At the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, several artists now identified with Salon Cubism (including Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, and Marie Laurencin) were hung together, prompting a public scandal that helped bring Cubism to broad attention and set the stage for later coordinated group exhibitions.
The Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais (Paris) again grouped Cubists prominently, reinforcing Cubism’s visibility beyond Picasso and Braque’s studio circle and helping solidify the idea of Cubism as a public-facing movement with identifiable participants.
By this period, the Puteaux/Section d’Or circle—meeting around the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux and Albert Gleizes in Courbevoie—had become an organizing nucleus for planning a large, didactic Cubist group exhibition intended to present Cubism’s range and ambitions to the public.
The 1912 Salon d'Automne opened at the Grand Palais (1 October–8 November 1912). Cubist works were regrouped in Room XI, intensifying public and political scrutiny of the avant-garde’s presence in a major Paris salon.
Within the decorative-arts section of the 1912 Salon d'Automne, La Maison Cubiste (associated with Raymond Duchamp-Villon and André Mare) presented a furnished, bourgeois interior incorporating Cubist paintings—an important statement about Cubism’s relationship to modern design and everyday life.
A special issue of La Section d’Or was published to coincide with the 1912 Salon de la Section d’Or, reflecting the exhibition’s intellectual positioning and the group’s effort to frame Cubism through criticism, theory, and publicity alongside the artworks.
The Salon de la Section d’Or opened at Galerie La Boétie in Paris, designed as a major Cubist group exhibition associated with the Puteaux circle. It ran 10–30 October 1912, overlapping the Salon d'Automne and amplifying Cubism’s public reach.
The first Salon de la Section d’Or closed after its 10–30 October 1912 run, having presented a large, organized public display of Cubist-related work and demonstrating how the movement could be curated as a coherent (if diverse) tendency rather than a set of isolated experiments.
Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Du "Cubisme" appeared in 1912 (published by Eugène Figuière). As one of the first major theoretical defenses of Cubism, it reinforced the Section d’Or project of pairing exhibition practice with explicit critical argument.
Controversy sparked by the 1912 Salon d'Automne Cubist room escalated into a debate in the Chambre des députés over public support and the presence of avant‑garde (and foreign) art at state-supported venues—an emblematic moment in Cubism’s politicized reception.
At the 1913 Salon des Indépendants (March–May), Cubist and related works were shown in dedicated rooms (notably Room 46), reflecting how rapidly the 1911–1912 controversies had translated into large-scale salon presence and ongoing public engagement.
The outbreak of World War I (summer 1914) effectively ended the Section d’Or group’s prewar momentum and curtailed the broader ecosystem of Cubist group exhibitions that had flourished in Paris salons and galleries from 1912 to 1914.
Salon de la Section d'Or and the 1912 Cubist Group Exhibitions (1912–1914)
