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BULLETIN
THE Minneapolis Institute of Arts
May 9, 1953
Volume XLII, Number 19

La Fresnaye's "La Vie Conjugale"

Roger de la Fresnaye's "La Vie Conjugale," one of the three works recently added to the Institute's growing collection of modern art, is a boldly revolutionary work yet has an independent beauty which transcends its formal idiom and seems to give it a special place in a longer tradition. It was painted in 1913, in the middle of the artist's short career and a mere three years after Picasso and Braque had reached the climax of their intense studies which led to the founding of cubism. Although it very clearly reflects the new approach to nature of the early cubist paintings, its interest even as a revolutionary work lies in the fact that it epitomizes a style which arrived at its cubist point of view as much on its own as through the influence of cubism's chief pioneers. For La Fresnaye began to take an interest in the work of the cubist circle of painters only a year before "La Vie Conjugale" was painted, and his interest, at least in the beginning, was limited and reserved.

The foundations of La Fresnaye's cubist approach were developed by himself and grew directly out of his interest in the Post-Impressionists and, particularly, Cézanne. There was no intermediate study of African negro sculpture which played so great a part in Picasso's first determined efforts to heighten the plastic reality of painted forms. Yet in "L'Artillerie," a major canvas by La Fresnaye painted in 1911, a year before his first tentative samplings of cubist work, there is already a radical simplification and abbreviation of natural forms.

The parallels between La Fresnaye's work of 1912-1914 and Picasso's and Braque's of a few years earlier which establish La Fresnaye's position in the evolution of cubism are clearly seen in the splendid "La Vie Conjugale." In this canvas the painter presents himself and an imaginary wife in what has been called the artist's dream of ideal domestic surroundings. The motives chosen for the composition are simple domestic objects with geometrical attributes, almost exactly the kind Picasso and Braque had limited themselves to in their pioneer cubist still lifes: symmetrical tumblers, plates, and fruits, books, ash trays and tables. At the same time every effort is made to bring out the plastic qualities of the objects. The same is true for the figures, clothed and unclothed, both of which found a place in the analytical canvasses of Picasso and Braque. Figures, objects and even minor individual features within each are conceived in terms of a