Section d'Or
This showing by Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Marie Laurencin (at the request of Apollinaire), created a scandal that brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the first time.
The Salon de la Section d'Or,[2] held October 1912—the largest and most important public showing of Cubist works prior to World War I—exposed Cubism to a wider audience still.
Various elements of the Groupe de Puteaux would mount two more large-scale Section d'Or exhibitions, in 1920 and in 1925, with the goal of revealing the complete process of transformation and renewal that had transpired since the onset of Cubism.
Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris and possibly Marcel Duchamp at this time were associates of Maurice Princet,[11] an amateur mathematician credited for introducing profound and rational scientific arguments into Cubist discussions.
[10] The name 'Section d'Or' represented simultaneously a continuity with past traditions and current trends in related fields, while leaving open future developments in the arts.
[12] Art historian Daniel Robbins argued that in addition to referencing the mathematical golden section, the term associated with the Salon Cubists also refers to the name of the earlier Bandeaux d'Or group, with which Albert Gleizes and other former members of the Abbaye de Créteil had been deeply involved.
This exhibition had received some attention in the press (l'Autorité and Paris Journal), though due to the diversity of the works presented it had been referred to as an exposition des fauves et cubistes.
Undoubtedly, due to the great success of the exhibition, Cubism became recognized as a tendency, genre or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal: a new avant-garde movement.
Despite a general interest in mathematical harmony, whether the paintings featured in the celebrated Salon de la Section d'Or exhibition used the golden ratio itself in their compositions is difficult to determine.
[16][17] Art historian David Cottington writes: It will be remembered that Du "Cubisme", written probably as these paintings were being made, gestured somewhat obscurely to non-Euclidean concepts, and Riemann's theorems; as Linda Henderson has shown, these references betray not an informed understanding of modern mathematics but a shaky hold on some of their principles, culled (indeed plagiarised) from Henri Poincaré's La Science et l'Hypothèse.
"[6] The 1912 compositions of Juan gris, according to art historian Christopher Green, were often "modular and regular... easily fitted to the demands of Golden Section composing in the pictures of the summer, such as Man in a Café and The Watch."
[20] Whereas Cézanne had been influential to the development of Cubism between 1908 and 1911, during its most expressionistic phase, the work of Seurat would attract attention from the Cubists and Futurists between 1911 and 1914, when flatter geometric structures were being produced.
With the Salons dominated by a return to classicism, Albert Gleizes attempted to resuscitate the spirit of the Section d'Or in 1920 but was met with great difficulty, despite support by Fernand Léger, Alexander Archipenko, Georges Braque, Constantin Brâncuși, Henri Laurens, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Louis Marcoussis and Léopold Survage.
[22][23] Gleizes' organizational efforts were directed towards the re-establishment of a European-wide movement of Cubist and abstract art in the form of a large traveling exhibition; the Exposition de la Section d’Or.
[25] In addition to Cubists works (which already represented a wide variety of styles), the second edition of the Section d'Or held at the Galerie La Boétie from 5 March 1920 included De Stijl, Bauhaus, Constructivism and Futurism.
[27] The new polemic resulted in the publication of Du cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre by Albert Gleizes, followed in 1922 by La Peinture et ses lois.
