En Canot
| En Canot | |
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| Artist | Jean Metzinger |
| Year | 1913 |
| Type | Black & white photograph obtained from a glass negative |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 146 cm × 114 cm (57.5 in × 44.9 in) |
| Location | Missing |
 Munich Exhibition of Degenerate Art on YouTube, Metzinger's En Canot shown in a film/video hanging at the 1937 Munich Exhibition of Degenerate Art, minute 3:10 - 3:15 |
En Canot, referred to in various publications as Im Boot, Le Canot, Femme au Canot et à l'Ombrelle, En Bâteau, In the Canoe, The Boat, On the Beach, Am Strand, Im Schiff, V Člunu and Im Kanu, is an oil painting by Jean Metzinger. The work was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1913. The following year it was shown at Moderní umění, 45th Exhibition of SVU Mánes in Prague, February–March 1914 (a collection of works assembled by Alexandre Mercereau). This "Survey of Modern Art" was one of the last prewar exhibitions in Prague. En Canot was exhibited again, in July of the same year, at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin. The painting was acquired in 1916 by Georg Muche at Galerie Der Sturm.
En Canot was exhibited in the Kronprinzenpalais, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1930, where it had been housed since 1927. The work was acquired by the Nationalgalerie in 1936 (on deposit by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung), where it was placed on display in Room 5. It was later confiscated by the Nazis around 1936, displayed at the Degenerate Art Exhibition (Entartete Kunst) in Munich and other cities, 1937–38, and has been missing ever since.
En Canot is a large oil painting on canvas with approximate dimensions 146 cm × 114 cm (57 in × 45 in), representing an elegantly dressed woman painted in a Cubist style holding an umbrella while she sits in a canoe or small boat. Water with undulating waves or ripples and two other boats are visible in the background. The vertical composition is divided, fragmented or faceted into series of non-Euclidean spherical arcs, hyperbolic triangles, rectangles, squares, planes or surfaces delineated by contrasting form.
Aimed at a large audience of the Salon d'Automne rather than the intimate setting of a gallery—just as other paintings by Metzinger of the pre-World War I period such as L'Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird) exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1913—there can be found in En Canot a continuity that transits between the foreground and background. For example, the two boats in the 'background' are smaller than the boat in the 'foreground' within which the model is sitting, consistent with classical perspective in that objects appear smaller as distance from the observer increases. However, to be perfectly consistent one would expect the boat on the top left of the composition to be smaller still than the boat just left of the models head. There is no perspectival fusion between objects close and far, yet the notion of depth perception has not been abolished. Overall, the spatial attributes of the scene are disjointed and flattened to the point where no absolute frame of reference can be determined.
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Wikipedia