The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne created a controversy in the Municipal Council of Paris, leading to a debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such 'barbaric' art.

It was executed by Picabia upon return from a road trip with two friends; the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the composer Claude Debussy, during the summer of 1912.

The history of the Salon d'Automne is marked by two important dates: 1905, bore witness to the birth of Fauvism, and 1912, the xenophobe and anti-modernist quarrel.

Recall too, it was Vauxcelles who, on the occasion of the 1910 Salon des Indépendants, wrote disparagingly of 'pallid cubes' with reference to the paintings of Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Léger and Delaunay.

[7] The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne created scandal regarding the use of government owned buildings, such as the Grand Palais, to exhibit such artwork.

The major contributors were André Mare, a decorative designer, Roger de La Fresnaye, Jacques Villon and Marie Laurencin.

In the house were hung cubist paintings by Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger (Woman with a Fan, 1912).

They are vast panels, on which have been drawn triangles, rhombuses, trapezoids, squares, rectangles, all crooked, and mixing in their inextricable entanglement the brown with the pink, the brick with the red nasturtium and the green bluish to reddish black.