(Maurice Raynal)[1]Jean Metzinger, judging from an interview with Gelett Burgess in Architectural Record,[2] appears to have abandoned his Divisionist style in favor of the faceting of form associated with analytic Cubism around 1908 or early 1909.

By 1910, the robust form of early analytic Cubism of Picasso (Girl with a Mandolin, Fanny Tellier, 1910), Braque (Violin and Candlestick, 1910) and Metzinger (Nu à la cheminée, Nude, 1910) had become practically indistinguishable.

Metzinger's interpretation targeted a wide audience—as opposed to private gallery collectors—exhibits in abundance an underlying idealism, a temporal reconstruction of dissected subjects based on the principles of non-Euclidean geometry.

These inferences were compelling because they offered a stimulating and intelligible rationale for his innovations—consistent with contemporary intellectual trends in literature; notably with the Abbaye de Créteil group and Bergson's philosophy.

Critics had begun treating these mutual interests as a single style, though the term Cubism would not emerge until the following spring relative to the same artists, on the occasion of the Salon des Indépendants.

[13] The critic Jean Claude writes in his review of the same salon, with reference to Nu à la cheminée, published in Le Petit Parisien, "Metzinger painted a puzzle, cubic and triangular, which after verification, is a naked woman.

He penetrates to its intellectual core: an art capable of synthesizing a reality in the mind of the observer..."[15] Albert Gleizes, in his review of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants writes about Metzinger's Nu à la cheminée:[16] In short, he wishes to develop the visual field by multiplying it, in order to inscribe it within the space of the canvas itself.

His Femme nu, depicted from various angles and in integral relationship with the setting, the shapes very subtly nestled one into another, was more like a masterful demonstration of the total image than an exclusively pictorial creation.