[4] Evidence found in a letter by Metzinger addressed to Léonce Rosenberg suggests the work was painted before his March 1915 mobilization, and possibly late 1914.

[6] Soldier at a Game of Chess, initialed "JM" and signed "JMetzinger" (lower right), is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 81.3 x 61 cm (32 x 24 in.).

The vertical composition is painted in a geometrically advanced Cubist style, representing a solitary French soldier playing a game of chess.

His facial features are eminently stylized, simple, geometric, resting on rounded shoulders delineated by a rectangular structure superimposed with elemental monochromatic planes that compose the background.

[10] This clarity and sense of order spread to almost all of the artists under contract with Léonce Rosenberg—including Metzinger, Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Auguste Herbin, Joseph Csaky and Gino Severini—leading to the descriptive term 'Crystal Cubism', coined by the critic Maurice Raynal.

Despite theoretical or conceptual differences, the works by these artists (and practically all those who exhibited at Rosenberg's Galerie de L'Effort Moderne) bear striking similarities.

(Green, 1987, p. 25)[13]The new aesthetic unity associated with the underlying geometric structure of the works created by these artists is what would lead to the appellation Crystal Cubism.

[13] During 1916, Sunday discussions at the studio of Lipchitz, included Metzinger, Gris, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Reverdy, André Salmon, Max Jacob, and Blaise Cendrars.

In a letter written to Albert Gleizes in Barcelona during the war, dated 4 July 1916, Metzinger writes: After two years of study I have succeeded in establishing the basis of this new perspective I have talked about so much.

Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, lasting art is never anything more than a mathematical expression of the relations that exist between the internal and the external, the self [le moi] and the world.

[21] In a second letter to Gleizes, dated 26 July 1916, Metzinger writes: If painting was an end in itself it would enter into the category of the minor arts which appeal only to physical pleasure... No.

"Metzinger's radical geometrization of form as an underlying architectural basis for his 1914–15 compositions is already visible in his work circa 1912–13, in paintings such as Au Vélodrome (1912) and Le Fumeur (1913).

[13] Metzinger's evolution toward synthesis has its origins in the configuration of flat squares, trapezoidal and rectangular planes that overlap and interweave, a "new perspective" in accord with the "laws of displacement".

In the case of Le Fumeur Metzinger filled in these simple shapes with gradations of color, wallpaper-like patterns and rhythmic curves.

[13] Each found the space and time to make art, sustaining differing types of Cubism (primarily sketches) during the war years.

Following the armistice and the series of exhibitions at Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, the rift between art and life—and the overt distillation that came with it—had become the canon of Cubist orthodoxy; and it would persist with the peace that followed.

Metzinger served very close to the front during World War I as a medical aide, and was probably with his surgical automobile when Soldier at a Game of Chess was painted.

The synthetic manipulation of abstract geometric shapes, or "mathematical expression of the relations that exist between the le moi and the world" (in Metzinger's words), was the ideal metaphysical starting point.

[13][21] Indeed, the wartime distillation of Metzinger's Cubism came with an acceleration in the type of games that could be played tactically with paradox by manipulating conflicting predications of planimetric flatness and the perspectival depth of space.

There are sufficient indications to suggest a soldier and the activity in which he's engaged; his military cap (and an echo of it in red), a hand (however transparent it may be), a face (with a cigarette in its mouth), the alternating colored squares of a chessboard, a rook, a pawn and other chess pieces.

And the disorientations are compounded by Metzinger's placing of green and orange in the soldiers upward-turned face, while the red of his arms espouse the echo-like profile of the face and cap in the background plane directed downward toward the game, for it becomes almost inevitable to see the soldier's alter ego; an effect that both pulls the man into the background of the composition and pushes him forward towards the viewer, again, canceling out indications of depth.

[13][failed verification] Here, Metzinger uses a checkerboard and wooden table to establish a clearly demarcated fore-plane that is non-fixed in relation to which its 'hovering' chess pieces are situated.

This profound battle between planimetric and perspectival dimensions as here in Soldier at a Game of Chess has precedence in Metzinger's Cubism of 1912–13, but the absence of decorative elements, the clarity and sense of order, and degree of game-playing with conflicting codes for the personification of space that he refined during the war places the artist at the forefront of the nascent form of art dubbed Crystal Cubism by the critic Maurice Raynal.

"JAMA's former editor, George Lundberg, wrote that this was part of an initiative to inform readers about nonclinical aspects of medicine and public health", and to emphasize the link between the humanities and medical science.

The aim of the exhibition was to reveal the interdependence between representations of human anatomy through biomedicine's imaging technology and imaginings in the creative art's.

"Digitally assembled radiographic scans" provided by the Department of Radiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center were superimposed on the painting.

[44][45][46] Organized by physicians, this exhibition gathered images of the body from a range of historical periods and considered "the extent to which they conform to established representational conventions or seem instead to reflect the artist's own observations or expressive goals".

[45] One year before Metzinger painted Soldier at a Game of Chess, the German physicist Max von Laue won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.

Produced with the cooperation of the University of Chicago Arts|Science Initiative, it was presented by the Special Collections Research Center, Smart Museum of Art.

[53] The motivation for the Pompidou exhibition resides in broadening the scope of Cubism, usually focused on Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, to include the major contributions of the Salon Cubists, the Section d'Or, and others who participated in the over-all movement.