Portrait of Jacques Nayral, one of Gleizes' first major Cubist works,[1] while still 'readable' in the figurative or representational sense, exemplifies the mobile, dynamic fragmentation of form characteristic of Cubism at the outset of 1911.

[2] Jacques Nayral (a pseudonym for Joseph Houot) was a young modernist poet, dramatist, publisher and occasional sports writer,[3] who shared with Gleizes a passion for the theories of Henri Bergson.

(Daniel Robbins, 1964)[3][7][8] A page from the periodical Fantasio, 15 October 1911, features Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes (1911) and Le goûter (Tea Time) by Jean Metzinger, juxtaposed with images of unidentified models, the man with his knees crossed and a book on his lap, the woman (clothed) holding a spoon and a tea cup, as if the sitters.

The artist became to a large extent free, libre, to place lines, shapes, forms and colors onto the canvas in accord with his or her own creative intuition.

Du "Cubisme", published by Eugène Figuière, a close associate of Gleizes' friends Jacques Nayral and Alexandre Mercereau, was an attempt to bring together all the progressive tendencies.

Nayral's related interest in avant-garde art led him to purchase Metzinger's large 1912 oil on canvas entitled La Femme au Cheval, also known as Woman with a Horse (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen).

In his capacity as Figuière's editorial assistant Nayral had selected Du "Cubisme" and Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques as part of a projected series on the arts.

Metzinger's La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a Horse) (1911-12)—illustrated in Du "Cubisme" and owned by the poet Jacques Nayral—is structured according to these principles.

[5] In a departure from the static nature of single-point perspective, in his Nayral portrait, as in Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon (1911), Gleizes simplifies, interpenetrates volumes, fuses the landscape with the model, to form a homogeneous picture.

The first time I met him was at President Bonjean's[16] house at Villepreux-les-Clayes, near Versailles, during a dinner which brought together the committee of that 'Villa Medicis Libre'[17] which, as I said before, had been founded by Alexandre Mercereau.

His face with clearly demarcated surfaces that made up a passionate interplay of facets, his hair in dark masses projecting lightly in waves over his temples, his solidly constructed body - straightaway suggested to me equivalences, echoes [rappels], interpenetrations, rhythmic correspondences with the surrounding elements, fields, trees, houses.

(Albert Gleizes)[18]Nayral himself celebrated this collaborative process in his preface to the Cubist exhibition held at the Galerie Dalmau in Barcelona, April - May 1912 (the second Cubist manifestation held outside of Paris): 'You see a portrait in a landscape' wrote Nayral, 'is it simply the reproduction of some lines that permit our eye to recognize a head, clothes, trees?

[12] Nayral answers the query: 'a thinking human in harmony with the surroundings, in accordance with them', one must 'reveal the concert of all these forms of life that are the thought of this man, the perfume of this flower, the brilliance of this plant, the vibration of this light, this is the task of the artist'.

In essence, write Antliff and Leighten in Cubism and Culture, "this synthetic vision was the product of Gleizes's sympathetic response to the expressive acts and physiognomic traits he deemed indicative of the poet's character.

Such 'intelligent' knowledge, writes the art historian Christopher Green, "was the accumulation of an all-round study of things, and so it was conveyed by the combination of multiple viewpoints in a single image."

These are private portraits that signify an intensely personal memorial to his closest friend and key figure who shared the hopes of the pre-war Passy group for an innovative collective artistic program.

"The cubists play a role in art today analogous to that sustained so effectively in the political and social arena by the apostles of anti-militarism and organized sabotage" wrote the critic Gabriel Mourney in his review of the Salon d'Automne of 1911 for Le Journal, "so doubtless the excesses of the anarchists and saboteurs of French painting will contribute to reviving, in artists and amateurs worthy of the name, the taste for true art and true beauty.

'[2] Vauxcelles, perhaps more so than his fellow critics, indulged in witty mockery of the salon Cubists: 'But in truth, what honor we do to these bipeds of the parallelepiped, to their lucubrations, cubes, succubi and incubi'.

His comfort level had already been surpassed with the 1907 works of Matisse and Derain, which he perceived as perilous, 'an uncertain schematization, proscribing relief and volumes in the name of I know not what principle of pictorial abstraction.

We'll not join them...'[2] In Room 7 and 8 of the 1911 Salon d'Automne, held 1 October through November 8, at the Grand Palais in Paris, hung works by Gleizes, Portrait de Jacques Nayral and La Chasse.

Also present were Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, André Lhote, Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, František Kupka, Francis Picabia and the Cubist sculptors Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky.

The first was the organized group showing by Cubists in Salle 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants (Paris), with Metzinger, Delaunay, le Fauconnier and Léger.

While the newspapers sounded the alarm to alert people to the danger, and while appeals were made to the public authorities to do something about it, song-writers, satirists and other men of wit and spirit, provoked great pleasure among the leisured classes by playing with the word 'cube', discovering that it was a very suitable means of inducing laughter which, as we all know, is the principle characteristic that distinguishes man from the animals.

[22] Christopher Green writes that the "deformations of lines" allowed by mobile perspective in the head of Metzinger's Tea-time and Gleizes's Jacques Nayral "have seemed tentative to historians of Cubism.

He considers that Picasso and Braque, despite the great value of their work, are engaged in an 'Impressionism of Form', which is to say that they give an appearance of formal construction which does not rest on any clearly comprehensible principle.

The exuberant eagerness and vitality of their region, consisting of two room remotely situated, was a complete contrast to the morgue I was compelled to pass through in order to reach it.