[14]Whether in advanced non-objective mathematical workings or abstract geometrical form, along with his non-representative dislocated outward appearance, Metzinger creates a pure image—"the total image".

The article is titled: "The 'Cubists' Dominate Paris' Fall Salon" and subtitled, "Eccentric School of Painting Increases Its Vogue in the Current Art Exhibition - What Its Followers Attempt to Do.

"Quite clearly" Metzinger notes, "nature and the painting make up two different worlds which have nothing in common ..." Already, in 1906, "it could be said that a good portrait led one to think about the painter not the model".

[15] In his Le Cubisme était Né: Souvernirs, Metzinger writes: As for Picasso ... the tradition he came from had prepared him better than ours for a problem to do with structure.

(Jean Metzinger, Cubism was Born)[15]From his Montmartre studio on the rue Lamarck to Picasso's Bateau Lavoir studio on the rue Ravignan, writes Metzinger, "the attempt [prétention] to imitate an orb on a vertical plane, or to indicate by a horizontal straight line the circular hole of a vase placed at the height of the eyes was considered as the artifice of an illusionistic trickery that belonged to another age.

I dreamed of painting glasses from which no-one would ever think of drinking, beaches that would be quite unsuitable for bathing, nudes who would be definitively chaste.

[10][15] The narrative of Metzinger outlined by his Bathers schematic geometric arrangements was the result of an abstracting process not solely based on "axiomatics".

He stressed this heavily, and at the same time brought out the flatness and dislocations of Cézanne’s transformations of nature—with the conceptual aspect of multiple perspectives and non-Euclidean spacetime.

[10][15] Nearly conscious in someone like Michelangelo, or Paolo Uccello, quite intuitive in painters such as Ingres, or Corot, it works on the basis of numbers which belong to the painting itself, not to whatever it represents.