Henri le Fauconnier's studio near the Bld de Montparnasse, where he is working on his ambitious allegorical painting entitled L'Abondance. "In this painting" writes Brooke, "the simplification of the representational form gives way to a new complexity in which foreground and background are united and the subject of the painting obscured by a network of interlocking geometrical elements". This exhibition preceded the 1911 Salon des Indépendants which officially introduced "Cubism" to the public as an organized group movement. Metzinger had been close to Picasso and Braque, working at this time along similar lines. Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Fernand Léger exhibited coincidentally in Room VIII. This was the moment in which the Montparnasse group quickly grew to include Roger de La Fresnaye, Alexander Archipenko and Joseph Csaky. The three Duchamp brothers, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and another artist known as Picabia took part in the exhibition. Following this salon Metzinger wrote the article Notes sur la peinture, in which he compares the similarities in the works Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, Gleizes and Le Fauconnier. In doing so he enunciated for the first time what would become known as the characteristics of Cubism: notably the notions of simultaneity, mobile perspective. In this seminal text Metzinger stressed the distance between their works and traditional perspective. These artists, he wrote, granted themselves 'the liberty of moving around objects', and combining many different views in one image, each recording varying experiences over the course of time. Once launched at the 1910 Salon d'Automne, the new movement would rapidly spread throughout Paris. Convinced that exposure to the work of German designers would prompt healthy competition in the decorative arts, Frantz Jourdain invited artists, architects, designers, and industrialists from the Munich-based Deutscher Werkbund to exhibit at the 1910 salon. "Our art menaced by Bavarian decorators" read the headline of the journal Le Radical (12 May 1910). This scandal, in addition to the non-French status of the authors in a time of growing nationalism, aroused the old polemic of exhibiting low-cost production objects, mass-produced items, simply designed furniture and interior decoration, in the context of a salon dedicated to art. Industrial art had never before been so controversial. The exhibition was reviewed in all the major journals. Louis Vauxcelles added to the crisis in a Gil Blas article. The exhibition was an enormous success in that it served to catalyze anew designers, decorators, artists and