Jean Metzinger was once a poster child of Cubism, even more so than Picasso.

When Metzinger premiered Tea Time at a salon in 1911 with his friends Albert Gleizes and Henri Le Fauconnier, the painting was met with immediate success. This was in part thanks to literary figureheads like André Salmon, who helped organize the exhibition in the first place. He described the painting as the “Mona Lisa of Cubism.” Others joked it was the famous lady with a teaspoon.

Importantly, who we now see as masters of Cubism, like Picasso and Braque, were no shows at that first salon. It was Metzinger, instead, who was proclaimed as the chief of the new art form; Tea Time itself was much more popular than any other cubist artwork up to this point. Just goes to show that you can’t always expect what will stick to prevailing history, because Picasso, and not Metzinger, is now shorthand for anything geometric in art.

For a cubist painting, the smiling woman seated comfortably in Tea Time might seem overly pictorial. Her form is more schematized in triangles and rectangles than it is deformed by them. This was seen as an evolution of cubism for Metzinger and Gleizes, because it allowed for a more nuanced representation of person and place than the representational form. Yet, opposed to abstract inclinations, it remained firmly tethered to a physical reality.

In fact, Tea Time could be considered a proto-dimensionist work. If you look at the tea cup on the table, it is seen from two-different vantage points in the same, an instantaneous moment. Gleizes, writing about the painting, talks about how the shapes lend motion to the woman’s body, tying the work to both Futurism and the works of dimensionist artists like Isamu Noguchi.

If anything, in the speed of history, we somehow forgot how seminal Tea Time was for what is perhaps the quintessential 20th century art movement: cubism.