Geometrical Still Life I

When Valmier painted this in 1919, Paris was in its first full year of peace after the First World War, and Cubism had entered a cooler, more ordered phase. He had come back to Montmartre the year before and here sorts the everyday objects of a table into a grid of prism-like facets. The subject is an ordinary still life, the kind of bottles and forms painters had arranged for centuries, broken into flat planes tipped along sharp diagonals so the eye slides from one to the next. It is the first of a numbered pair he made across two years, a problem he clearly wanted to work through twice. The canvas hangs today at the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, in the Dutch countryside, gathered by a collector who bought modern French painting while it was still new.