Jean Metzinger's Femme à l'Éventail served as a cubist warning shot during its majestic debut at le Salon d'Automne 1912.

The artwork thumbed its oil-painted nose at its many political and moral opponents, evoking similar reactions to a hip-hop record in the early '90's. For the French art scene, the creative scandal du jour was Cubism. 

The Femme à l'Éventail hung defiantly at le Salon, at the Grand Palais on the river Seine, from October 1-8, 1912. The publisher Paul Gallimard organized no fewer than 52 books to accompany the exhibition, and the poster was designed by the brilliant Pierre Bonnard. In the enormously controversial "cubist room" also hung Metzinger's Danseuse (Dancer in a Café),  which now hangs at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, La Plume Jaune (The Yellow Feather), and Paysage (Landscape).  Art critics Louis Vauxcelles and other adversaries "would begin by saying: 'there is no need to devote much space to the Cubists, who are utterly without importance,'" writes the blogger Peter Brooke, "and then they furiously gave them seven columns out of the ten that were taken up, at that time, by the Salon." As it often does, the controversy spurred public interest in the very art form the critics were railing against. 

In a fascinating twist, art historian Lynn Catterson brilliantly reveals that the strong reacion against cubism may have had a strange source. At the fin de siècle (turn of the century), freewheelin' France was suffering from a brutal phase of sexually transmitted diseases among its citizens, and the fear was that cubism, by geometrically decomposing the human body in order to transcend Euclidean mathematics, was also somehow celebrating the physical decomposition of people's bodies due to STDs. 

It's not our habit to discuss STDs in terms of math, or vice versa, but the Euclidean model is the one that schoolchildren learn, in which spacetime is flat, and physical things relate to one another in a linear, meat and potatoes, one foot in front of the other kind of way. By the Euclidean model, painting is a kind of footnote to objective reality. Non-Euclidean geometry, on the other hand, saw spacetime as curved, which threw everyone, especially mathematicians, for a loop. In a painting sense, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Metzinger's non-Euclidean aspirations made human bodies look bizarre and lacking in structural integrity. One later mathematician, Mandelbrot, would develop an idea of "fractional dimension" in order to describe fractal, iterative patterns. In fact, math is a central ingredient in the first book on cubism, published by Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, simultaneous with the release of Femme à l'Éventail. 

For a certain period, before WWII, this work belonged to the gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg. In 1938, the Guggenheim Museum purchased this work for its founding collection. According to photographic documentation, at le Salon d'Automne 1912 this work hung in André Mare's Le Salon Bourgeois, a room in an amazing, Disney-esque architectural installation, co-designed by Marcel Duchamp's brother, called the Maison Cubiste (Cubist House). It hung alongside Fernand Léger's Le passage à niveau (The Level Crossing) and an unidentified portrait of a woman by Marie Laurencin. The unidentified nature of Laurencin's work shows the disappointing tendency, which persists, to overlook the fundamental contribution of women in the development of the cubism. Laurencin is not nearly as well known as her male peers, despite the fact that Metzinger and Gleizes' cubism book includes more Laurencin paintings than those by Picasso or Braque.