Proto-Cubism that Metzinger was the first to recognize explicitly and implicitly the significance of the use of "a free, mobile perspective", and the "mixing... of the successive and the simultaneous". He was the first to write of the fact that artists had abandoned traditional perspective and were now free to move around their subjects to paint them from various points in space, and at various moments in time. Metzinger's role at center of Cubism both as a painter and theorist prompted Guillaume Apollinaire to write of Picasso, Braque and Metzinger as the first three Cubist painters. Now well beyond the teachings
Crystal Cubism clearest and most intelligible definition of Cubism. At the outset of the First World War many artists were mobilized: Metzinger, Gleizes, Braque, Léger, de La Fresnaye, and Duchamp-Villon. Despite the brutal interruption, each found the time to continue making art, sustaining differing types of Cubism. Yet they discovered a ubiquitous link between the Cubist syntax (beyond pre-war attitudes) and that of the anonymity and novelty of mechanized warfare. Cubism evolved as much a result of an "evasion" of the inconceivable atrocities of war as of nationalistic pressures. Along with the evasion came the need to diverge further and further away