Man with a Red Kerchief 1922

Roger de La Fresnaye made this painting, Man with a Red Kerchief, using oil on canvas. Although we don't know the precise date, we can assume that it was made in France around the time that the artist was working. The image is a portrait of a man, with a geometric and Cubist style. The man’s features are simplified into basic shapes and planes, with the face presented in a combination of frontal and profile views, echoing experiments by Picasso and Braque. What could have led de la Fresnaye to embrace this style of fragmentation? As historians, we can look to the context of early 20th-century Europe, a time of rapid social and technological change, and the rise of new philosophical ideas about perception and reality. The institutional histories of galleries, museums, and art schools of the time, show us that artists were breaking away from traditional modes of representation. We might consult periodicals, exhibition reviews, and artists' letters to understand this work better. The meaning of art is always contingent on social and institutional context.